By ·Updated May 2026

New Brunswick's Coffee Scene: 16 Indie Roasters from Saint John to Sackville

New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada, and you can read it off the roastery names before you ever taste the coffee. "Café Tintamarre." "Rôticana." "Cafés Sunny Brae." The accents are kept on the labels because the identity is the point — about half the active operators here lean francophone or bilingual, and the other half work in English with francophone customers a phone call away.

We mapped 16 active independent coffee roasters across New Brunswick. Seven of them sit in or near Fredericton, two in Moncton, two in Saint John, and the remaining five are scattered across Alma on the Bay of Fundy, Hampton in the Kennebecasis Valley, Notre-Dame in the francophone east, Sackville near the Nova Scotia line, and Sussex in dairy country. New Brunswick is the smallest of the three Maritime provinces by population, and it has the fewest roasters of the four launched Canadian provinces in our directory — but it carries more francophone weight than any of them, and it's where some of Atlantic Canada's most distinctive editorial stories live.

Saltwinds: Carbon-Capture, Cold Brew Bronze, and Ocean Air

The roastery worth opening with isn't in any of the three big metros. Saltwinds Coffee Company operates out of Keswick Ridge — a Fredericton-adjacent hamlet on the way up Route 105. Co-founders Laura Richard and Brad Rideout opened in Douglas in March 2022 and moved the roastery to Keswick Ridge as the operation scaled.

The editorial story is hard to oversell. Saltwinds runs a carbon-capture roasting R&D partnership with the University of New Brunswick and the Research and Productivity Council, working on capturing emissions from the roast cycle itself rather than offsetting them after the fact. Their proprietary "Ocean Air" infusion exposes green beans to ocean air pre-roast, a deliberate gesture toward how coffee originally arrived in Canada by sea. They've taken bronze at the International Cold Brew Championships two years running — 2023 and 2024 — and Laura Richard was named one of Atlantic Canada's 25 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2024.

A whole-operation carbon claim is rare anywhere in coffee. Most "sustainable" marketing operates at the bag level — origin certifications, recyclable packaging, fair-trade stamps. Saltwinds is operating at the roastery level with university research partners. That's the tier of story you'd expect from a much larger metro than Keswick Ridge.

The Fredericton Cluster

Saltwinds is the editorial anchor, but Fredericton proper is where the volume sits. Six roasters work the city itself.

Mill Town Roasters is the multi-format operator. Founded January 2019 by Carl and Melodie (or Katie — Huddle Today profiles disagree across two articles, and we've kept both names in our records pending a direct confirmation) Martens, Mill Town runs three sites under one brand: the Coffee Mill at 1187 Smythe Street where the actual roasting happens, the Brick House on King Street as the downtown café, and the Landing in Marysville — a cycling-café format on the Nashwaak River bike trail. The cycling-café is the unusual one. You can pedal in off the rail-trail, refill, keep going. That's a setup you don't see often in North American specialty coffee, and Mill Town is the only New Brunswick operator running it.

Rôticana Coffee Company is the diversity-recognized indie. Founder Mohamed Khirallah arrived in Canada from Egypt in 2016 and built Rôticana into a Fredericton roastery with a Saint John café satellite. The NB Multicultural Council named the brand "Champion for Cultural Diversity" in 2018. The circumflex on Rôticana is preserved on the label and on our directory page — the slug uses ASCII because URLs do, but the brand identity keeps the accent.

Freddy Bean Roasters, founded by Jeremy MacFarlane and Wil Mazerolle, occupies the most distinctive product niche in the province: non-alcoholic, barrel-aged, spirit-infused coffee. They age green beans in whisky barrels and rum barrels for months before roasting. It's a niche that overlaps the craft-spirits and craft-coffee worlds without leaving either, and Freddy Bean is the only NB operator working it. They roast out of the Picaroons Brewtique location and a Wilsey Road space, on a roast-to-order model.

Whitney Coffee Company, Duck Duck Coffee Roasters, and Jonnie Java Roasters round out the Fredericton roster. Whitney works out of 69 Pugsley Street with a Saturday vendor presence at Boyce Farmers Market — beans roasted weekly, ground to order, four drip varieties with two of them fair-trade organic. Duck Duck operates wholesale and online without a clear retail address (Fredericton's farmers-market roaster pattern, which Whitney also fits). Jonnie Java has been roasting since 2007 as a sub-brand of Paradise Imports — the longest tenure of the Fredericton group, with a 95 York Street café that scores 4.1 on Tripadvisor and ranks #83 of 180 Fredericton restaurants. That's solid mid-tier rather than top-tier specialty, and we've noted as much.

Saint John: Java Moose and the Online Independents

Saint John is New Brunswick's largest city by population, and it has the province's largest-scale indie roaster.

Java Moose Coffee Roasters was founded in 1995 by Glen McLean and Randy Pedersen, and it's been founder-owned for thirty years. Four cafés (uptown headquarters at 84 Prince William Street, plus Westmorland Road, Clark Road in Rothesay, and a fourth) and 250+ wholesale accounts across Atlantic Canada, with around forty employees. That's a meaningful scale — borderline for what we'd call "indie" — but Wikipedia and Huddle Today both confirm founder-ownership has held, and Java Moose is the longest-running Saint John operator. We've flagged the row for a Phase A.5 ownership re-verification because thirty years and forty employees is the threshold where outside investment usually starts showing up, but as of the public record it's still founder-led.

East Coast Roasts Coffee is the scrappy 2020 indie. Founder Harrison Fisher styles East Coast Roasts as "Saint John's only independent coffee roaster" — a claim that became more defensible after Rogue Coffee shut its café in 2021 (Rogue's Shopify shop technically still exists, but every SKU is sold out as of early 2026, so the brand is winding down). East Coast Roasts works mostly online and through wholesale; we don't have a public street address for it and we've geocoded the row at the uptown Saint John centroid.

Moncton: Epoch Chemistry and the Acadian Wholesale Hub

Moncton has only two active rows in our directory but they're both substantive.

Epoch Chemistry Coffee is the third-wave specialty anchor for Atlantic Canada — the brand most likely to come up if you ask the broader Canadian roasting community to name a serious New Brunswick operator. Founded June 2019 by Conor Conway and Matt Symes, Epoch works a Nordic-style light-medium roast profile on a 9kg Stronghold Halogen, supplies around thirty wholesale accounts across Atlantic Canada, and runs a tasting-room format with cupping experiences out of 400 St George Street. The contact structure tells you something about how seriously they take the operation: separate emails for sales, events, and tasting-room bookings.

Sunny Brae Coffee, styled in French as Cafés Sunny Brae, is the bilingual / Acadian wholesale spine. Founder Clément Dugas opened the microbrûlerie in 2015 as an offshoot of his Café Clémentine deli, and he's spent the decade since supplying cafés across the province — Cactus Café in Shediac, Café Tintamarre in Sackville, and others. The Sunny Brae site is French-primary with an English toggle. If you've had specialty coffee at a small NB café and there's no in-house roasting visible, there's a non-trivial chance you've had Sunny Brae beans.

Down East: 30 Years from a Cedar-Log Roastery

Down East Coffee Roasters is the heritage operator. Founded 1996 by Terry and Germaine Montague — not Lloyd and Patty Bernard, as some directory listings have it; we've corrected the founder names against Down East's own About page and APEX Magazine — Down East has been roasting from Notre-Dame, a francophone village halfway between Moncton and Shediac, for thirty years. Caley Montague, the founders' son, took over in 2022. Clean family succession, still indie, no parent company.

The roastery itself sits in a pièce-sur-pièce cedar-log building, and Down East has held a direct-trade Aroma Nica sourcing relationship with a single Nicaraguan grower for more than a decade. The retail arm includes Café Codiac, Moncton's first independent drive-thru, opened 2010 at 666 St. George Boulevard. Thirty years of continuous indie operation is rare in any province; in New Brunswick, only Java Moose matches the tenure.

The Editorial Highlights: Buddha Bear and Café Tintamarre

Two roasters earn editorial-highlight status on setting alone.

Buddha Bear Coffee Roasters & Café operates out of a converted church in Alma — the small Bay of Fundy village that anchors Albert County tourism — alongside Holy Whale Brewing Company as a co-tenant. Old pews. Stained glass. Pet-friendly. Bilingual staff. Tripadvisor's #1 of 1 in Alma (which says less about competition than about the fact that there's exactly one café in town and Buddha Bear is it). Founders Jeff Grandy, Peter Grandy, and Ian Hillier converted the church around 2016 and built the brewery + roastery co-tenancy that gives Buddha Bear its identity. There's no independent website — the public storefront is Facebook and Instagram only — but the editorial signal is among the strongest in the province.

Café Tintamarre is the Acadian-named micro inside a tourism centre. Owners Alice Cotton and Pete Stephenson run a small electric roaster, roast fair-trade green beans imported by Just Us Coffee out of Nova Scotia, and operate two storefronts: a permanent counter inside the Sackville Visitor Information Centre at 34 Mallard Drive, and a Boler trailer at the Sackville Farmers Market. Mount Allison University is across the street. "Tintamarre" is the iconic Acadian National Day noise-making tradition — pots, pans, anything that makes sound — and naming a coffee roaster after it is a deliberate Acadian-identity move in an English-leaning border town.

The Smaller-Town Surprises

Three more roasters fill out the active map.

Picadilly Coffee Roasters, in Sussex on the highway between Saint John and Moncton, opened August 2021 under owner-operators Elissa and Matt Colpitts. Café, retail, wholesale, plus Nuova Simonelli equipment service — the full-stack indie setup. They score 4.9 on Tripadvisor and rank #5 of 29 Sussex restaurants, which is roughly the highest editorial signal you can get out of a town of 4,000 people.

Beamer's Creek Coffee Roasters, in Hampton in the Kennebecasis Valley between Saint John and Sussex, runs a Facebook-only digital footprint but has confirmed wholesale capacity — they supply Catapult Coffee in Saint John (light + dark blends), which means they're real enough to ship product and not just a homestead hobbyist. Fair-trade South and Central American sourcing.

That brings the active roster to 16 — the count we set out with at the top.

What Makes the New Brunswick Scene Distinct

A few patterns stand out across the 16 roasters.

The first is that the bilingualism is real and structural rather than decorative. Sunny Brae's site loads in French by default. Café Tintamarre takes its name from a francophone tradition. Rôticana keeps its circumflex. Down East works from the francophone east. About half the active rows touch francophone identity in some way, and the other half operate in cities (Fredericton, Saint John) where francophone customers are routine. This is structurally different from Quebec — where French is the dominant language and English is the toggle — but it's also structurally different from the rest of Atlantic Canada, where francophone presence is much smaller. New Brunswick sits in the middle of a Maritime trio (PEI, NS, NB) and carries the francophone weight for all three.

The second is the small-town editorial density. Saltwinds in Keswick Ridge. Buddha Bear in Alma. Café Tintamarre in Sackville. Picadilly in Sussex. Down East in Notre-Dame. Five of the strongest editorial stories sit in towns under 5,000 people. That's a function of New Brunswick's demographic shape — there's no single dominant metro the way Toronto dominates Ontario or Montreal dominates Quebec — but it also tracks with the fact that NB tourism is built around small-town destinations (Bay of Fundy, Mount Allison, Acadian Peninsula) and roasters tend to plant flags where the tourism is.

The third is the specialty-niche range. Saltwinds is doing carbon-capture R&D. Freddy Bean is barrel-aging green beans. Mill Town is running a cycling-café. Buddha Bear is in a church. Sixteen rows isn't a deep bench by any standard, but the editorial differentiation across those sixteen is unusually high — which is the right outcome for a province this size, because it's the only way a small scene survives without consolidation.

New Brunswick isn't trying to be Toronto, and it's not trying to be Montreal. It's running a fundamentally different scale of indie specialty — bilingual, small-town-anchored, and tilted toward operator-level distinctiveness rather than metro-level density — and the sixteen roasters who make it work are doing it on terms specific to the province. That's worth a closer look.

Explore New Brunswick roasters on Roast Local:

Or browse all New Brunswick roasters → for the full provincial map.

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Last updated: May 2026