The Best Coffee Roasters in Nashville

Let’s settle something right up front: Nashville isn’t just hot chicken, honky-tonks, and somebody’s cousin chasing a record deal. This city roasts coffee with the same stubborn pride it brings to a three-minute song — and once you’ve had a cup pulled by someone who actually knows the farmer’s name, you don’t go back to the gas-station stuff. Trust me.

What I love about the coffee scene here is how unbothered it is. These folks aren’t roasting beans to impress a magazine in some other city. They’re doing it because a converted transmission shop made a perfect cafe, because a nonprofit needed a way to put teenagers through college, because a paper on living out your faith turned into a plan to fund clean water halfway around the world. That’s a very Nashville way to do things — big heart, no fuss.

So pour yourself something, settle in, and let me walk you through the ten roasters actually worth your loyalty around here. These are the ones roasting their own beans, treating their farmers right, and making coffee good enough to ruin you for the chains. Let’s get into it.

First, A Little Homework

Before you go chasing the perfect bag of beans, let’s make sure your kitchen can do them justice. Great coffee starts at the source, sure — but it’s made or broken at home. A few honest upgrades go a long way, and these are the ones I’d put my own money behind:

• Coffee Grinders: The single biggest upgrade to your cup. Non-negotiable. A great bean ground badly is just expensive dust.
• Coffee Makers & Machines: From pour-over to full espresso setups — find the one that fits your morning, not somebody else’s.
• Storage Containers: Fresh beans go stale fast in the wrong jar. Keep all that hard-won flavor where it belongs.
• Coffee Scales: Eyeballing it is a crime against good coffee. Weigh your beans and watch your cup get better overnight.

Alright, homework’s done. Here are the ten Nashville roasters worth clearing a shelf for.

Crema Coffee Roasters

If there’s a royal family of Nashville coffee, it’s the Lehmans. Rachel and Ben set out to build something special back in 2007, and by 2008 Crema was open downtown on Hagan Street — long before “third wave” was a phrase anybody in town was throwing around. Rachel came in with more than a decade behind the bar and in management, and you can taste that experience in every cup.

Crema sources through direct relationships with farmers, runs as a zero-waste roaster and cafe, and has the hardware to back up the hype — named Food & Wine’s Best Coffee Roaster in Tennessee in 2022 and counted among the magazine’s 100 Best Coffee Shops in America. With spots downtown, in Brentwood, and an East Nashville takeaway, they’re easy to find and impossible to forget.

Find them: crema-coffee.com · @cremacrema

Barista Parlor

Barista Parlor opened in 2012 when Andy Mumma turned a converted East Nashville transmission shop into the cafe that basically wrote the playbook for the city’s coffee scene. It’s art-forward, motorcycle-cool, and unapologetically its own thing — the kind of place that made people realize a coffee shop could be a destination, not just a pit stop.

The roasting operation came a couple years later (Mumma even teamed up with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys on the Golden Sound expansion), and these days the beans come out of a 6,000-square-foot space in Wedgewood-Houston. Multiple locations around town, a serious design obsession, and coffee that holds its own against the aesthetic — Barista Parlor earned its legend status the honest way.

Find them: baristaparlor.com · @baristaparlor

8th & Roast

8th & Roast has been roasting exceptional coffee in Nashville since 2009, and in 2016 childhood friends Ed Reed, Sam Reed, and Q-Juan “Q” Taylor took over the company and gave it new life. There’s a real warmth to this place — it grew up around long conversations and big dreams at the original 8th Avenue cafe, and you can still feel that.

They build long-term relationships with the farmers who grow their coffee, sourcing fresh and fair and giving those growing communities a steady market for their crop. You’ll find them in 8th Ave/Melrose and Sylvan Park, plus partner counters at the airport and Canopy by Hilton — and yes, that means a genuinely great cup is now waiting for you before your flight.

Find them: 8thandroast.com · @eighthandroast

Bongo Roasting Co.

Let’s give the elder its due. Bongo Java opened on March 28, 1993, founded by Bob Bernstein — a self-described “recovering journalist” who moved to town, fell hard for it, and never left. It’s Nashville’s oldest and most honored coffeehouse, and that title isn’t up for debate: nobody else here has the receipts going back that far.

Bongo Roasting Co. is Nashville’s first certified organic coffee roaster, pouring fair trade coffee since day one. The company has grown into more than five concepts across the city (their sister cafe Fido is a local institution in its own right), and they’ve racked up Best Coffeehouse honors in the local readers poll year after year. Old-school, organic, and still going strong.

Find them: bongojava.com · @bongoroastingco

Frothy Monkey Roasting Co.

Frothy Monkey started life as a cozy 12South neighborhood spot back in 2004, the kind of place where regulars become family. It grew up well: the dedicated Frothy Monkey Roasting Co. operation opened at the INK Building in the spring of 2015, which is when they really took the beans into their own hands.

These days Frothy is an all-day-cafe empire with locations across Nashville — 12South, Downtown, The Nations, East Nashville — plus Franklin, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and a couple of Alabama outposts. But don’t let the footprint fool you; the coffee program stays serious, with single-origin lots and seasonal blends that reward a closer look. Big reach, small-shop soul.

Find them: frothymonkeycoffee.com · @frothymonkeyroasters

Honest Coffee Roasters

Honest Coffee was founded in 2014 by Brett Henry, and it became Franklin’s very first specialty coffee roasting company. There’s a great backstory baked in here: Henry is the great-great-grandson of James Green, a Franklin grocer who, way back in 1800, traveled to Nashville hunting for good coffee to stock his store. Two centuries later, the family’s still on the same mission.

The original roaster lives inside The Factory at Franklin, a ninety-year-old former stove factory, and the beans are sourced fresh and ethically. You’ll find Honest across the greater Nashville area — the Factory, Berry Farms, West Nashville, downtown — and they’ve even spun up a sister juice company along the way. Unpretentious, well-named, and genuinely good.

Find them: honest.coffee · @honestcoffeeroasters

The Well Coffee Roasters

Here’s a mission that’ll get you out of bed. The Well was founded in 2012 by Rob Touchstone and Chris Soper after Touchstone, asked to write a theology paper on living out a mission, sketched out a coffeehouse instead. The idea: use the profits from great local coffee to fund clean water projects in communities that need them most.

The Well builds direct relationships with farmers, buys green coffee, and roasts it themselves — farm to faucet, as they put it — so every cup you buy is doing double duty. They’ve grown to multiple Nashville locations while keeping that founding purpose front and center. Good coffee that quite literally changes lives somewhere down the line; that’s a hard cup to feel bad about.

Find them: wellcoffeeroasters.com · @wellcoffeeroasters

Steadfast Coffee

Steadfast set up shop in Germantown in 2015, over on Taylor Street, and quickly became one of those cafes coffee people name-drop without a second thought. The crew here has serious competition chops — the team behind it made a strong showing at the 2016 US Coffee Championships — and it shows in how dialed-in everything tastes.

They roast their own beans and lean hard into direct trade, building relationships that mean ethical wages and responsible farming for the folks growing their coffee. Add a genuinely good food and drink program and a neighborhood-anchor vibe, and Steadfast is the kind of place you go for a quick cup and somehow lose an afternoon. No complaints there.

Find them: steadfast.coffee · @steadfastcoffee

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Retrograde Coffee Roasters

Retrograde landed on historic Dickerson Pike on the edge of East Nashville in 2018 with a refreshingly simple goal: be a true neighborhood coffee stop. A place to gather, to work, to connect, to actually pause for a minute. In a city moving as fast as this one, that’s no small ambition — and they nailed it.

They roast their own beans and have grown thoughtfully since, recently opening at Starling in Germantown to mark a third location. Expect rotating single origins from Ethiopia, Bali, Honduras and beyond, plus the kind of laid-back room where the barista remembers your order. Coffee, beer, wine, food, good company — Retrograde keeps it real and keeps it close.

Find them: retrograderoasters.com · @retrograderoasters

Humphreys Street Coffee

Save room for the one that’ll warm your whole heart. Humphreys Street started in 2008 when Brian Hicks shared his passion for roasting specialty coffee with a handful of South Nashville high schoolers. It grew into a social enterprise under the nonprofit Harvest Hands CDC, and in 2018 they opened a full coffee shop and roastery on Humphreys Street.

Here’s the part I love: every dollar of profit gets reinvested into the students. Humphreys Street employs sixteen local teens a year, teaching them to roast while guiding them through mentorship, college tours, and scholarships. They roast some of the best-tasting coffee in town — and they do it while changing kids’ lives. That’s about as Nashville as it gets.

Find them: humphreysstreet.com · @humphreysstreet

So, Where Do You Start?

Honestly? Pick the story that pulls at you and let your taste buds follow. Want the trophy case? Start with Crema. Want history in a cup? Bongo’s been at it since ’93. Want your coffee to do some good in the world? The Well and Humphreys Street are waiting. Grab a bag, get it home, and then have a little fun dialing it in — a few minutes spent adjusting coffee strength can turn a good cup into your cup, and if you’re ready to chase the perfect shot, our at-home espresso guide will get you there without the heartbreak.

The beautiful thing about Nashville is that you can’t really make a wrong choice here. Every roaster on this list is pouring something worth driving across town for, and half the fun is showing up, chatting up the barista, and finding the one that feels like home. So go meet them. Tell them what you like, ask what they’re proud of, and let them surprise you. Now go pour one. ☕