There are only two matters James Freeman has ever honestly wanted to do: play the clarinet and make espresso.
Today, Freeman is excellently referred to as the founding father of Blue Bottle coffee, the premium coffee chain with a simple yet elegant blue emblem that ornaments more than 75 upscale cafes around the arena in which you could purchase a more or less $five drip espresso made from the brilliant single-starting place, freshly roasted artisanal beans. In 2017, Swiss food giant Nestle bought a majority stake in Freeman’s organization in a deal that reportedly valued Blue Bottle at over $700 million.
But before, Freeman was the founding father of a business enterprise that set to roast more than 2.6 million kilos of coffee beans. During these 12 months, he becomes a suffering classical musician roasting his fresh beans as a hobby.
An obsession will become a commercial enterprise.
Freeman had long been “interested” in coffee and became obsessed with consuming the simplest, freshest cup. That meant roasting beans himself—shopping for uncooked, green coffee beans and heating them at about 500 degrees Fahrenheit—because he felt that most retail espresso chains over-roasted their beans.
In 2002, Freeman made simply enough cash to pay his bills playing the clarinet at component-time gigs with nearby orchestras in Northern California. In his off-time, he nursed an obsession with sparkling coffee that stimulated him to roast his raw espresso beans in the oven of his Oakland, California, condo. Freeman began questioning if there is probably an enterprise possibility for a devoted espresso snob like himself to promote his version of the correct cup of coffee to like-minded caffeine junkies. While pals warned him that the coffee market changed into already oversaturated, Freeman also noticed that, at the time, few coffee sellers in the Bay Area even found out how fresh their espresso become.
“At the time, there literally became not an area in San Francisco one should visit to get a bag of coffee with a roast date stamped on it,” he says.
Freeman commenced ramping up his homegrown roasting operation by renting (for $600 a month) a 186-square-foot potting shed positioned close to his apartment in Oakland’s Temescal district wherein he should roast beans in 7-pound batches the use of a vintage Diedrich roaster he’d driven to Idaho to shop for immediately from the producer. He decided to end his track profession and pursue his hand as a barista, promoting his home-roasted espresso beans at the side of sparkling cups of coffee at farmers’ markets around San Francisco and Oakland.
“In my profession as a clarinetist, there have been moments of delight, but they tended to be few and far between, and so I saw espresso as an area, a touch-safe haven, wherein I could work out the matters I’m interested in, but additionally this opportunity to no longer play the clarinet. So, something that could pay my payments, I don’t have to visit gigs,” Freeman tells CNBC Make It.
Freeman was given through on his relatively easy setup and enterprise model for the next couple of years. However, Blue Bottle’s origins weren’t without prices, from the roaster to condo prices for the potting shed and the espresso cart’s spot at farmer’s markets, not to mention the cost of raw beans and paying a nearby photograph fashion designer to caricature the emblem’s easy, blue brand. Freeman says he poured everything he could into the commercial enterprise. “Clarinetists don’t acquire a lot of wealth, so I put in all of the money I had, plus a pair of credit score playing cards.”
That came out to about $20,000 in total, with up to $15,000 in debt unfolding throughout credit score playing cards.
