Coffee By Design

Roasted to order at the Diamond Street plant

Diamond Street in Portland, Maine is a working roastery with a counter attached. Coffee By Design roasts to order there, so the bags on the shelf have not been sitting in a warehouse waiting for a buyer, and the café sits close enough to the drums that the room takes on the smell of the day's production. The company started in 1994, when co-founder Mary Allen Lindemann opened downtown in the middle of a recession and called the venture a community coffee company, and it has since built a wholesale business supplying cafés, restaurants and shops across Maine and beyond. The building also holds the Origins Bar and the company offices, which is why it reads as a coffee business you can walk into rather than a café with a mural on the wall.

Single origins, blends, and a list worth reading

The range is broad: single origins, blends, water-processed decaf, flavoured coffees and limited editions, some long-running bestsellers and some available for a season only. The current featured set shows the spread. Rwanda Nyamasheke Gasharu Honey is described as juicy, with raspberry preserves and Orangina; India Natural runs to red fruit, molasses and black tea; Colombia Rosé Bourbon is floral, rose tea and red berries. Alongside them sit cause-linked blends including the Juneteenth Blend and the AANHPI Blend. Local chefs have worked with the roastery on blends built for their own menus, so the café functions as the retail face of a much larger coffee programme. Coffee By Design was a James Beard Award semifinalist in 2025.

What to drink, and what to notice in the room

Cold brew is the easiest place to start, with espresso drinks and single-origin pour-overs covering the rest of the counter, a frozen cappuccino for warm afternoons and a pastry case beside the till. Take the pour-over if you want to taste what the roastery is doing rather than what milk does to it. The building itself is part of the visit: the fit-out reuses cabinetry, the paint and carpet are no-VOC, the lighting is efficient and there is solar power on the roof, all of it done in partnership with Efficiency Maine. A screen on the wall shows power use and savings as they happen, which is an unusual thing to put in front of customers and fits a company that has framed itself around community since 1994.