Best Independent Coffee Roasters in Des Moines, Iowa (2026)
Des Moines has been roasting its own coffee since 1991. Friedrichs opened that year as the city's first true coffeehouse. Zanzibar's followed on Ingersoll in 1993. The newer names slot in around them — but the elders still set the rhythm.
This guide covers 9 active independent coffee roasters as of July 2026, across Des Moines, Altoona, and West Des Moines. The bench is anchored by Friedrichs Coffee — the city's first true coffeehouse, founded in 1991 — and Zanzibar's Coffee Adventure, the woman-owned Ingersoll fixture that has been roasting on-site since 1993. Newer entries fill in around them: Horizon Line in the West End Artist District, Wake Up Iowa on the north side, Black Silo and Capital City sharing a street in Altoona, Coffalo's bicycle-delivery operation and Corazon's organic program in West Des Moines, and Kingman's local-only micro-roastery. For Iowa's capital — a metro of around 700,000 — that's the densest indie roasting bench in the state. The Des Moines city directory page lists only the five roasters inside the city limits; this guide widens the frame to the metro.
Des Moines anchors the Iowa specialty coffee scene. The city's downtown and East Village specialty corridor has grown alongside a restaurant boom over the last decade, and the customer base has caught up enough to support a roastery at every size — from a 1991 European-style coffeehouse to a 2017 modern specialty bar to a 2020 bicycle-delivered home roaster. What follows is a guide organized roughly by where these roasters actually work, because in Des Moines the building, the neighborhood, and the year on the door are most of the story.
The downtown and East Village corridor
Horizon Line Coffee
Horizon Line operates from 1417 Walnut Street B in the West End Artist District, on the west side of downtown a short walk from the East Village restaurant cluster across the Des Moines River. The roastery and cafe share the same address. Co-founders Brad Penna and Nam Ho left Southern California in 2017 to open the operation, after learning the craft at Arcade Coffee Roasters in Riverside, California — a lineage that connects Horizon Line to one of the more rigorous small-roaster scenes in the country. Daily Coffee News profiled the launch in August 2017, and Imbibe Magazine ran an inside-look feature shortly after. The bag program emphasizes single origins rotated frequently and a tighter blend selection, sold through the cafe and shipped nationally through the website. The shop has the deliberate, owner-attentive feel of a roaster that opened in Des Moines because the founders wanted to be in Des Moines — not because they were chasing a market.
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The north side: Lower Beaver
Wake Up Iowa Coffee
Wake Up Iowa opened in Iowa City in 2011 — founder Jarrett Mitchell started it as a coffee cart before it grew into a roasting operation — and crossed the state to open a Des Moines espresso bar and retail outlet at 3605 Douglas Avenue in the Lower Beaver neighborhood in 2024. The beans are roasted in small batches on a fluid-bed roaster back in Iowa City, and the Des Moines location runs the espresso bar and the bag side. The lineup leans on single origins rotated fresh, sold at the counter, at eastern-Iowa farmers markets, and shipped nationally through the website. The Douglas Avenue shop reads as a neighborhood room first — kid-friendly, stocked with snacks and kombucha, open Tuesday through Saturday — a different posture than the downtown specialty bars, and one that fills a real gap on the north side of the metro.
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Ingersoll and the Sherman Hill corridor
Zanzibar's Coffee Adventure
Zanzibar's runs from 2723 Ingersoll Avenue in the Sherman Hill area, the residential corridor that links downtown to the western neighborhoods. The shop opened in 1993 and has been roasting small-batch single-origin Arabica on-site every year since — making Zanzibar's, by the metro's own measure, the longest continually-owned local coffee shop in the Des Moines area. The business has been woman-owned the entire time, which is rare for a 30-plus-year coffee operation anywhere in the country. The cafe runs an espresso bar, an all-day breakfast menu (including a steamed-egg breakfast that locals have ordered for three decades), and a bag program of single origins available in multiple sizes. The Ingersoll location is the kind of neighborhood institution that doesn't get covered in specialty-cafe roundups, which is exactly why it deserves to be the second name on this list.
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University Avenue and the Urbandale roastery
Friedrichs Coffee
Friedrichs is the elder of the entire scene. The flagship cafe opened in October 1991 at 4126 University Avenue and is regularly cited as Des Moines' first true coffeehouse. The roots run further back than that — founder Edward Sidey traces the family's coffee lineage to a great-grandfather named Friedrich who ran a coffeehouse in Charlottenburg, Germany, in the early 1900s. Sidey's own interest in the craft matured during a 1991 vacation to Sarchi in Costa Rica's coffee mountains, where he and his wife stayed and helped with the harvest. The operation now spans three retail cafes (University Avenue in Des Moines, 86th Street in Urbandale, and a West Des Moines shop) plus the dedicated roastery at 2781 99th Street in Urbandale. Friedrichs hand-roasts in small batches on gas-fired European drum roasters, and the wholesale program ships across the metro to restaurants, grocers, and offices. Thirty-plus years of continuous Des Moines roasting is the kind of lineage most state capitals don't have.
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The eastern metro: Altoona
Black Silo Coffee Roasting Co.
Black Silo roasts from 305 1st Avenue South in Altoona, the suburb on the eastern edge of the Des Moines metro along Interstate 80. The origin story is the kind that gets retold in coffee press: the founders started in a garage in 2017 with a chicken rotisserie, roasting one pound of beans an hour while they figured out blend ratios. After local cafes started picking up the small batches, the operation upgraded to a professional hot-air roaster — a method that was unusual enough at the time that Black Silo became one of only two Iowa roasters using it. The bag program has since expanded into Hy-Vee and Fareway grocery distribution across the state, alongside direct online sales. Iowa Starting Line's 2023 roundup of Iowa-made products picked Black Silo as one of the standouts. The Altoona location keeps the roasting work close to home and the wholesale footprint statewide.
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Capital City Coffee
Capital City is the second Altoona roaster on this list, working from 106 1st Avenue South — the same 1st Avenue South strip as Black Silo, a few doors apart. Founded in 2014, it's run by owner Iisha Martin as roaster and barista both, and the model is deliberately made-to-order: beans are roasted to order rather than pulled off a shelf, organized by roast level and flavor, under the shop's own house line ("life is too short to drink bad coffee"). There's no national shipping and no wholesale chase — Capital City is a storefront operation serving Altoona and the eastern metro directly. For drinkers who want the freshest possible bag and don't mind that it's roasted the day they ask for it, it's the most owner-direct pickup in the eastern suburbs.
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The western metro: West Des Moines
Coffalo
Coffalo is the smallest and most unusual operation on this list. Founded in November 2020, Coffalo is a one-person roastery working out of a West Des Moines home setup, with whole-bean bags roasted to order and delivered around the metro by bicycle — the founder is regularly seen in an orange shirt and helmet doing the rounds. The Daily Iowan ran a feature in April 2025 covering the basement-roastery-to-bike-route arc. The model is intentionally local: no national shipping, no wholesale chase, just direct-to-customer relationships built around a rotating menu of single origins and the bicycle as the delivery vehicle. Coffalo is the kind of operation that doesn't usually appear on city coffee guides because it doesn't have a storefront — but for Des Moines metro drinkers who want the freshest possible bag from the shortest possible supply chain, it's the obvious answer.
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Corazon Coffee Roasters
Corazon roasts from 516 Elm Street in Valley Junction, the historic-district core of West Des Moines, a short walk from the antique shops and the farmers market that anchor the neighborhood. The program is built on certified-organic, fair-trade green coffee — "coffee with a heart," in the shop's own words — with single origins offered across the full roast spectrum from light to dark and a set of house blends (a Breakfast Blend, a House Blend, the Crema Love espresso, and a HoQ Blend). Everything is priced flat by the pound and rotates seasonally. Unlike Coffalo down the road, Corazon ships anywhere in the U.S., which makes it the West Des Moines roaster to reach for if you're ordering from out of state.
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The metro micro-roaster
Kingman Coffee
Kingman runs as a Des Moines micro-roaster with a constantly rotating lineup of single origins lightly roasted to surface the natural aromatics of the green coffee. The operation is small enough that the roastmaster's preferences shape every release, and the local-pickup model keeps the bags fresher than the shipping-first roasters can manage. Kingman is the closest thing Des Moines has to a modern specialty production roaster sized for the metro rather than the wholesale market — a deliberate choice that pulls the kind of customer base who knows the difference between bags rotated weekly and bags sitting on a shelf. For Des Moines drinkers who want a strictly local single-origin experience and don't mind picking up rather than ordering online, Kingman is one of the more interesting options.
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What ties Des Moines's roasting scene together
Des Moines is one of those quietly deep coffee markets that doesn't make the national conversation because the elders don't try to. Friedrichs has been roasting on University Avenue for 35 years. Zanzibar's has been roasting on Ingersoll for 33 years and woman-owned the entire way. Horizon Line landed in the West End Artist District in 2017 with Daily Coffee News press attached. Black Silo built a statewide grocery footprint out of an Altoona garage. Coffalo runs the country's most charming bicycle-delivery roastery from a West Des Moines basement. Kingman holds the metro micro-roaster lane. Wake Up Iowa crossed the state from Iowa City to open a north-side espresso bar, Capital City roasts to order a few doors from Black Silo in Altoona, and Corazon runs an organic program in Valley Junction. Six of the nine ship nationally — the other three are deliberately local. There's no single Des Moines coffee identity, and that's exactly what makes the bench work.
The Des Moines coffee roasters worth paying attention to are owner-operated, neighborhood-tied, and selling directly to a customer base they can name. This metro set spans Des Moines proper plus Altoona and West Des Moines; browse the Des Moines roasters on the city directory page, or open the Explore map to see how Des Moines fits into the broader Iowa coffee scene — Iowa has 56 indie roasters statewide, with Des Moines as the densest specialty corridor and the eastern Iowa Cedar Rapids–Iowa City corridor as the second cluster. Not sure where to start? Take the quiz for a roaster matched to your taste profile.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many independent coffee roasters are in Des Moines, Iowa?
Des Moines, Altoona, and West Des Moines have 9 active independent coffee roasters between them as of July 2026 — Friedrichs Coffee (founded 1991), Zanzibar's Coffee Adventure (founded 1993), Horizon Line Coffee, Black Silo Coffee Roasting Co., Coffalo, Kingman Coffee, Wake Up Iowa Coffee, Capital City Coffee, and Corazon Coffee Roasters. Five sit inside the Des Moines city limits; the rest are in the inner suburbs of Altoona and West Des Moines. Friedrichs and Zanzibar's predate the modern specialty era by more than a decade and anchor the scene. Our count includes only operators who roast their own beans, not the larger pool of cafes that resell other roasters' coffee. Des Moines is the densest specialty coffee market in Iowa.
What is Des Moines known for in specialty coffee?
Des Moines is the anchor of Iowa's specialty coffee map and runs on a longer clock than most cities its size. Friedrichs has been roasting on University Avenue since 1991. Zanzibar's has been on Ingersoll since 1993, billed as the longest continually-owned local coffee shop in the metro and woman-owned the entire way. Newer operators like Horizon Line (2017, in the West End Artist District), Black Silo (2017, in suburban Altoona), Coffalo (2020, in West Des Moines), Kingman, Wake Up Iowa, Capital City, and Corazon fill in around them across the metro. The downtown and East Village specialty corridor has grown alongside the city's restaurant boom, and the bench is unusually deep for a Midwest capital this size.
Do Des Moines coffee roasters ship nationwide?
Six of the nine ship nationally — Friedrichs Coffee, Zanzibar's Coffee Adventure, Horizon Line Coffee, Black Silo Coffee Roasting Co., Wake Up Iowa Coffee, and Corazon Coffee Roasters all sell whole-bean bags through their websites and ship out of state. The other three are deliberately local: Coffalo runs a hyper-local model with bicycle delivery around West Des Moines and the metro, Kingman Coffee operates as a local-only micro-roaster, and Capital City Coffee roasts to order for pickup at its Altoona storefront. For out-of-state customers, Friedrichs and Horizon Line are the easiest entry points online.
Where in Des Moines should I look for indie roasters?
Downtown and the West End Artist District anchor the specialty corridor — Horizon Line operates from 1417 Walnut Street, in walking distance of the East Village restaurant cluster across the Des Moines River. The Ingersoll Avenue corridor in the Sherman Hill area holds Zanzibar's at 2723 Ingersoll Ave. Friedrichs runs a flagship cafe at 4126 University Avenue plus locations in Urbandale and West Des Moines, with the roastery on 99th Street in Urbandale. Wake Up Iowa runs a north-side espresso bar at 3605 Douglas Avenue in Lower Beaver. In Altoona, on the eastern edge of the metro, Black Silo roasts from 305 1st Avenue South and Capital City from 106 1st Avenue South a few doors away. In West Des Moines, Coffalo works from a home roastery and Corazon from 516 Elm Street in Valley Junction. Kingman is a metro-wide direct-pickup operation.
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Last updated: July 2026