Still serving up beer and seltzers at night, Cypress & Grove Brewing Company is now a coffee shop by day with the opening of its new Morning Brew storefront this month. 

Located in Cypress & Grove’s Brick Room at 1001 NW 4th Street in Gainesville, Morning Brew offers hot and iced espressos, lattes, cappuccinos, craft pour-overs, house drip, tea and refreshers—all using water pumped straight from the Floridan Aquifer like in the brewery’s beer. 

Pastries and bagels from Village Bread pair well with the coffee from Condaxis Coffee and Tea in Jacksonville, and the shop’s Wi-Fi makes for a well-equipped work and study space. 

Cypress & Grove is now open for sunrise shifts at Morning Brew, starting from 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Mondays to coincide with the Grove Street Farmers Market, and 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. 

Morning Brew is in a soft opening right now to work on perfecting recipes and kneading out process kinks, all gearing up for a grand opening sometime around August. 

“Morning Brew is about creating an experience centered around great craft beverages,” said owner Patrick Burger. “Just as we focus on craftsmanship in brewing beer, we’re bringing that same attention to detail to coffee.” 

The same four owners who founded Cypress & Grove in 2017—Burger and his wife, Sally Adkins, along with husband-and-wife duo Gary Heil and Anna Heineman—are the same people bringing Morning Brew to Gainesville.   

Burger said they all started the brewery together with a passion for the power that craft beverages have to bring people together. Coffee was always seen as part of that picture, he said, it’s just taken some work to get there, starting with the building. 

Cypress & Grove brews out of the former Gainesville Ice and Cold Storage Co., that’s been standing since 1896 and operated as an active ice plant until 1976.  

Located right next to the railroad—now a section of the 6th Street Rail Trail—Burger said trains lugged ice from lakes up north to the icehouse where employees delivered blocks to locals and even contracted customers like Camp Blanding in Starke. 

The icehouse also froze water pumped straight from the Floridan aquifer using a 398-foot deep well that still serves the brewery—and now coffee shop—today.  

“I’ve got lots of stories from locals about how their parents used to take them to the icehouse and they would get ice for their ice box and their coolers,” Burger said. 

It took a few years for the quartet of entrepreneurs to renovate the building after purchasing it in 2015. Since then, Burger said the craft beer industry has become more competitive and consumer preferences have evolved as the coffee aims to expand Cypress & Grove’s offerings. 

But whether it’s been ice, beer or coffee, Burger said the space has always used locally crafted goods to bring people together.  

“For many people, a well-brewed cup of coffee is what starts the day, just as a great beer might help them unwind at the end of it,” he said. “As we looked at our property and the community space we’ve built over the years, it felt like a natural extension of our mission to create a coffee experience that would allow people to enjoy Cypress & Grove in the morning.” 

Although beer and coffee can be a compatible pairing—like in Cypress & Grove’s Keep Shining Blond Ale beer, coffee combo—Burger said the fact that the drinks are both brews might be one of the few things they have in common for crafting. 

Beer takes hours to make and depends mostly on the malt ingredients and water chemistry. Coffee, on the other hand, can take seconds for one drink and relies more on the machinery and the right combination of beans. 

Burger said the most critical part of a successful venture into coffee so far has been Patty Nobles, Morning Brew’s head barista. 

Nobles has worked in a variety of coffee shops around town, some places where he pumped out hundreds of drinks a day and other specialty shops where he could slow down and work on technique. 

He said he’s currently narrowing down what blends and setups will work best for Morning Brew and training the baristas on the new Sanremo espresso machine. 

“We’re just excited to bring good craft beverages to Gainesville,” Burger said. “It’s one of those things where you can get coffee anywhere, but if you want a really good cup of coffee, it takes somebody that thinks about it and works hard on it. And that’s what we’re shooting for.”