The Roastery

There are buildings that people are drawn to, places that you put yourself in when thinking about your life’s dream, this is one of them.

The Brick House Roastery: Prime Roast’s state-of the-art roasting facility mixes the best of the old with the best of the new. It was built in the 1840s as a mill manager’s house, but by 2014 when the building came up for sale it had become a vacant remnant of the city’s industrial past.

Now the original 1840s architectural details are mixed with updated industrial touches all wrapped in an energy-efficient package. The lighting in the roastery is now predominantly LED and the building is so well insulated you barely hear the road noise of the 13,000 passing vehicles a day. The basement and decaying first floor joists were eliminated, and an efficient radiant heated concrete floor was installed. A crumbling brick wall was replaced with a wall of glass to showcase the centerpiece of our roasting house; a super-efficient Loring coffee roaster that we call Stella. Stella is smart—her advanced controls allow for consistent recreation of perfect roasts. Stella is a clean-burning work of stainless steel art—low emissions and fuel usage combined with even more nuanced flavor profiles for our already award-winning coffees.

Prime Roast Coffee saved a piece of Keene’s industrial heritage. People in the community love this little brick building, and so the love flows to us.

Though the Brick House Roastery building is for production only, feel free to stop by and take a photo in front of the Welcome to Keene sign and tag us #traveltoprime