BUBS Naturals and the Search for the Perfect Cup of Coffee

We don’t dabble. We jump in, with both feet, from a running start. That’s just how we do it here at BUBS Naturals.

So in 2021 when the results of a massive customer service survey (really, over 20K of you replied. We love it!) told us that what our customers wanted from us was coffee, we got to it.

Right after we made a cup of coffee.

Picture this: Sean Lake and TJ Ferrara, co-founders of BUBS Naturals, are on a ski lift at Mt. Baldy. It’s New Years Eve in 2021 and TJ and Sean are on winter vacation with their families. Together, they ask themselves, Okay. What would coffee look like for BUBS?

(Mild Tangent: If this all feels familiar to you, it should. This is how we came to develop our first product, BUBS Naturals collagen. In Sean’s kitchen, having a cup of coffee and asking ourselves, if we are going to do this, how can we do it well?)

The First W30 Approved Coffee

“Our BUBS Family asked us to make coffee so well, shit, I guess we gotta make coffee!” Sean Lake said. “We’re going to find out everything people love about coffee, then plus it up.” We started at the source. We’ve sourced every bean ourselves, picking the right source, with the right standards, and the right flavor profile. And we knew we needed three points of difference: BUBS Brew is USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified, and W30 Approved.

Roasted Locally in Small Batches

When BUBS Brew comes to us in California, we test every single lot for three things: mold, yeast, and aflatoxins. Once every lot passes all three tests, we keep it in the family, roasting weekly here in Southern California - sharing the roasting fun with two local coffee roasters.

We knew that every roast had to make sense for BUBS. So we did what we did best, we looked to Glen.

It was in Costa Rica, on a surf trip, that our namesake Glen “BUB” Doherty, met a handful of Navy SEALs, inspiring him to join the Navy himself when he returned home. This was Glen’s “Origin Story” to the Navy, so we launched with our first blend, available in medium and dark roast, The Origin Blend.

Then, there was Glen’s most challenging deployment in Mexico City. So we sourced a Mexican single-origin blend, called The Challenger, which will be available at the end of February 2023.

Glen successfully completed a special civilian deployment in Africa, so we sought out the best Ethiopian beans we could, for The Wanted, which will roast and ship in April 2023.

Lastly, we’re honoring the legacy of SEALs and Hawaii, with a high-end Kona roast called The Easy Day, out in June 2023, because the only easy day was yesterday.

A Story Brewed in Legend

Sean was there to roast the very first bag of the very first blend of BUBS Brew. “Coffee was a ritual for Glen. He’d appreciate the hell out of this,” Sean said. Sean remembers spending his twenties with Glen, trying to get up before him to start the coffee before BUB could. “Glen always made the weakest coffee, even though he was a dark roast guy. We’d roast the hell out of him for it.”