Pour on: A new coffee house has debuted on this bustling Lexington road
There’s a new place for Lexington residents and visitors to get their coffee fix near a busy residential area not far from a major interstate.
Righteous Grounds Coffee Roasters opened a new coffee shop on Jan. 26 at 734 Barr Road. The shop, which is in a tastefully converted brick residential home, is just southwest of the intersection of Barr Road and Rawl Road, near large residential neighborhoods including Southberry Park and Prescott Glen.
It’s a little more than a mile away from the Country Club of Lexington, and about 3 miles northwest of Interstate 20.
The Barr Road shop has a wide variety of coffee offerings, including lattes, cappuccino, Americano, macchiato, espresso and more. The shop also carries chai, herbal and black teas, as well as fresh pastries. It’s open from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and is closed on Sundays.
The new Righteous Grounds outpost comes from owners Jim and Jessie Huthmaker, who are familiar to the Lexington coffee scene.
Jim Huthmaker, a former “smokejumper” woodland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, founded Righteous Grounds as a coffee roasting operation back in 2010. What started as a hobby quickly became a small business, with the company selling roasted coffee by the bag.
The Huthmakers later ran The Haven coffee shop on Main Street in Lexington for a time, before selling that business in 2019. (That Main Street space is now home to O’Hara’s Bakery.) They then moved to Colorado for several years, where they operated a Higher Grounds coffee shop in the town of Woodland Park.
The family then sold that Colorado shop and moved back to the Midlands in late 2024 — Jim is a Lexington native — and began to plan what would become the new shop on Barr Road.
“I love Lexington, and I grew up here before there were almost any restaurants,” Huthmaker said of his family’s return to the area.
Righteous Grounds specializes in what Huthmaker calls “The Guatemalan Way” of roasting coffee. Years ago he traveled to Panajachel, Guatemala and spent months learning about roasting from coffee expert Michael Roberts. Huthmaker brought back what he learned and has infused it into his coffee ventures ever since.
“I wanted to do this really authentically,” Huthmaker said. “I have that kind of personality where I’m all in or I’m all out. I can’t explain it any other way.”
The roasting room for Righteous Grounds is on-site at the Barr Road shop. During a recent tour, Huthmaker showed The State his new Buckeye Coffee brand roaster. The roasting room is lined with huge bags of coffee beans from Guatemala, Brazil, Rwanda and other international locales.
While Jim Huthmaker focuses on the coffee at Righteous Grounds, Jessie oversees the pastries, and has become particularly known for her scones through the years.
The Righteous Grounds space at Barr Road is cozy, with table and high-top bar seating, as well as a number of cushy couches. There is a fireplace along the front wall, and there were puffs of smoke rising from the chimney when a reporter stopped by on a cold afternoon. The house was built back in 1969, and was extensively renovated to make way for the coffee shop.
“It’s just kind of us,” Jim Huthmaker said about the coffee house. “It was really what we were looking for. ... We really wanted something that was quaint. It doesn’t have to be big, we just wanted to focus on coffee and pastries.”
This story was originally published February 5, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
