Dam Roast House and Browder Bookstore – Brewing Community Into Boulder City
After hearing people in Boulder City wanted a local coffee shop that wasn’t a Starbucks, Amber Stephens and Misty Magruder teamed up to open their own. In January 2021, that dream came true when Dam Roast House and Browder Bookstore opened.
While both were working at Albertsons, they frequently heard customers ask where they could find a locally owned coffee shop. Seeing that void in their community, they set to work on making it happen, going from coworkers to co-owners.
“It was very challenging during the beginning of the pandemic,” Stephens said. “But we had a lot of support, and people were respectful.”
“Yeah, and more people nowadays are supportive of local businesses,” Magruder added. The Dam Roast House and Browder Bookstore is now fast approaching its fifth anniversary.
A Coffee Shop with a Mission
Stephens and Magruder wanted to open their coffee shop and bookstore with the Boulder City community in mind.
“For us, supporting the community is important, and sourcing locally is too,” Stephens said. “Our beans are roasted locally, the veggies are grown here, and we feature books from local authors and art by artists to sell on consignment. ‘Community over competition’ is our mantra.”
Dam Roast House and Browder Book Store also support the community through events featuring book signings with local authors and music by local bands. They’ve also hosted poetry open mic nights in the past.
In addition, they wanted to provide people with a genuine coffee shop experience. They accomplish this by using fresh ingredients, authentic coffee, real mugs, and preparing everything fresh in-house.
Dam Roast House – The Coffee Shop
With locally sourced ingredients, Dam Roast House offers delicious drinks and food for all tastes.
From standard coffee orders and fun seasonal or employee-created concoctions, to a diverse menu of teas and other beverages, it’s hard to pick just one. For fall, they’re featuring a pumpkin blonde latte, an apple pie chai, and a butter pecan latte. In response to how they come up with their drink menu ideas, Stephens said, “Our brains,” with a laugh.
“The main menu was conceptualized when we opened, and we have our regular seasonal menu that changes every few months to match the season or holidays,” she explained. “We also let the staff play around with it a bit. They really enjoy creating ideas for the seasonal drinks.”
She added that they love that the team has fun with coming up with new drinks, and mentioned a current staff-made drink – the Cookie Monster Latte. For the really popular specialty beverages, they also have a not-so-secret menu of discontinued staff drinks that are still orderable.
In addition to delightful coffee concoctions, the shop also features a plethora of all-organic, loose-leaf teas curated from Davidson’s Organics – a company up in Sparks, NV.
“We’re the only shop in town providing loose-leaf teas, with almost 20 varieties,” Magruder said. “People can mix and match them, and we sell retail bags of teas. If there’s one we don’t have on the shelf, we’ll make it for you to take.”
For food, they offer a delicious selection of pastries, specialty toasts, sandwiches, and more.
Browder Bookstore
For the bookstore portion of the establishment, a wide selection of books and genres draws people in, as well as fun accessories like book bags, journals, crystals, and more.
“With such a small space, we carry a little bit of everything,” Stephens said. “We have cookbooks, poetry, self-improvement, children’s, fiction, and non-fiction. Our most popular genres are romance and thrillers. And we have a small used section that dabbles in a little of everything, from best sellers to classics.”
The store gets new books every month or so, with a few of each title at a time.
“I go off the bestseller list, and the team also helps pick out books,” Stephens said. Magruder then added that an employee named Riley was a bookworm and recommended a lot of books.
“She knows all the good stuff,” she said.
“Through ordering books, I learned a lot about what’s what,” Stephens went on to say. “Personally, I read a lot of self-help category books, and I just barely got into thrillers.”
Upcoming Events
Dam Roast House and Browder Book Store host a lot of events like book signings and read-alouds, with at least one author event a month. Through this, they bring the community together over coffee and creativity.
One regular event is with Coffee House Tours, a group that visits coffee shops throughout the area, and usually brings a couple of local authors with them. Dam Roast House hosts them every second Saturday from 11 AM to 2 PM.
On October 25, they participated in several Halloween-inspired events such as the Boulder City Block Party and a pumpkin carving contest. They also hosted a read-aloud with children’s book author Gina Usufzy, and Sunshine Connections Permanent Jewelry will be vending from 4 – 6 PM in the store.
Opening the Shop
Historical Roots
In addition to missing a local coffee shop, Boulder City also lacked a local bookstore. So, Magruder and Stephens filled both community needs at the same time. Once the duo was ready to find a location for their business, there was only one building they had their eyes on. One with history, which is honored in the very name of the shop.
“This was the first commercial building in Boulder City, and we named the business after Ida Browder, who was the first to receive that first deed,” Stephens shared. “She moved here in the 30s with her kids when the Hoover Dam was being built, and opened the first diner here, which was this building. She’d even started a root beer stand for her daughter.”
“She was a very prominent woman in Boulder City,” Magruder added. “So we wanted to honor her in the name.”
“Yeah, she even started the Girl Scouts here, helped create the high school, and even got the Library of Congress to donate 3,000 books to help found the city library,” Stephens added. “This building has a lot of history.”
Ida Browder was an incredibly accomplished woman, honored as Boulder City’s first female businesswoman, the first woman to serve on the city school board, and one of the First Ladies of Boulder City in general.
Acquiring This Special Building
Securing this specific location for their business was no small feat.
“We really manifested this building becoming ours,” Stephens said. “It was boarded up for eight years after originally being Mel’s Diner. The previous owner wasn’t looking to sell.”
“Yeah, we’d met and brainstormed with Jill Lagan, the CEO of the local Chamber of Commerce, and she asked where we wanted to open the shop,” Magruder said. “This was really the only place we wanted, but it was always unavailable. Nothing else felt right, and then suddenly it became ours. We definitely manifested it, though we weren’t actively pursuing the owner for it.”
Once they acquired the building, it was time to renovate.
“It had been gutted,” Stephens said. “We had to do historic preservation while also doing the new build, which was fine because the history was really important to us.”
“After we got the building in May 2020, it took August through December to rebuild,” Magruder added. “Getting permits and working with the city was challenging at times, like trying to get the historic preservation grant. But we had a great construction company. We were down here every day during construction, seeing the day-by-day changes.”
With an original timeline of six to eight weeks, the rebuilding process ran into some issues along the way, given the age of the building. But in December 2020, construction finished, so Magruder and Stephens started hiring and training right away. On January 4th, 2021, the Dam Rost House and Browder Book Store opened its doors to the Boulder City community.
“This palace was boarded up for a long time. The community was super excited when we turned the corner into something,” Magruder said. “Before, it was an eyesore.”
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Challenges
Stephens and Magruder had a few challenges to overcome as they opened the shop. But they learned a lot along the way.
“Aside from opening a business at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of learning involved. We weren’t in the coffee or the book business,” Stephens said. “And, there’s always something going on with an old building. We’ve learned a lot. It’s been challenging but exciting, and we had to read a lot of business books. There was a lot more than what we initially considered.”
“Yeah, it was definitely a learning curve. The whole thing has been a learning process, and we’re constantly learning what works and what doesn’t,” Magruder explained. “We didn’t know a lot of the things; we’d never even made an espresso before. So, we reached out to a lot of people doing this stuff. We’ve had to change things that didn’t work and learn to adjust from what we thought would.
In addition to learning about business and coffee, they also learned a bit about construction as challenges arose during the rebuild, such as the slope of the concrete being off. Magruder went on to share how they had a clear vision for what they wanted the building to look like at the end of construction, from the interior to the exterior. Stephens also added that they tried to match the vibe of the historical original of the building.
“The construction company wasn’t sure if they could do what we had in mind, but they made it work,” Magruder continued. “Much of the build was done by hand and made by one guy, like the shelves and the bar. They’d never done it before, but they all enjoyed the challenge of this build.”
Goals Through 2026
Looking at the rest of 2025 and through 2026, Stephens and Magruder plan to catch up after a rough summer.
“The remainder of the year is catch-up. We struggled over the summer with the road getting ripped up,” Stephens said, referencing a construction project on Main Street to widen the sidewalk. Now that construction is done and the weather is nice, the businesses in this historic part of town have a lot of events coming up.
“These are the months where business starts picking up again,” Magruder said. “There are events almost every weekend this time of year.”
Some upcoming community events include an annual trick-or-treat event, a block party on October 25th, a Christmas parade, and a planned New Year’s Eve party with a ball drop at 9 PM and midnight.
Brewing Up Community
With their ‘Community over competition’ mantra, Dam Roast House works closely with the Boulder City community on events and other collaborations.
“We have really good relationships with the other local businesses,” Magruder shared. “There’s a really good group of business owners out here.”
“Yeah, we’re all friends here,” Stephens added. “And there’s a lot of Millennial business owners as well.”
Dam Roast House also gets most of its ingredients locally, partnering with local small businesses to ensure freshness and quality.
“Everything is organic. We get our bread and baked goods from two local bakeries – Fox Family Bakery and Chef Lemming Bake Shop over on Water Street,” Stephens said. “Our beans are roasted locally from Colorado River Coffee, and our veggies are picked here in Boulder City by Herbs by Diane.”
Dam Roast House also supports the community throughout the year for various causes.
“We’ve done events with See Spot Run before, we’ve collected donations for school supply drives, and we’ve supported families during the holidays,” Stephens said.
And the store supports local creatives by providing space for them to sell things like artwork and stickers. You can even find some of our Stickers for Solidarity at the shop now!
The Best Parts
Running their own business brings a lot of benefits to both Magruder and Stephens, who shared their favorite parts of their job.
“I’d say for me, I enjoy the freedom to be able to be with my family if I want or need to, as opposed to working at a corporate job,” Magruder said. “My older kids were safe key kids before and after school; now I get to be there for my youngest at drop off and pick up, and be there for events. I love being able to be there for my family.”
“Yes, same,” Stephens added. “And, specifically related to the coffee shop, my favorite part is the community we’ve built with the locals and other businesses. I got to grow up here in this small town, and went to school here. I grew up knowing everyone, like who owns what shop, etc, and now my kids get experience that themselves.”
The two of them also enjoy getting to know the locals here, as well as talking with tourists.
“My husband works off the strip, and he’s constantly sending people out here to visit Boulder City,” Magruder said. “He sends them to all the businesses, using the selling point that it’s by the Hoover Dam, and telling them that we’re here.”
“Yeah, a lot of people go to the dam and miss Boulder City,” Stephens added. “And then they do come here and they’re shocked and surprised walking around seeing everything.”
“It’s such a cute and quaint place here,” Magruder said. “The small community here is nice, and it’s a good place to raise your kids.”
Staying Grounded
In these uncertain economic times, Magruder and Stephens each find ways to stay grounded and work through any challenges they face.
Magruder shared that she grounds herself by “being real” about the situations at hand.
“Sometimes it’s hard being a business owner. There’s always something happening or breaking,” she said. “But, you have to show up, and keep going. We have a really great staff who are the heart of our business, and we wouldn’t do as well without them.”
“Yeah, we can really count on the team, and we don’t have to stress when we’re not here,” Stephens added. She also shared how their community grounds them with the overwhelming support people have given the store to help it grow and thrive. “It’s always worth it in the end.”
“I love what we do,” Magruder said. “I would never want to go back to working for a corporate business again.”
#GetinMotion with Dam Roast House and Browder Bookstore
Visit Dam Roast House and Browder Bookstore any day of the week from 6 AM to 5 PM to enjoy a delightful drink or pick up a new book to read! They’re located at 554 Nevada Way, Boulder City, Nevada 89005.
Follow the shop on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook to stay updated on events coming up or new menu options.
And email damroasthouse@gmail.com with any questions, or for events or other collaboration ideas.
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