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Our StoryA century of coffee.
One square.
Nicholas Coffee & Tea Co. has been roasting in Pittsburgh’s Market Square area since 1919 — through booms, busts, and everything the city poured into the last hundred years.
Nicholas Coffee & Tea Co. is one of Pittsburgh's oldest coffee roasters, serving the Market Square area since 1919. More than a century later, the beans are still roasted fresh, the tea is still weighed by hand, and the coffee bar still pours for downtown Pittsburgh every morning.
Pittsburgh, 1919
When the first sacks of green coffee arrived at Nicholas Coffee, Market Square was already the beating heart of Pittsburgh — a place of market stalls, streetcars, and steel-town appetites. A coffee roaster opened its doors that year and simply never stopped. The smell of fresh roasting has been part of the square ever since.
The city around us has changed almost beyond recognition. The craft hasn't. Coffee is still roasted in small batches and sold fresh, the way it was when the shop first opened — because a hundred years of customers have never let us get away with anything less.
The roaster kept turning
Nicholas Coffee opens in the Market Square area and begins roasting coffee for the people of Pittsburgh.
Through the Depression and two World Wars, downtown workers, merchants, and families kept coming for fresh-roasted coffee — and the roaster kept turning.
As Market Square was reborn around us, Nicholas grew into a full coffee and tea merchant: blends, single origins, loose leaf teas, gifts, and a coffee bar pouring espresso for a new generation of regulars.
Same square. Same craft. Now with nationwide shipping from our online shop and mobile ordering at the coffee bar — over one hundred years in, the first roast of the morning still smells exactly the way it should.
Roasted fresh. Sold fresh.
Great coffee is not complicated — it's just demanding. Buy good beans, roast them with care, and sell them before they lose their life. That is the whole secret, and it's the same one we started with in 1919.
From classic blends and dark roasts to single origins, flavored coffees, and a roaster's choice that changes with the seasons — alongside loose leaf and boxed teas weighed the old way.
Explore Our Coffee