In the sort of tasteful spectacle you'd come to expect from a brand monolith like Starbucks, two coffee bars, a shop, a standalone restaurant, a two-story library with 200 books, and a factory all fit under one roof in a caffeinated wonderland sitting at the top of Seattle’s swank Capitol Hill district. This giant new flagship store is the largest Starbucks ever built. It’s also a production plant where the company will roast its "small batch" Reserve line for the entire world.
That's a projected 1.4 million pounds of coffee to be roasted and packaged a year, all while the public is free to watch, sip coffee brewed by the most eager and informed Starbucks baristas I've ever met, and interrupt the guy manning the roaster to ask him a question. It's as much a meticulously groomed peek inside Starbucks's global roasting and distribution system as it is an advertisement for Starbucks itself.