Bulletproof Coffee to Expand to Seattle

After raising $9 million from Trinity Ventures (the same group that originally backed Starbucks), a new kind of coffee shop set up in Santa Monica, California this April: the buttery kind. Tech entrepreneur Dave Asprey is behind new Bulletproof Coffee, which claims capacity to help make people thinner, smarter, and overall healthier—and now MyNorthwest reports there are plans to bring a storefront to Seattle.

The idea for Bulletproof Coffee (which is actually Bellevue-based, as a company, though no cafes are there) came to Asprey during a trip to Tibet over a decade ago, he told MyNorthwest.

"At 18,000 feet elevation you feel really awful, normally," Asprey said. "I drank a cup of yak butter tea and suddenly felt really good."

When he returned stateside, he started experimenting with ways to replicate the substance (and the great feelings he got from drinking it) and came up with Bulletproof Coffee: a combination of mold-free coffee beans, grass-fed butter, and a coconut oil extract called "brain octane oil" that he says is around 18 times stronger than regular coconut oil.

"When you blend those together, you get a mental feeling and complete lack of food cravings," Asprey said.

Through the combination of mold-free coffee beans, grass-fed butter, and a coconut oil extract called "brain octane oil" in Bulletproof coffee, "you get a mental feeling and complete lack of food cravings," Asprey said.

If you were under the impression that most coffee you know is mold free, think again, apparently: the U.S. doesn't have a legal limit on mold toxins in coffee, according to Asprey. "This is one of the things that can contribute to the jittery, cranky crash that comes two hours after you drink normal coffee," he said.

No word yet on just when (or where) the Seattle cafe might be coming, says MyNorthwest, but it's in the works. Over the last eight months, the health claims associated with Bulletproof Coffee have (unsurprisingly) been hotly debated, and the whole operation has been accused of being a marketing ploy. Here in coffee city, we'll soon get to see for ourselves.