Trip Report: Blue Bottle Coffee Co. (SFMOMA Rooftop Garden)
Posted by TheShot on 15 Feb 2012 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew, Machine
Opening in May 2009, this Blue Bottle Coffee outlet is located inside the SFMOMA museum on the fifth-floor Rooftop Garden. It’s a rather elite affair, given the open space and the artworks that surround it. There’s seating on concrete floors and benches among modern sculptures, but there are also white metal café tables for seating.
They use Mazzer and Astoria grinders, offer Bonmac filters for single origin drip, and (quite unusual for Blue Bottle) a three-group Mistral Mirage Idrocompresso Triplette with manual levers.
They pull espresso shots with a medium brown crema and darker brown spots. It’s served quite short for a doppio, but it’s the right amount of potent: very well balanced, broad flavor profile of herbs, pungency, and some tobacco and honey. They use a special SFMOMA blend of five different beans, and it is a true blend — almost something of a rarity in the U.S. It’s one of the best homogenized examples of a blend that Blue Bottle offers. Hopefully they will make a blend like this more widely available.
Served in a Heath ceramics demitasse with a side of sparkling water. About as good as museum coffee can get.
Read the review of Blue Bottle Coffee Co. at the SFMOMA Rooftop Garden.
2 Comments »
That’s a Mirage Idrocompresso; different from a Mistral, fwiw.
Thanks, Kevin. I do play a bit too fast and loose with the KvdW machines, so I’ve corrected it above.