Story

Opened in April 2011, Bluebeard Coffee Roasters is a 253rd wave coffee company delivering a world-class suite of coffees to an expanding market of coffee lovers in and around beautiful Tacoma, WA.

First and foremost, the proof is in the cup. We consider our balanced roast the perfect medium. A roast deep enough to develop depth – chocolate, caramel, sugars – and light enough to leave the subtle nuances of high-scoring specialty coffees intact. A nice balance in a cup that characteristically tasted as good cold as it did when it was hot.

At Bluebeard we sample and buy the very best beans we can source. We pay at the top of the market for unique and compelling coffees from throughout Latin America, Indonesia and East Africa.

The big secret to Bluebeard’s success is no great secret. We buy neat coffees from folks we love collaborating with. We roast them well on a classic 12-kilo Probat drum roaster. We extract them precisely and look to find and teach others to do the same.

We are excited about our prospects and process, taking the scenic route to get there. We’ll keep our eyes on the coffee and people at all times. We’ll tell you what we can deliver, and little else. We will remember to smile and laugh with our customers and at ourselves. We can’t wait for you to join us.

What's in a Name?

The short answer? Bluebeard was our family’s childhood cat, along with Paisley. My dad was an English teacher, and Kurt Vonnegut's books were a steady presence around the house growing up, so I assume the cat's name came from Vonnegut’s novel by the same name.

If you research it, you'll find the legend of Bluebeard to be a sordid tale of murder, love, betrayal, and murder. If there are things I find interesting about the tale of Bluebeard, it's that there is really no good morality takeaway in it. Everybody loses. There is no redemption. The character represented is a monster, apparently, which is then contrasted by a very real love story – it's an oral history, so it gets told and retold differently and evolves – which ends tragically in betrayal and death. It's also a staple reinterpretation of many Women and Gender Studies Programs. Further muddying the waters, historians are currently evidencing that the very real person whom the tale is based upon, Gilles de Rais, was framed for personal and political reasons. It’s a lot.