Good morning, fam! How do you all like to start your day? I personally like to stumble around my house in search of my glasses, and once I can see I’ll make a cup of coffee that cools off while I’m getting ready for work. Then it’s usually too late for breakfast (plus I’m a procrastinator) and I’m running late as always, so I shove some food in my mouth while I’m drying my hair and drink my coffee in the car on my way to the hospital. What a life, huh? Exciting, I know! But if I had my way, I’d wake up early and head across town to pick up a latte and a donut from one of my favorite local spots in Lexington: North Lime Coffee and Donuts. That’s right y’all, we’re crossing off an interview that’s been at the top of our bucket list since we started the blog! We were thrilled to sit down and talk to Aaron, the manager of the OG North Lime shop on the corner of West 6th Street and Limestone in downtown Lexington, and he had all kinds of interesting stories to tell!

For those of you who are outside of Lexington, KY, North Lime Coffee and Donuts is a local donut joint that opened its doors in 2012 in the aforementioned location in the downtown area. Three people with three different backgrounds - a pastor, an engineer, and a mortgage broker - thought it would be a good idea to have a place where not only can you get some great local coffee, you can also get great local donuts. As a matter of fact, Aaron and co-owner Joe Ross (the aforementioned mortgage broker) worked together at a Starbucks for a while and this is where the idea for opening a donut shop was born. They noticed that people would come through the drive-thru and have donuts from Spaulding’s or Donut Days, but they were getting coffee from Starbucks; wouldn’t it be awesome to have a place where you could get both things at the same time? Shortly after deciding to take on this venture, Heidi (the engineer) noticed a building for sale as she was coming out of a show at Al’s Bar, and this small building soon became the flagship location for North Lime Coffee and Donuts. Something else that strikes us about North Lime is their logo. The iconic owl design came from an artist working in the art studio next door to the shop named John Lackey, who actually carved the logo backwards out of wood and pressed in on paper to get all of the intricate woodworking seen on the logo itself. There is also a nod to this part of town in the logo, which makes it even more cool in my opinion!

Looking to do something a little different with their donuts, Joe drew some inspiration from an unlikely source: his aunt’s secret roll recipe. Getting this recipe wasn’t easy, as the aunt kept it a strict secret, but fate was on their side; following a series of events in the family, the aunt became a little loose-lipped and let the beans spill on the secret recipe, and Joe was now in possession of the instructions for these famous rolls. Some tweaking to the process occurred, and they were left with a more dense, cake-like donut that has become the bedrock of their business. North Lime started out in June 2012 with a few standard flavors, and as Halloween drew near they decided to do some experimenting; this brought us the fan-favorite maple bacon donut, as well as the cookies and cream and others that pop up again from time to time. The shop still tries out new flavors, and some of the best ideas have come from their employees; they even put out a call for ideas once a week to get everyone involved with the process. When they first began making the donuts, it would take up to 12 hours to make 16 dozen donuts, but now they can make that same amount in just around 1 hour.

The North Lime Coffee and Donuts family got an expansion in 2014, opening a new shop on Clays Mill Road in Lexington, so naturally they decided to name this store North Lime Clays Mill. This is where the practice runs for an exciting new opportunity began to take place - North Lime was going to be featured on TV! They were contacted by the show Sugar Showdown on the Cooking Channel and asked to participate on the baking contest show, which they agreed to do, and they ended up winning their episode! They had to keep the big win a secret for several months, but a watch party at West Sixth Brewing in Lexington let the cat out of the bag and the crowd went wild! The group later found out that while they had been asked to be on the show, other contestants had to apply on their own just to get a tryout, so that right there tells you how good their product has become.

North Lime Coffee and Donuts also likes to get involved with other businesses around town, especially their neighbors on Limestone. They worked with the awesome ladies from Sorella Gelateria, creating donut cones to hold all of the delicious gelato, and they still bring those back from time-to-time. They’ve also worked with Crank and Boom, a local ice cream shop ran by Toa Green, to start making affagato drinks at the Clays Mill location, and they have supplied the ice cream shop with glazed donuts for their Lexington Burger Week dessert burger for the past couple of years. They have also participated in that event, and have made up their own burger week (check out #noliburgerweek on Instagram) in the past as well, selling Aaron’s own homemade BBQ with tons of toppings on a glazed donut. The team also likes to do charity work as well, donating 10% of all profits to a different local charity each quarter; right now they are donating to Habitat for Humanity, and they are looking to put a team together to build a Habitat house sometime this year. They also don’t like to waste their leftover donuts, so each day volunteers will come and take the donuts that are left at closing and take them to local people in need. The Clays Mill donuts are picked up by a wonderful lady from Mary, Queen of the Holy Rosary church and delivered to the Catholic Action Center, and an anonymous donor picks up the day’s leftovers from the Limestone location and takes them to local firefighters and police officers. Aaron also really emphasizes the idea of Third Place at North Lime; if your First Place is your home and your Second Place is your work, then your Third Place should be somewhere fun where you can interact with your community, and that’s something else that makes North Lime a great place to be!

We’ve always admired the social media aspect of North Lime Coffee and Donuts; they do a great job of keeping their followers updated with daily and weekly specials, and we love getting to see the different donuts and the employees who make them every day. They use this platform in fun interactive ways: for example, they do a Donut Madness every year in March to coincide with college basketball’s March Madness, where donuts are pitted against each other in a bracket-game situation, and the winner becomes the special for the month of April. This year, a customer did some analytics for the contest and helped decide which donuts would be a part of the bracket based on popularity…how neat is that? You can get more information about that on Instagram once tournament time rolls around. They also host a Donut Day 3K race in honor of National Donut Day (there are two of those by the way, and they celebrate the one associated with the Salvation Army), and all the proceeds from that race are donated to the Salvation Army to commemorate the occasion.

As for future plans, Aaron says the owners would love to expand the business. They have recently moved into the Louisville market, opening North Lime Old Louisville in 2018 in what sounds like a super interesting location; the property was owned for a long time by LG&E electric company, and this particular building was home to the lamp lighters, who would go around lighting all of the street lamps at night in Louisville. A third Lexington location would be awesome, as would other locations in Louisville and maybe one day even Cincinnati could be in the mix. As for now, Aaron is focused on his shop in downtown Lexington; when we grilled him on his favorite donuts, he thought for a moment before landing on plain glazed, blueberry cake, cinnamon sugar glazed, and root beer (once a collaboration with A&W). He also told us about his idea to move away from straws and use plastic lids with lipped edges to help ease environmental stresses, which is always a plus in our book! So if you’re in Lexington and in need of a great cup of coffee and some of the best donuts around, stop by either location and they’ll hook you up! Thanks again to Aaron for talking with us, and thank you all for reading our blog!