Boonie Hat Coffee Company

Boonie Hat Coffee Company operates out of a small storefront inside the Market Street building on South 8th Street in downtown Opelika, Alabama, a veteran-owned roastery and cafe with a founding story rooted well outside Lee County. Founder Luis Saavedra traces his interest in coffee back to childhood trips to Bolivia, where he first understood how good coffee could be when it was handled with care rather than treated as an afterthought, something he describes as coffee’s ability to be “fresh, smooth, and bring people together.”

That early interest crystallized years later during a military deployment in Southwest Asia, where Saavedra found himself drinking what he has described as burned, bitter Department of Defense coffee, brewed with quantity prioritized over quality. On especially remote operations, where troops went weeks without basic comforts like a shower, he came to see good coffee as something closer to a morale tool than a simple caffeine delivery system, a way to lift spirits in conditions that offered little else to look forward to. That insight became the seed of the company’s operating mission, summed up on its own site as coffee that is “fresh, smooth, plentiful, and available.”

The path from that idea to an actual business started with an online tutorial on roasting green coffee beans in a household popcorn popper. That experiment eventually led Saavedra to a commercial roaster built around the same hot air roasting method, and Boonie Hat Coffee Company grew out of that research, with many of its beans still sourced from South America in a nod to where his interest in coffee began. The roastery also offers fair trade and low-acid options, and describes itself as the first coffee shop in the area to produce its own fresh-roasted k-style cups for home brewing, a small operational detail that sets it apart from the other independent coffee shops nearby on South 8th Street.

The menu covers the standard espresso bar lineup, lattes, breves, americanos, drip coffee, and pour overs, each offered in small and large sizes, alongside herbal tea, hot chocolate, and fruit smoothies in flavors like mango, peach, and strawberry. The shop also makes artisan ice pops in flavors ranging from salted caramel and Mexican vanilla latte to strawberry lemonade and chocolate mint Oreo, a warm weather sideline that has become as much a draw as the espresso bar itself.

Hours run Monday through Friday from early morning into late afternoon, with a slightly later opening and earlier close on Saturdays, and the shop stays closed on Sundays. Whole bean and ground coffee are also available for purchase to take home, including through a standing subscription option, so a stop at the counter can extend well past the visit itself for anyone who wants to keep drinking the same roast at their own kitchen table. The shop also shares its building with, and keeps close ties to, the neighboring Market Street Paint Shop, part of the small cluster of independent businesses operating out of the same downtown address.

South 8th Street runs through the heart of Opelika’s historic downtown, a district that traces back to the city’s 1854 charter and its growth as a stop on the Montgomery and West Point Railroad, once a hub for moving cotton rather than coffee. That commercial core, restored building by building over the past two decades, is now home to Boonie Hat’s storefront alongside a cluster of other independent cafes and bakeries within a few blocks in either direction, giving Opelika a walkable coffee scene that did not exist in any organized form a generation ago.

Tucked inside a shared downtown building rather than announced by a freestanding storefront, Boonie Hat rewards visitors willing to look a little closer, a small, veteran-owned roastery with a genuinely unusual origin story behind every cup it pours in Opelika.