Winter hours · Mon–Tue 12–4, Wed–Fri 9–4

Roasted this week, not last quarter.

Silvermine Coffee Roasters has been running small batches out of a roastery on Harbor Avenue since 2015 — single origins, house blends, and the kind of freshness you only get from beans roasted the same week you buy them, not shipped from a warehouse. They love walk-ins, and if you tell them what you usually drink, they will point you at something you will actually like.

They are wholesale-friendly too — 5-pound bags for a shop or office, individual pillow packs for an event, custom roasts for weddings and gifts. Gift cards if you would rather let someone pick their own.

29 Harbor Ave, Norwalk · 203-952-0252

Spacecat calls this its biggest party of the year, and five years in, that is no longer a boast — it is a fact everybody on Chestnut Street has made peace with. The taproom brews its own German-style beers for the occasion, and when the regular bar cannot keep up, an outdoor tap truck opens as a second one. Two live bands play through the afternoon, there is food running the whole time, and a couple of loose, low-stakes contests keep the crowd moving between rounds. A $40 ticket gets you food for the day and your first beer — everything after that is cash or card at the truck. Doors at 10 AM, last call at 6, and South Norwalk train station is a short walk if you would rather not drive home.

Tickets & details →

Wild Ride: Community Bike Ride with Manresa Wilds & NRVT

Manresa Wilds and the Norwalk River Valley Trail team up for a low-key, six-mile family bike ride through South Norwalk, the NRVT corridor and Mathews Park — more nature walk on wheels than group workout. Helmets required, riders 10 and up. Starts at the Manresa Island waterfront at 9 AM, back by 12:30.

Ride details →

MONOTHON 2026 Print Session

Once a year the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Mathews Park turns its studio into an open house: working artists pull monotypes — one-of-a-kind prints, ink to paper, no do-overs — all day, headed for the MONOTHON auction that funds the center. Watch printmaking happen in real time, ask the artists what they are doing and why, and see work go from press to wall before it is sold.

Session details →

September has an R in it, which by the old rule means the harbor is back open for business. The warning goes back at least to 1599, when an English writer told readers to leave oysters alone in any month without one — May through August, the ones spelled without an R. There was real reasoning under the superstition. Wild oysters spawn in the warm months, which leaves them thin, milky and not at their best on the half shell, and before refrigeration, shellfish sitting out in summer heat was a genuine way to get sick. Neither problem is what it used to be — farmed oysters are bred not to spawn, and everything on ice today came out of cold water this morning — but the rule still lines up nicely with the calendar. Connecticut’s oyster harvest peaked around 1911, at roughly 25 million pounds statewide, more than the beds ever gave up before or since. Long before Spacecat had a tap truck, this stretch of the Sound had one export, and this was exactly the week it started moving again.

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