Imbibe put our bottle next to Blue Bottle’s. We are still a bit pleased about it.
18 August 2016
The old press page opened with the line “We’re getting kinda famous…” followed by four pull quotes and a row of logos, and we have decided not to improve on it, because it was exactly right. A small company in Fullerton got written about by people who had no particular reason to, and we were delighted, and we said so.
Here is the whole of it, with everything we could still find.
Two we cannot prove
There are logos in the 2016 press kit for Delish and Yahoo. We have not been able to recover an article for either, and a logo in your own folder is not evidence of anything — so they are not on this page. If either turns up, we will add it and say where it came from.
The Times was not a logo credit
For a decade we described the New York Times mention as a logo on a page — the company name appearing in a piece that was really about something else. That is what everyone remembered, and nobody had gone back to check.
It is an interview. In a March 2014 Styles piece on Silicon Beach, our founder is quoted by name, at some length, comparing Los Angeles to San Francisco and coming down firmly on the side of the former — “that’s the great thing about L.A., it’s not as snooty” — reportedly between sips of rosé at a bar off Olympic Boulevard.
Twelve years is long enough to forget you were in the New York Times properly. Read it above.
The one that got lost
For years the fourth quote on our press page — “Ever wake up to an empty canister of coffee grounds?” — sat there with no outlet attached to it. The logo had stopped loading, the link had rotted, and nobody had written down where it came from.
It was SELF, August 2015, in a piece called The 10 Best Cold-Brew Coffees. We found it again in 2026 by digging our own 2016 press page out of the Wayback Machine, which is a slightly humbling way to learn something about your own company.
The SELF URL is dead now. The link above goes to the archived copy, which is the honest thing to link to.
Two ingredients, never heated, twenty-four hours. This is the object all of the above is describing.Bear State archive, 2015
What it was actually like
Smaller than it sounds. Imbibe put us next to Blue Bottle and Stumptown, and for about a week the phone did something interesting, and then it stopped. Gear Patrol called us one of five cold brews fuelling New York City, from an office in Orange County, which remains the funniest sentence in this company’s history.
None of it made us profitable. All of it was lovely. Both things are true and the second one is the reason the archive still exists.
Not bad for a bear born and bred in Southern California.
