Mills Coffee

Every good insomniac needs a great source of coffee! Mills Coffee Roasting Company of South Providence is a great place and the best kept secret in RI. Mills is a family owned and operated business that roasts coffee for all of the area restaurants and coffee shops in RI and has been doing so for over a century. The place smells great. You can smell roasting coffee a block away. Mills has a coffee roasting machine that is huge, the size of two Subaru station wagons. Although it's loud it draws you in. It looks like a gigantic version of my food mill with the metal mesh where the hot air is pushed through the jumping beans. There are large tubes the diameter of dinner plates running in and out of the machine, probably running the beans up and down. Right beside the machine is a dumb waiter to send orders up and down to the office. This is not a store front this is a mill space. There are hundreds of burlap bags of green coffee beans piled to the ceiling and the beans come from all over the world. The best part of all is Mike-the-roaster knows what he's doing. He loves his work and loves to talk about coffee and he loves people. All of the people that work in the office are great too. I had an art show at Julian's Restaurant and they gave me a cup of coffee and I said wow this is good coffee and they told me all about Mills Coffee and how nice they were. So I went there and met Mike and went back a few times with my husband and my dog to buy coffee, sniff the aromas of fresh roasting coffee and hear great stories from Mike. Wherever Mike goes people smell the roasting coffee! I'd like to drop off my clothes there for a day so they too can soak up the aroma of roasting beans.