Elements Books Coffee Beer
- Brick + Tides
- Mar 3
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 24
On the second day of March, winter in Biddeford feels less certain.
The cold is still sharp enough to stiffen your fingers, but the light has changed. It comes in clearer now, a brighter blue stretched over Main Street. Snowbanks along the curb have thinned and grayed at the edges. Meltwater runs in narrow ribbons toward the storm drains. The river, a few blocks away, moves under a surface that won’t hold much longer.
At 265 Main Street in Biddeford, mounted against brick and dark green trim, three square signs stack neatly against the sky.
Bk.
Co.
Be.
Books. Coffee. Beer.
They hang over the sidewalk without fuss. No neon. No flourish. Just color against brick, geometry against weather. The Biddeford City Hall clock rises in the distance. A pickup idles at the light. Someone walks past without a hat and doesn’t seem to regret it.
Through the front windows you can see light — warm light — catching on wood and glass. A few silhouettes lean toward each other at a table near the front. If you stand there long enough, you’ll see the door open and close. Someone steps inside and disappears.
The shift is immediate when you open the door.
Cold gives way to air that smells of espresso and books and coats thawing. Steam lifts in thin curls from dark ceramic cups. Boots leave damp shapes on the mat near the entrance. The grinder hums, settles, hums again. The low murmur of conversation overlaps without competing.
Book spines line the walls in steady rows. A small stack of titles sits angled near the register, one cover turned outward to the light. Tables are close enough that you can hear someone laugh two tables over without feeling drawn into the story. The windows gather the late-winter brightness and lay it gently across the floor.
Near the front, Katie Pinard wraps both hands around a black mug. Steam rises and fades before it reaches her face. She smiles the way someone does who has already been up for hours and does not feel the need to mention it.
Across the room, Michael Macomber stands at a shelf holding a book that local author Emma Bouthillette
wrote about the history of Biddeford. He studies the cover, tilts it slightly toward the window, reads a line on the inside flap. He slides it back into place and adjusts the neighboring title by a fraction of an inch.
Thirteen years is enough time for a place to settle into itself.
Michael says the idea began with a shape in his head. “I knew it was going to be a coffee shop, a bookstore, and a bar,” he says. He speaks evenly, without flourish. “That was the whole concept.”
The sign came before the name. He liked the order of the periodic-table style he’d seen elsewhere — the way letters could sit in boxes and carry weight. “In my head, I knew it was going to be like the elements,” he says. “I knew that that was the sign I wanted outside.”
Chemists have objected from time to time. The letters don’t align properly with their science. He shrugs. “I made it up for this.”
Before this, he was a philosophy professor. He spent years in New York, writing in coffee shops because they were the places where thinking could happen in public. When he moved back to southern Maine in 2010, he found himself walking to a café in Saco and noticing what wasn’t on Main Street.
“Two towns, forty thousand people,” he says. “On Main Street, there was no coffee shop. There was no bookstore.”
It was not a lifelong ambition. It was a gap he couldn’t ignore.
Katie’s relationship to this street runs deeper. She grew up here, remembers childhood Saturday mornings that moved from McArthur Library to Reilly’s Bakery, books to breakfast, errands to conversation. She remembers storefronts - Doyon's Pharmacy, Butler's Department Store - that once felt ordinary and then didn’t.
“Downtown was just a much more alive place,” she says.
She does not soften what followed. “Biddeford had such a bad reputation. We have a really tough socioeconomic history, and that’s just the reality of it.”
She left for school. Lived in Seattle long enough to understand what a coffee shop can mean to a neighborhood — not as a novelty, but as infrastructure. A place you go when you are not at home, not at work, not in school. A room that belongs to the in-between.
She came back in 2010 and began sketching ideas in a journal: coffee, books, a place to gather. She was working in nonprofit development at the time, training as a minister, thinking about community in more formal terms.
When Elements opened in 2013, she walked in as a customer. “I asked Michael, ‘Hey, are you hiring?’” she says. She started part-time. Took on more hours. Became manager. A few years later, she became co-owner. The transition happened gradually, like snow receding from the base of a building.
In the early years, the hours stretched long. Seven in the morning to eleven at night. Michael had three employees and a concept he believed in.
“I was here all the time,” he says. “All day, every day.”
There were suggestions. Requests for more food. Advice on what the neighborhood needed. Warnings about what might not sell.
“I knew coffee. I knew books. And I knew beer,” he says. “If I were to veer from any of those and try to do too much, it would have fallen apart.”
The room now carries none of that strain. It carries repetition instead.
The door opens again and a draft of early-March air slips in before the warmth absorbs it. A man in a knit cap nods toward the counter before ordering. Two twenty-something year olds slide into a table near the back, backpacks resting against chair legs. A woman with a stroller maneuvers carefully around a chair and is met with a quiet, automatic shift of space from the people nearby.
Katie’s attention moves through the room without calling attention to itself. She checks in with a staff member, straightens a chair that has drifted slightly out of line, wipes a small ring of moisture from a tabletop.
“I trained as a minister,” she says. “I don’t run a church. I run this place. This place is as sacred as any church has ever been for me.”
On summer mornings, Katie says, new faces fill the tables — people who have found their way downtown because there are enough reasons now to make a day of it. In winter and in this early hinge of March, the room belongs to those who return.
“There’s day one customers,” Michael says.
“And they continue to come daily for thirteen years.” Katie names them easily. “Larry and Trudy.”
Children who once came in holding a parent’s hand have stood behind the counter as employees. Musicians who played the first night still come back. Staff move through seasons of their lives, but the structure holds.
Michael’s days look different now. The roasting happens offsite, in a space carved out of domestic life. He roasts between ten and three, tending green coffee beans that will become the cups warming hands across this room. He delivers the coffee himself, returns in the afternoon to straighten a shelf, wipe down a table, stand behind the counter if needed.
“I didn’t feel like I was part of the fabric anymore,” he says of a time when he was away too much.
Fabric is a word Biddeford understands. The mills shaped its early identity. Threads crossing. Tension held. Patterns repeated. The shop does not declare itself as metaphor, but it behaves like one. People arrive, sit, leave. Others take their place. The pattern continues.
Outside, the light has shifted again. It is still cold, but it no longer feels fixed. A drip falls from the edge of a snowbank and disappears into the street.
Inside, steam rises and fades.
When you step back out onto Main Street, the door closes softly behind you. A brief spill of warm air meets the cold and disappears. The grinder starts again inside. Someone laughs.
The Bk / Co / Be sign hangs steady against brick and sky. It has seen harder winters. It will see softer springs.
The forecast says forties this week. Maybe fifties next week.
The door opens. A regular nods toward the counter. A student pulls out a notebook. The block keeps moving, one cup at a time.
Many thanks to Michael Macomber and Katie Pinard for their time on Monday, March 2, 2026.
Visit their shop at 265 Main Street, Biddeford, Maine.
Visit their website: https://www.elementsbookscoffeebeer.com
Follow them on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/elementsbookscoffeebeer
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Photos and interview by Cy Cyr. Contact him at info@bricktides.com
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