What is Yellow Spruce Roasters?
Most of Old Town’s coffee is poured by somebody else’s roaster. Yellow Spruce roasts its own, and has since before it had a shop. Founder Brian Fernandez bought his first roaster in 2018, spent a year working out blends at home, founded the company in 2019 and opened a storefront at 3902 N Brown Ave in September 2020, when opening anything took some nerve.
Fernandez’s résumé is not the usual barista path. He served 23 years in the U.S. Air Force, active duty and reserves, and retired as a police officer from a big-city department. The company story credits the travel with his taste in coffee and the patrol shifts with his appreciation for what a cup does for a room. The name and the yellow-and-green spruce twig in the logo point back to Colorado’s pine country, a long way from Brown Avenue’s saloons.
In October 2023 the shop took over the suite next door and became a wine bar in the evenings: Arizona wines, a few local beers, mimosas and a list of espresso martinis made with the house espresso. The result is a room that opens at 5:30 a.m., earlier than nearly anything else in Old Town, and is still pouring at 9 p.m. on weekends.
It is a small, neighborhood operation rather than a destination café, and that is the appeal. You can buy a coffee here before the galleries on Main Street open, and come back for a glass of Arizona red after they close.
Morning, happy hour and night
Mornings are for the counter. Drip, espresso drinks and loose-leaf teas are the base, and the house beans are the point: Mum’s Dark Roast, a Breakfast Blend of Central and South American coffees, and single origins such as a Tanzanian Peaberry. Breakfast croissant sandwiches run until noon. The early opening makes this the obvious stop for anyone walking to the Old Town Farmers Market on a Saturday or heading out before the heat.
Happy hour is the value play. From 3 to 5 p.m. on weekdays the shop sells bundles built around its jalapeño bacon cheddar pull-apart bread: with a bottle of wine, with two espresso martinis, or with two coffee drinks. Food also comes $2 off.
At night, order what the room is built for. The espresso martini list runs from the classic to a dirty chai version and a salted caramel one, and the wine list includes an Arizona section alongside the imports. A three-pour wine flight is the way to sample it. There is gelato in the case, and the affogato, espresso over vanilla gelato, is the dessert.
Make it part of a Brown Avenue walk. The shop sits on the street where Scottsdale’s first store stood, between First Street and Main. The Old Adobe Mission and The Mission are just south, the 1921 bank that is now the Rusty Spur Saloon is at the Main Street corner, and the Little Red Schoolhouse is a short walk west. Park in the Civic Center garage rather than circling for a street space. If you are on the Civic Center side instead, the company’s second counter is inside the Civic Center Library.
A small roaster on Scottsdale’s first street
Brown Avenue is where Scottsdale began. J.L. Davis put up the town’s first store at Brown and Main in 1897, E.O. Brown ran it from 1904 and gave the street his name, and the 1920s buildings that survive here, the blacksmith shop, the first post office and the adobe mission, are the real town under Old Town’s Western paint. For most of the last half-century the street has sold boots, Western art and drinks to visitors.
A roaster-owned coffee shop is a newer kind of tenant, and Yellow Spruce arrived in the 2020s, when Old Town’s food scene was tilting toward national imports and big-budget openings. Its scale runs the other way: one founder, his own beans, a storefront that grew by one suite in three years. It is closer in spirit to the specialty pioneers like Cartel on Fifth Avenue, which taught the Valley to care where its coffee came from, than to the brunch rooms a few blocks north.
The growth since has been steady rather than splashy. The wine bar came in 2023. The Civic Center Library counter followed in August 2024, putting Yellow Spruce inside one of Bennie Gonzales’s 1968 civic buildings. Roasting has since moved to a separate facility in north Scottsdale, and a wholesale program supplies other businesses, including a mobile coffee cart that books weddings and corporate events.
The honest assessment: this is a neighborhood shop, not a showpiece. The room is small, the food is simple, and the wine list is short. But the coffee is roasted by the people who serve it, the doors open before dawn, and it gives a street of saloons and Western wear a place to sit down with a cup. For a list of other good options, see our guide to the best coffee shops in Scottsdale.