third-wave-coffee
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Blue Bottle Coffee
Blue Bottle Coffee is an Oakland-born specialty roaster and cafe chain that helped define the third-wave coffee movement. Founded in 2002 by clarinetist James Freeman, it built a reputation on freshly roasted single-origin beans, an obsessive 48-hour freshness rule, and a spare, Japanese-influenced cafe aesthetic. It now runs roughly 140 cafes across the US and Asia plus a sizable e-commerce and subscription business, and changed hands in 2026 when Centurium Capital agreed to buy its retail operations from Nestle.
Karl Strovink
Karl Strovink is the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, the Oakland-born specialty roaster now owned by Nestlé. A Berkeley native with an MBA from MIT Sloan, he arrived in 2019 from a twelve-year run at Converse and has spent his tenure pushing Blue Bottle toward oat milk by default, instant espresso, zero-waste cafés, and aggressive expansion across Asia, all while protecting the brand's small-batch identity inside a thirty-billion-dollar coffee parent.
James Hoffmann
James Hoffmann is an English barista, YouTuber, author, and co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters. He won the 2007 World Barista Championship in Tokyo and went on to become the most-watched coffee voice on the internet, with a YouTube channel exceeding 2.5 million subscribers. Known for tortoiseshell glasses, knit sweaters and a dry sense of humour, he turned brewing minutiae into mainstream curiosity.