The cream-white Rancilio Classe 5 now sits behind a butter-yellow tiled bar at 1942 1st Avenue South, where Kenny Beers has traded the pop-up counter for a permanent morning station. Sun Bear Coffee St Petersburg opened its first standalone cafe in late July, giving the roaster its own 1,200-square-foot shop after roughly five years of markets, pop-ups and local counters.
Sun Bear Coffee St Petersburg: From Pop-Up to Permanent Bar
Sun Bear Specialty Coffee Roasters spent about five years moving through St. Petersburg by way of markets, pop-ups and other local businesses before Beers opened the 1,200-square-foot cafe. The new room gives the roaster a stable morning address, a retail counter and space for indoor seating for 20 to 30 guests, plus an outdoor patio (Localshops1).
The move also closes one chapter. Beers formally established Sun Bear in 2021 and later ran a small coffee bar inside St. Petersburg’s Sans Market. Sun Bear closed that bar at the end of May to focus on the new cafe, while keeping ties to the city’s market circuit. The stand at the Saturday Morning Market continues, which matters for regulars who first found the coffee outside the walls of a permanent shop.
The address puts Sun Bear Coffee St Petersburg at 1942 1st Avenue South, near the community Beers was already serving. Beers told St. Pete Rising that the building sits close to where the business had been operating, and that proximity matters for a brand built one cup at a time across local counters (Localshops1).
For coffee people, the permanent move changes the way to read Sun Bear. A pop-up can tell you how a barista works under pressure. A cafe tells you how a roaster wants the whole day to run, from the first grinder adjustment to the last retail bag on the shelf. Sun Bear now has enough room to make that argument in public.
The 1970s-Inspired Design and Roasting Setup
The design carries Sun Bear’s 1970s reference points into the room without turning the bar into a prop. The cafe has a butter-yellow tiled bar, red shelving, pendant lights, natural wood and stainless steel. Behind the counter, an old-fashioned menu board sits between vintage hi-fi speakers. Kenny Beers put the design plainly: "We already had a great space, but our Pinterest pinboard was loaded."1
The room’s strongest production detail sits next door. Beers roasts in an 800-square-foot adjoining space on a Yoshan machine, supplying the cafe and wholesale clients from the same St. Petersburg address. That puts the roasting work close to the bar work. Bags can move from the roaster to retail shelves, and coffees can move from sample decision to espresso service without the distance that separates many cafes from their production rooms.
That adjoining roasting space gives visitors a piece of access the market stand could not offer. Sun Bear built its pre-cafe years around lightly roasted single-origin coffees, including coffees with experimental post-harvest processing. In the permanent shop, those coffees move through a visible chain: green buying relationships, Beers at the Yoshan, a retail bag, then espresso or pourover at the bar.
The 1,200-square-foot cafe and the 800-square-foot roasting space also change the pace of the business. At a market stand, the line dictates the rhythm. In a cafe, the bar can set one tempo in the morning, retail another at mid-day, and roasting another in the adjoining space. Sun Bear’s first standalone shop turns a roaming service model into a working coffee room.
Kenny Beers’ Route from Music Teacher to Roaster
Before Sun Bear, Beers taught music in Cambodia. That part of the story explains more than the hi-fi speakers. While in Cambodia, he spent time around late-1960s and early-1970s music and pop culture, influences that later entered Sun Bear’s visual language. He also performed at a cafe run by Kakada Nub, a Cambodian roaster and barista competitor.
Nub taught Beers the basics of roasting before the COVID-19 pandemic brought Beers back to the United States. That training line gives Sun Bear a named point of origin rather than a vague origin story. The roasting started through a friendship, then moved through garage-scale work, markets, Sans Market and now the permanent cafe.
The July 26 grand opening folded that music history back into the cafe. Several bands played at the opening, which made the launch feel like a continuation of the rooms Beers had already known, places where people gather around sound, service and repetition.
Sun Bear Coffee St Petersburg now carries that musician-to-roaster arc into a daily schedule. A cafe is built on repeats. Dial the espresso. Greet the regular. Restock the shelf. Wipe down the bar. Start again tomorrow. For a former music teacher, the work has a familiar structure, practice made visible through service.
What to Order at the New Bar
Start with espresso. Sun Bear uses a cream-white 2-group Rancilio Classe 5 at the bar, and an Ethiopian Guji coffee often serves as the espresso base. That is the cleanest way to read the shop on a first visit because it tells you how Beers wants his roasting to land under pressure, through the house grinder, in the cup the bar serves all day.
If the bar has a manual pourover available, ask what is brewing before you order. Sun Bear uses pourovers to highlight co-fermented offerings as well as washed-process coffees. The sourcing runs through Unblended, Cafe Imports and Cofinet, along with direct relationships maintained largely through WhatsApp. That is the order for guests who track producers, processing style and importer relationships as closely as they track cafe openings.
There is a scarcity angle here, even without a numbered bottle count or allocation list. The first permanent Sun Bear bar gives regulars a steady way to taste coffees that were previously tied to market appearances, pop-ups and a small Sans Market counter. If a co-fermented coffee is on pourover, it is the cup to ask about because that is where the shop’s sourcing and roast decisions become easiest to read.
Cold drinks have a place here too. Some drinks use house-made syrups or additions such as dragon fruit cold foam. For a first pass, keep the order focused: one espresso to read the bar’s baseline, then a pourover if the available coffee catches your ear. If you are buying a bag, ask what was roasted most recently in the adjoining space and what Beers is most interested in brewing that week.
Food stays intentionally outside the production focus. Sun Bear serves pastries and light bites from outside vendors because the shop does not make food in-house. That choice keeps the cafe’s labor centered on coffee service, roasting and retail. It also gives visitors a clear read on what the business is built to do.
Why the First Permanent Cafe Matters in St. Petersburg
Sun Bear’s permanent cafe lands at a point when many specialty coffee businesses grow through temporary formats before taking on a lease. Markets and pop-ups let a roaster test demand, build regulars and learn service patterns without committing immediately to a full cafe buildout. Beers followed that route for roughly five years before opening the standalone shop.
For St. Petersburg drinkers, the difference is practical. The coffee is no longer tied only to a market calendar or a borrowed counter. Sun Bear now opens daily hours from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., giving locals and travelers a dependable window for espresso, drip coffee, cold brew and retail bags.
The shop also gives coffee tourists a specific morning stop in a city where cafe itineraries often sit alongside bakeries, breweries and beach plans. The address is fixed. The roasting is on-site. The espresso setup is named. The sourcing channels are named. Those details help serious drinkers decide where to spend a limited morning.
There is also a wholesale and subscription layer to watch. Sun Bear has added subscription services including Crema.co and Bottomless, and Beers has said he wants the roasting to reach a broader audience across the U.S. The cafe gives that effort a home base, while the Saturday Morning Market stand keeps the brand visible in the public rhythm that built it.
Location, Hours and the Best Time to Go
Sun Bear Coffee Roasters is at 1942 1st Avenue South in St. Petersburg. The new shop is open from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., with indoor seating for 20 to 30 guests and an outdoor patio. For the clearest read on the bar, go early enough to catch the morning espresso rhythm before the day turns into laptop seating and retail browsing (Localshops1).
Order the Ethiopian Guji espresso if it is on bar, then ask about the manual pourover list. If the staff is pouring a co-fermented coffee, that is the second cup to consider. If you already know Sun Bear from Sans Market or the Saturday Morning Market, the new cafe lets you compare the same roasting voice in a room designed for daily service.
The next thing to watch is how far the roasting program travels now that the morning bar, the retail shelf and the Yoshan share the same St. Petersburg address.