Starbucks Reserve
Starbucks Reserve is Starbucks’ premium sub-brand: a line of small-batch coffees, plus the shops built to sell them. It launched in 2010, first online and in a handful of stores, as the company’s answer to the wave of independent roasters — Blue Bottle, Stumptown and their imitators — who were taking the top of the American coffee market away from it (Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch; the same launch year and the same motive are given independently by trade press, Nation’s Restaurant News, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).
In its own words, Reserve is “a selection of the most extraordinary coffees Starbucks has to offer,” and it develops “a unique roast for each individual lot” (Starbucks Reserve — About, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).
That sentence contains the word this wiki cares about — lot, meaning one specific batch of coffee from one specific place and harvest. It is also, as far as the public record goes, where the specifics stop. See what Reserve does not publish below; it is the most important thing on this page.
The three formats
| Format | What it is | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Reserve Roastery | A multi-storey building with a working roasting plant inside it, plus coffee bar, cocktail bar, a Princi bakery and retail | 5 operating (a sixth, Seattle, has closed) |
| Reserve Store | The roastery’s small cousin — a standalone shop selling Reserve coffee and merchandise | approx. 7 — New York, Mumbai, Prague, Shanghai, Riyadh |
| Reserve Bar | An ordinary Starbucks with a dedicated Reserve counter bolted on | approx. 43 |
Counts are from the encyclopedic record (Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch) and go stale quickly — see the to-verify note below.
The roasteries
These are the buildings people mean when they say “Reserve.” Each is a piece of retail theatre at a scale no independent roaster can match: raw green coffee arrives, gets roasted in front of customers, and travels between floors through copper tubes.
| Roastery | Opened | Size | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle (Capitol Hill) | December 2014 | 15,000 sq ft | Closed 25 September 2025 |
| Shanghai | December 2017 | 30,000 sq ft | operating |
| Milan | 7 September 2018 | 25,000 sq ft | operating |
| New York City | 13 December 2018 | 23,000 sq ft | operating |
| Tokyo | 28 February 2019 | 32,000 sq ft | operating |
| Chicago | 15 November 2019 | 35,000 sq ft | operating — largest Starbucks in the world |
Dates and sizes are from the encyclopedic record, read directly (Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve, Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve Roastery (Chicago) and Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve Roastery (Seattle), all accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). Starbucks’ own Reserve site currently lists exactly five roasteries — New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Shanghai and Milano — which is consistent with Seattle having closed (Starbucks Reserve — About, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).
The Chicago building is five floors: coffee bar and roaster at ground level, a Princi bakery above it, a floor of barrels ageing coffee, a cocktail bar, and a roof terrace. Eight copper tubes, each 56 feet tall, move beans between the floors.
The plan that shrank
Reserve was originally supposed to be enormous. In November 2016 Howard Schultz announced the potential for “1,000 or more” Reserve locations and “20 to 30 Roasteries around the world.” His successor Kevin Johnson cut that back in 2018 to six to ten more concept stores before a “commercial phase,” and said of the original target: “One thousand was an aspiration.” (Nation’s Restaurant News, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch.) Chicago in 2019 was the last roastery built, and Seattle — the first one — closed in 2025.
So the shape of the programme is: a very public ambition to become a chain of coffee cathedrals, revised down to a handful of flagship buildings and a counter inside existing stores.
What Reserve does not publish
This is the part that matters for a wiki built out of farm names, altitudes, varieties, processing methods and cup scores.
Reserve is the closest thing Starbucks has to a specialty-coffee programme, and it produces none of those fields in public. Nothing consulted here gives:
- a farm or producer name for a Reserve lot,
- an altitude, variety or processing method for one,
- a cupping score from a Q Grader or anyone else,
- a price paid to the producer, or
- a bid at Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence or any comparable green-coffee auction.
The two origins named anywhere in the sources here are Yunnan, China, and Hacienda Alsacia, the Costa Rican farm Starbucks itself owns — and even those come with no lot detail attached. This is the same absence recorded on Starbucks, Starbucks China and C.A.F.E. Practices: the largest buyer of coffee on earth keeps its specifics off the record.
The practical consequence is that Reserve sits on the demand side of Premiumisation, not the supply side. It teaches millions of people that a coffee can be worth more because of where it came from — which is the belief the whole auction economy runs on — while never itself entering the results tables that make that belief checkable. A reader looking for “Starbucks Reserve” in an auction archive will not find it, and that is a finding rather than a gap.
To verify — the 2004 Black Apron Exclusives precursor
A single food-and-drink blog traces Reserve’s lineage back to Black Apron Exclusives, a rare-coffee line Starbucks is said to have launched in 2004 and later folded into Reserve (The Daily Meal, accessed 2026-07-23). Nothing on Starbucks’ own Reserve site, in the encyclopedic record or in the trade reporting consulted here mentions Black Apron. Treat the 2004 origin as unconfirmed; the 2010 launch of Reserve itself is well-supported.
To verify — how many Reserve Bars and Stores actually exist
The two sources here disagree and neither is dated. The encyclopedic record gives 43 Reserve Bars and about 7 Reserve Stores worldwide; the trade explainer, written around 2018–2019, gives 20 Reserve Bars in the United States and 150 in China, and says there was then only one Reserve Store, in Seattle — the same Seattle site that has since closed. The Wikipedia summary is also internally inconsistent, describing “five operational roasteries” while listing six built. All counts on this page should be read as approximate and dated 2026-07-23. Separately, Starbucks China already flags an unverified claim that China’s first Reserve Bakery Café and first Reserve Bar Mixato both opened in Shanghai in 2019.
To verify — Hacienda Alsacia and the Yunnan sourcing
The claim that some Reserve coffee comes from Yunnan and from Hacienda Alsacia, Starbucks’ own farm in Costa Rica, rests on a single source (Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve, accessed 2026-07-23). Starbucks’ own pages for the farm returned HTTP 404 when fetched on 2026-07-23 and there is no encyclopedia entry for it, so nothing about the farm’s size, altitude, varieties or acquisition date could be confirmed. The Yunnan coffee and Starbucks China notes independently establish that Starbucks buys Yunnan arabica; what they do not establish is that any of it is sold under the Reserve name.
Related
- Starbucks — the parent company, its founding, scale and sourcing rulebook
- Starbucks China — where most Reserve Bars are, and the market Reserve was meant to defend
- Howard Schultz — the executive who set the 1,000-store target
- C.A.F.E. Practices — Starbucks’ private sourcing standard, which also publishes no results
- Premiumisation — the demand-side ladder Reserve sits on
- Illy · Luckin Coffee — the rungs above and below it
- Yunnan coffee — one of only two origins named in connection with Reserve
- Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence · Coffee scoring · Cupping · Q Grader — the published-results world Reserve stays out of
- Geisha · Natural process · Anaerobic fermentation — the lot-level vocabulary Reserve does not use in public
Official links
- Official site — Starbucks Reserve
- Official site — Starbucks Reserve, About
- Official site — Starbucks Corporation
Sources
- Starbucks Reserve — About (official) — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
- Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
- Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve Roastery (Chicago) — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
- Wikipedia — Starbucks Reserve Roastery (Seattle) — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
- Nation’s Restaurant News — Explainer: what is the Starbucks Reserve brand and where is it going? — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
- CNBC — Starbucks opens its first Reserve store — accessed 2026-07-23 (via research brief; not independently opened)
- Tasting Table — The history of Starbucks Reserve stores — accessed 2026-07-23 (via research brief; not independently opened)
- The Daily Meal — The overambitious origins of Starbucks Reserve — accessed 2026-07-23 (blog; the Black Apron claim is flagged above)
- Starbucks — Hacienda Alsacia — attempted 2026-07-23 (returned HTTP 404)