Milstead and Co

Milstead & Co. opened in September 2011 with no house roaster at all, just coffees bought from several roasters and rotated on the bar. Seattle Met profiled founder Andrew Milstead in 2013 under the headline of a brave new coffee model, reporting that he was buying from five roasters and swapping coffees several times a day.

The lineup has moved over the years. At opening the roasters included Stumptown, Intelligentsia and Heart, with Bows and Arrows added later. Pendulum Magazine counted more than ten roasters on the retail shelf in 2018, named Kuma Coffee among them, and reported that the espresso rotated daily. The current roster is not published online, so ask what is on the espresso grinder that day.

The building is newer than the business. The original cafe sat in the old Fremont Electric buildings at 744 N 34th St, which were demolished in 2016 for a five story office and retail building. Milstead ran from a temporary space at 900 N 34th St in the meantime and returned to the same block around mid 2017. Pendulum described the new room in 2018 as spacious, with big windows facing the water and a seat with an Aurora Bridge view, and Adventures of A+K, updated in 2025, calls it laptop workable, with plenty of tables that do fill up.

Google lists hours of 7am to 4pm every day. Some older listings still show the temporary 900 N 34th St address and longer hours, and the shop's own website is an unfinished page from before the 2011 opening, so trust the street address here. On food, The Infatuation singled out a homemade Oreo from Standard Bakery in 2017.