Tempest Stirs Up Craft Coffee and Cocktails in Suburban Indianapolis

Story by Howard Bryman · 640 readers

Tempest Stirs Up Craft Coffee and Cocktails in Suburban Indianapolis Howard Bryman | October 12, 2026 Inside the Tempest Artisan Coffee Bar in Brownsburg, Indiana. All images courtesy of Tempest Artis...

Tempest Stirs Up Craft Coffee and Cocktails in Suburban Indianapolis

Howard Bryman | October 12, 2026

Tempest Artisan Coffee Cocktail bar Brownsburg Indianapolis inside

Inside the Tempest Artisan Coffee Bar in Brownsburg, Indiana. All images courtesy of Tempest Artisan Coffee Bar.

Swirling into suburban Indianapolis with aromas from its roastery, kitchen and craft cocktail bar, Tempest Artisan Coffee Bar has opened its first location in Brownsburg.

Open since July, the shop’s offerings include freshly roasted coffee, scratch-made Liège waffles and sweet and floral syrups made in-house. A 30-foot Corian-topped bar faced in walnut slats anchors the space under 18-foot ceilings.

The airy main seating area within the 2,000-square-foot cafe space northwest of Indianapolis features furniture and lighting that blend contemporary and Art Deco styles, while deeper inside, leather couches create a more intimate setting in a wallpapered lounge alcove.

“We were looking to combine light and brightness with earth tones, and a little bit of edginess with some darker and moodier atmospheres that we can blend into our cocktail service,” Tempest Artisan Coffee Bar Co-Owner Jonah Brooks told Daily Coffee News.

Brooks leads the business alongside co-owner and bar manager Ocean Ode, plus additional equity investors.

Green coffees purchased through fellow Indiana-based company Theta Ridge, Canadian importer JA Coffee and young-producer-focused Unblended Coffee are sample-roasted by Brooks on a Nucleus Link before production roasting on a Coffee Crafters Valenta 7 fluid-bed roaster inside the cafe.

Supplying the cafe and a handful of local wholesale customers, the roastery operates as a separate company, Kingdom Coffee, which Brooks co-founded with his father, Todd Brooks, more than a decade ago.

At the bar, the coffee program ties in with Ode’s cocktail program, focusing on creativity and natural ingredients. Brooks said all drinks are designed to be “coffee forward” or “spirit forward” and to “accentuate the artisanal craft behind both of these avenues of expression.”

The concise food menu includes panna cotta desserts, Cuban sandwiches and waffles made from fermented brioche-style dough. One savory option, the Seoul Liège waffle, features a Korean marinated “mayak” egg, kimchi, “smacked” cucumbers and gochujang butter.

“We have some plans to broaden our food menu but also keep it small,” said Brooks. “We don’t want to crowd the menu.”

For espresso, baristas use a 3-group Slayer Steam EP espresso machine paired with Markibar Izaga W grinders. The bar also keeps a cold case stocked with freshly canned lattes, sealed behind the bar using an Airosia machine.

“The entirety of specialty coffee is competing with what I would not consider specialty coffee — your Starbucks, your 7 Brews, your Dunkin’s,” Brooks said. “The main draws for people to those places are the convenience and the speed, so we needed to find a way to appeal to that.”

For guests staying longer, Tempest also hosts live music, including jazz on the last Saturday of each month. A string quartet is slated to perform during the holiday season.

Tempest’s model emphasizes wages intended to attract and retain staff. Brooks sees the Brownsburg shop as a potential template for future expansion elsewhere in Indiana.

“We’d like to see rapid growth, driving revenue, doing new things, fun things,” Brooks said. “It’s a really great opportunity to provide a living wage for good people. We’d like to be able to bring that same opportunity to other communities like, employ 17 to 20 other people at this rate and provide them with a good job and livable wages.”