Milton Home Coffee Roastery set to open new store

For Lara Ozden Ware, owner of Milton Home Coffee Roastery, it’s full steam ahead on her new store on Lavinia Street in Milton.

The shop will have a soft opening Saturday, March 8. It will offer a wide variety of coffees – lattes, espressos, cappuccino, americano and Turkish, among others – as well as teas, smoothies, acai bowls and snacks such as yogurt parfait and oatmeal chia. Customers can also get coffee beans or ground coffee and loose-leaf teas to take home.

Ozden Ware started Milton Home Coffee Roastery out of a small outbuilding at her home on Cave Neck Road. She said she first developed a passion for coffee and baked goods while spending time at her grandparents’ coffee shop and bakery in her native Turkey. When Ozden Ware first came to Sussex County, she worked and lived in Rehoboth Beach, but later moved to Milton, which she said has become home for her.

As befitting someone who has spent much of her life around coffee, Ozden Ware knows what the good stuff is. She gets coffee beans from all around the world, and they arrive to her as raw beans. She has her own roasting machine, which she can put up to 25 pounds of beans in at a time that are roasted to that familiar dark coffee bean color and then cooled. 

At first, she did all of this from her tiny outbuilding, but Ozden Ware said she recognized that she could make her coffee business work in Milton and looked for a place she could expand. She spent two years looking for the right spot until she found the shop at the former Friendly Flowers Florist location near the corner of Mulberry and Lavinia streets.

“We grew so much faster than I expected,” Ozden Ware said.

She said the store has the capacity to produce 500 pounds of coffee per day, and as time moves on, she’d like to add more items to the menu, such as pastries and baked goods. 

“I feel really comfortable and at home here,” Ozden Ware said. “I feel really proud. I feel blessed. I feel really good about this.”

For more information on Milton Home Coffee Roastery, go to www.miltonhomecoffee.com or find the business on Facebook.