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Flux Coffee

211 Main St, Farmingdale, NY

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Flux Coffee didn't start as a café at all — it started in 2010 in Berkeley, California, as a cold brew company built around an innovative cold brew method that founder Arsalan Pourmand distributed via bottles and kegs across the Bay Area rather than through a storefront. That's a genuinely unusual origin for a business that's since become a fixture of the Long Island coffee scene: most local roasters start with a café and add packaged product later, while Flux started as a packaged cold brew brand and only later became a place you could sit down. Pourmand eventually moved back east, and in 2017 he opened Flux's first brick-and-mortar café and roastery on Main Street in Farmingdale — a deliberate shift from a West Coast cold brew operation into a full Long Island café and roasting business. That East Coast pivot gives Flux a distinct identity among Farmingdale-area roasters: the cold brew technique that built the company in California remains a core part of the menu, alongside a full hot espresso and drip program developed after the move. The café itself functions as both a working roastery and a retail bar, letting customers watch and buy beans roasted on-site rather than sourcing green coffee elsewhere and shipping it out. Flux sells pre-bagged grounds and whole beans to go alongside its brewed drinks, giving regulars a way to take the same coffee home that they're drinking in the café — a straightforward but not universal offering among smaller Long Island roasters, several of which sell only prepared drinks on-site. The company's full name, Flux Coffee, still nods to its cold-brew-first identity even as the Farmingdale café has broadened into a complete specialty coffee operation — Daily Coffee News covered the brand's evolution specifically under the headline description of Flux flowing "from West to East, Cold to Hot," a framing that captures the company's actual business history more precisely than most café origin stories manage. That West Coast-to-Long Island arc, combined with Pourmand's specific technical background in cold brew extraction, gives Flux a genuinely different foundation than the classic "barista opens a neighborhood café" story most other Long Island coffee shops tell. For a Long Island coffee list, Flux Coffee is the essential "cold brew company that became a full café" entry — a Berkeley-born cold brew business that Arsalan Pourmand relocated and rebuilt into a working Farmingdale roastery and bar, carrying its bottled-and-kegged origins into a genuine hot-and-cold specialty coffee program.

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