Press Coffee building mega Phoenix roastery

Facility at Shea/32nd St. will include cafe, deck

Talk about coffee pride.

Press Coffee has broken ground on a new flagship roastery and cafe just south of Shea Boulevard on 32nd Street in northeast Phoenix.

An abandoned KFC restaurant was demolished to make room for the new, 5,600-square-foot roastery, slated to open in April.

The new industrial-chic roastery will feature a 1,500-square-feet cafe with a patio, and an exhibition roasting room complete with a second-story observation deck.

True to Press Coffee’s roots, community education, from cupping classes to tastings, will be central in the new operation.

Press Coffee has experienced steady growth since the first shop opened in 2008, and has been party of the coffeeshop boom in Phoenix.

Founder Steve Kraus and partners Jason Kyle and Alex Mason have grown the coffee company to seven retail outlets scattered from Phoenix to Scottsdale to Tempe to Chandler, all serviced from a single roastery in an industrial park in south Phoenix.

The current roastery will remain in the fold, but operations will focus solely on cold brew once the new roastery is up and running.

“We needed more space,” said Kyle, a former New Orleans Saint Super Bowl champion. “The current roastery will convert to not-so-sexy cold-brew oper- ation, while the new roastery will showcase whole bean roasting in a much more interactive way for our customers, combining the roastery with the cafe and a retail shop.”

Press Coffee, he adds, is solidly committed to Arizona.

“We don’t want to go outside of Arizona. Instead of 100 stores across multiple states, we want to develop and nurture 10 to15 great stores within Arizona,” Kyle said. “Our goal is to keep the quality high. We don’t do drive-through. We buy the best beans, the best equipment and hire the best people.”