You might have noticed the tall, red brick silo when driving to or from Arvada off of Ralston Road. What you probably didn’t notice was the coffee shop – Red Silo Coffee Roasters – tucked into a business-style building that pays homage to that silo. Owners and long-time business partners Shelley Flood and Greg Pierce opened the cafe, roastery and small-business hub last year as the first of multiple buildings in their vision of a small-business campus.
“When we built the building we didn’t envision a coffee shop being inside,” stated Pierce. Prior to opening Red Silo the two worked together for about 20 years on multiple construction and development projects, so coffee was a brand new endeavor for them. “While working on the campus I was tired of driving to Denver for coffee and the space also needed a heart – a coffee shop brings that. Coffee is a pretty unique language that everyone speaks to some degree,” Pierce said.
You can tell that Red Silo was meant to be more than a cafe by the thoughtful and spacious design. Inside you’ll find a large brick silo standing from floor to ceiling that celebrates the community and camaraderie that the old silo brought to the farmworkers of Arvada. “The workers would all meet up at the silo each morning to get their assignments for the day,” said Flood. The space is two floors and can seat up to 75 upstairs alone, making it a great space for community events, parties and gatherings. There is a conference room upstairs that’s fully audio-visual equipped and perfect for business meetings. The modern farmhouse decor merges clean, minimalist design with classic farmhouse attributes like sliding barn doors and rustic local art. “We did things kind of backwards but we fell in love with it,” stated Pierce.
Now Flood and Pierce travel the world to taste and choose coffees from suppliers in dozens of countries and have about 22 different varieties in stock at any given time. They only source high quality, third wave coffee which Flood described as “looking at everything from seed to cup. We know how much effort goes into producing the coffee – there’s probably about 100 people that have a hand in it. We are the last link in that chain and we are the last people that touch that coffee before it goes to you so we want to make sure we are honoring that as much as we can.”
Currently, Red Silo offers food from local vendors but Flood and Pierce are in the midst of building out a bakery in the space next door in order to provide fresh baked goods for the cafe and produce food at scale. They are also looking for a space to build a drive-thru coffee shop modeled after their “prototype” drive-thru in Ephrata, Washington. “The idea is to figure out how to serve craft coffee and have it be convenient,” said Pierce. The two plan to open the bakery next year and hope to find a location for an Arvada drive-thru coffee shop soon.
Red Silo Coffee Roasters is located at 6590 Holman St. Suite #207, Arvada. Open Monday – Friday 6 a.m.- 6 p.m., Saturday 7 a.m.- 6 p.m. and Sunday 7 a.m.- 5 p.m.