Inside the new Firecreek Coffee roastery and cafe in Phoenix.
Flagstaff, Arizona-based Firecreek Coffee Co. has spread South to Phoenix with the soft opening of a second, and larger, coffee roastery that includes a sixth retail location, an onsite bakery and an event space.
Firecreek is planning an SCA-accredited training facility on the second level of the building behind a slide-up wall of windows, while also prepping for a grand opening celebration in October.
Firecreek Coffee Founder Mike Funk told Daily Coffee News that the interior of building, built as a department store in the 1940s, feels even bigger than its 7,500 square feet. The four-year buildout came piece by piece, evolving naturally through time, according to Funk.
“With my background I’ve designed hundreds of cafes, usually with very rigid timelines and features and performance and wants from everybody,” said Funk. “After doing that for so long, it’s kind of nice to say, ‘hey, can we just do what we feel for this portion of the building, instead of being constrained?'”
A tall potted coffee tree greets customers while soaking in the light from floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the shop. A mezzanine wraps around the space to create an open central area with soaring 20-foot ceilings. A long, winding brass bar intended to tarnish naturally as it ages is fronted with wooden slats that create a natural feel while also helping to dampen sounds during regular service and events.
“Up in Flagstaff at our main cafe, we’ve done really well with having live events, live music, visual artists and performing arts and integrating with the community that way,” Funk told DCN. “So down there [in Phoenix], we wanted a large space and it has a central stage.”
Views of a refurbished and modified 60-kilo-capacity Samiac roaster with a 90-kilo-capacity cooling tray are available from every angle.
“When we found it, it was really exciting to see the structure and the ceilings and all of that space, and it was super cool to renovate the building without gentrifying a neighborhood,” said Funk. “There was no displacement, there was only upside to it.”
Firecreek acquired the Samiac just prior to securing the space, then spent almost as long on the machine’s restoration and modification. De-rated to 35-40-kilo capacity with a rebuilt drum and components, the Frankensteined production machine includes reconfigured airflow and a number of updated sensors.
Back in Flagstaff, the company continues to operate a 25-pound San Franciscan roaster, which has supplied all of the company’s five retail locations to this point. Matt DuPont, who has been with Firecreek for 12 years, moved to Phoenix for the head roaster position on the Samiac.
Funk, who is originally from Seattle, founded Firecreek in 2008 with a single location in Cave Creek, Arizona, after years of servicing and selling espresso equipment and cafe supplies, as well as building cafes.
A second location came to Sedona, followed by a third in Flagstaff. Today, the Flagstaff roastery, warehouse and retail locations are all in separate facilities.
“We were just super fortunate in northern Arizona. We received more business than we ever thought we would,” said Funk. “We’re just bursting at the seams. So instead of going into a bigger industrial space and having economies of scale, we decided we love the Northern Arizona business. We’ll just take some of the pressure off, let them be that local roaster for northern Arizona, and we’ll go down to Phoenix — going from a few hundred thousand people to 6 million people in the area — and we’ll try to be a local roaster to Phoenix.”
Most of Firecreek’s bespoke locations have bakeries on site, while another new Phoenix project by Funk and associates called Big Park Bakery also recently soft-launched.
The standalone commercial bakery will serve restaurants and other wholesale clients, but is also designed to be a kind of test kitchen and incubator space for Firecreek’s own needs.
Funk described the bakery venture as “very much a learning process” for him personally.
“It’s like being in coffee 30 years ago — it’s just flour and salt and water, man — but wow is there a lot to learn,” said Funk. “My whole existence in the coffee industry is thinking something’s easy and then getting humbled.”
[Editor’s note: This story has been updated. The original version incorrectly identified Matt DuPont as Mike DuPont.]
Firecreek Coffee is located at 1618 E. McDowell Road in Phoenix. Tell DCN’s editors about your new coffee shop or roastery here.
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Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
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