Maas Coffee Roasters

Maas Coffee Roasters occupies a storefront on Miracle Strip Parkway in the middle of downtown Fort Walton Beach’s Historic District, and it has roasted its own beans on-site for more than two decades. The shop traces back to the mid-1990s, when founder Jim Maas moved to the Emerald Coast, learned coffee roasting from an experienced roaster at Peet’s Coffee in San Francisco, and found the current storefront while riding around the area on his motorcycle. His guiding rule, that every bean should be no more than two weeks old, still shapes how the shop runs today.

In 2023, longtime coffee enthusiasts Teddy and Lupe Batarao took over the business, drawn to preserve a shop that already had a loyal following built on carefully roasted beans and a community feel. Their daughter now runs the original Fort Walton Beach location day to day, while her parents opened a second Maas Coffee Roasters location in Destin the same year. The Fort Walton Beach shop remains the flagship, roasting beans weekly on-site rather than shipping in coffee roasted elsewhere, which keeps batches small and turnover fast.

The shop sells whole-bean and ground coffee by the bag alongside brewed drinks and pastries for anyone who wants to sit and stay. Signature roasts include a Jazz blend and a Breakfast Roast, both roasted in small batches so the flavor stays consistent cup to cup. Beyond coffee, the shop stocks brewing accessories for customers who want to replicate the experience at home, from grinders to filters, making it a stop for both a quick espresso and a coffee setup upgrade to take home.

Downtown Fort Walton Beach’s Historic District surrounds the shop with small businesses and the kind of walkable block that rewards a slow morning. Grabbing a coffee at Maas pairs naturally with a walk through the district before the day heats up, and the Indian Temple Mound Museum and the Fort Walton Beach Heritage Park and Cultural Center are both an easy walk away on the same stretch of Miracle Strip Parkway, making a coffee stop here a natural bookend to a morning of local history. The shop keeps generous hours for a small roaster, open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., which makes it a reliable stop whether visiting on a weekday errand run or a lazy weekend morning downtown.

Locals treat the shop as a fixture of the neighborhood rather than a novelty, and the smell of roasting beans drifting out to the sidewalk is part of what makes the block feel lived-in instead of built for tourists. Anyone splitting a Fort Walton Beach trip between the beach and the mainland should plan a stop here on the way into or out of the Historic District, since the shop is easy to combine with a browse through the district’s other small shops, the nearby museums, and a walk along the sound before heading back to the coast. Ordering a bag of beans to go is also worth considering for anyone staying a week or more nearby, since the shop’s whole philosophy is built around selling coffee close to the day it was roasted rather than beans that sat in a warehouse.