This is part of a year-long ‘Love for Local’ series called NB365: portraits of New Brunswick entrepreneurs, businesses, and organizations. Huddle is a media partner with Love for Local. Today we feature Michael Petrovici and Katherine Lanteigne of Kaffeine Espresso Bar – Au Bootlegger, in Bathurst.

My wife Katherine and I saw a great opportunity to make our community and our downtown core better and more vibrant by adding our bar and coffee shop and driving much-needed traffic to our main street.

Our beautiful city of Bathurst deserved to have a cozy and welcoming place to meet and socialize, either over drinks or coffee, and downtown was our primary choice.

It gives us great pleasure and pride to see a revitalized city core and we look forward to keep developing, building, and investing in our downtown and in our region.

Since our inception days, supporting local is core to our business models. For Au Bootlegger, we decided to only offer New Brunswick-crafted artisanal beers on tap, made with pride by breweries from across the province.

We also work closely with New Brunswick distilleries for our spirits and support local artists, musicians, and comedians every chance we can.

At Kaffeine, we work with local bakers for some of the baked goods we offer. We are also strong supporters of local artists for the art we display and local artisans for our retail shelf where we offer our customers Canadian artisan roasted coffee beans, artisanal candles, jewelry, honey, maple syrup products, and much more.

We have put our hearts in these locally owned and created businesses and we love all the community support we have received over the past few years.