Ready to Roast

Coffee connoisseurs will find lots to love at these two cool outlets

Latte at Pumphouse Pouratorium. Photo by Jake Constantakos, @nothingnegativeco
Photo by Jake Constantakos, @nothingnegativeco

Pumphouse Coffee Roasters

When Alex Le Clainche first looked at a warehouse outside downtown West Palm Beach, he had visions of turning it into a CrossFit gym. But now, more than a decade later, it is the new home of Pumphouse Coffee Roasters, which Le Clainche founded in April 2016 with his brother, Christian. Known as the Pouratorium, the 8,000-square-foot space boasts a retail and café area, a roasting facility, and a lab for training, tastings, education, and special events. 

Pumphouse Pouratorium. Photo by Jake Constantakos, @nothingnegativeco
Photo by Jake Constantakos, @nothingnegativeco

“This was always the dream,” Le Clainche says of the Pouratorium. “I just had anticipated instead of going into year seven, it would probably happen around year 14. That’s been a byproduct of a lot of hard work, a lot of sleepless nights.” 

The Le Clainches use a modernized 90-kilo German Probat roaster built in 1964, plus a 12-kilo Probat that came out of their parents’ garage. They roast for wholesale partners across the county and for their own cafés; in addition to the Pouratorium, they have a stand in Grandview Public Market and are inside Cones & Coffee in Jupiter. 

“Everything that we’re putting on bar is roasted weekly,” says Le Clainche. “We try to give the coffee a little bit of resting time.”

They offer single-origin coffees from Central and South America, East Africa, and Indonesia, as well as five proprietary blends. Patrons at the Pouratorium can also purchase pastries (made fresh daily by Aioli) and bites like burritos, tacos, toasts, and a churro-dusted Belgian waffle. Most of the dishes are rooted in family recipes, underscoring the homegrown nature and community values at the heart of Pumphouse. 

Photo courtesy Roasting Plant Coffee
Photo courtesy Roasting Plant Coffee

Roasting Plant Coffee

Inside The Fresh Market in Palm Beach Gardens awaits an innovative coffee experience where the roasting happens before your eyes. Based in New York City, the Roasting Plant Coffee company has pioneered a system known as the Javabot, which roasts micro batches of beans and brews coffee to order.

“It’s like an air popcorn popper on steroids,” says Michael Johnson, The Fresh Market’s director of special projects. 

Coffee tasting setup at Roasting Plant Coffee. Photo courtesy Roasting Plant Coffee
Coffee tasting setup at Roasting Plant Coffee. Photo courtesy Roasting Plant Coffee

A former industrial engineer and Starbucks executive, Roasting Plant Coffee founder Mike Caswell developed the Javabot inside his garage in Fort Lauderdale 16 years ago. A trained wine sommelier, Genevieve Kappler sources beans for the company, prioritizing farms with strong social and ecological practices. Johnson explains that while most coffee shops need to have a roastmaster on site because the process is so nuanced, Kappler calibrates the Javabot to follow roasting settings for each bean; it can also account for changes in humidity and temperature to ensure consistent roasts. 

At The Fresh Market in the Gardens, customers can watch as nine single-origin beans and five blends are roasted. They can pull whole beans to take home or savor any of them as a pour-over-style coffee or within an espresso beverage at the adjacent coffee stand. The store also hosts free weekly coffee tastings on Saturdays or Sundays, giving the public the opportunity to discover their next favorite bean. 

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