09/02/2026
It’s our birthday! Blueprint Coffee opened our doors for the first time 13 years ago today, in 2013.
In honor of our 13th birthday, here are 13 things you might not know about our flagship The Delmar Loop café…
1. For the first decade, we roasted & packaged all our coffee in the back of the café (you had to walk past the roaster to get to the bathroom!)
2. Our cast-iron Gothot roaster dates to the 1930s. Today, it’s working as hard as ever at our HQ in Midtown — this week we roasted batch 37,000.
3. There’s a free parking lot in the back — just turn onto Eastgate, and the lot is on your right, just behind the building. You can even come in through our back door.
4. The blue tables are made from antique computer parts.
5. The building dates to 1922. Designed by the Saum Architecture firm, the building cost $85,000. Today, the original doctors’ & dentists’ offices upstairs are apartments.
6. Until this year, our Retail Director Kevin lived in one of those apartments upstairs — setting the all-time Blueprint record for shortest commute to work.
7. Before it was Blueprint Coffee, 6225 Delmar was at times a ho**ah lounge, a dry cleaner, and an architects’ office.
8. It’s a common misconception that the county line runs through Skinker — but it’s actually at Eastgate. That means we’re just inside St. Louis City.
9. We did most of the build-out work ourselves: Kevin, Mazi, Nora, and her brother Roy started from an empty box and put up walls, dug out for plumbing, built cabinets, and sanded so much wood to transform the space into a café.
10. Much of the wood covering the walls at Delmar is reclaimed Illinois barn wood. And some of it came from Nora’s childhood home.
11. On day 1, there was only one employee besides the group of owners (we love you, Radames!)
12. Because the Pageant and Delmar Hall are down the street, we’ve served a lot of famous guests over the years — performers and musicians like the Flaming Lips, Fiona Apple, Kurt Vile, and Courtney Barnett, to name just a few.
13. We experienced a coffee roaster’s rite of passage in 2022: a small roaster fire. Mazi sacrificed his facial hair but saved the roaster (and the café).
