I remember reading something a while ago that there aren't actually enough coffee beans produced of a high enough quality to produce Starbucks-level quantity at current Blue Bottle-level quality. I'm curious whether this is the problem Blue Bottle intends to solve, or if they plan to be "Yet Another Starbucks".
I don't know too much about raw coffee quality, but what I do know is that roasted coffee goes stale very quickly. If you freeze it you can preserve some flavor for a time, but generally the best thing is to grind directly before brewing and finish the beans within a week or two of roasting.
The reason starbucks is bad is because they let their coffee sit around for months in the supply chain, and they over-roast in order to compensate for the lost flavor as well as the tremendous amount of cream and sugar they put in every drink.
Again, I don't know how much good quality beans there are out there or even how you grade raw beans, but I suspect that average quality beans if roasted locally and brewed quickly (which was sort of the hallmark of Blue Bottle if I recall) will be an order of magnitude better than Starbucks right off the bat. If they organize their logistics around that I think they can scale a much better quality coffee than Starbucks.
