Fifty Shades of Coffee: Seattle’s Milstead Co. – A Seattle Coffee Hot Spot

Milstead Co. in Fremont is kinda sexy.

Do you remember that cute “new girl” in high school that miraculously showed up to school one day and sat next to you in history class? She very well may have been the girl of your dreams. You do remember her. She was the one who all the girls loved to hate, and the guys all wanted to date?

Well, Milstead Co. in Fremont, reminds me of that girl. Cute. Sweet. Perhaps a little sexy. Certainly aesthetically pleasing. Yet, it was always kinda awkward when sitting down next to her.

Great Seattle Coffee in Ballard

Over the last few months, I’ve heard lots of good chatter about the Fremont-based café despite the fact it’s still shy of its first birthday. That’s good news if you’re in business and want to recover your hefty up-front investment in great décor.

After some witlessly-wandering about Fremont, past the Fremont Troll, past the Statue of Vladimir Lenin, and past a number of bridges, I found Milstead Co. overlooking Lake Union like a swimsuit model glistening with suntanning lotion.

No doubt, Milstead’s is an easy-on-the-eyes café – and the coffee art I was served up effortlessly was beautiful.

It all got me wondering: Can coffee be sexy?  

Certainly booze, beer, and even sports drinks are all heavily marketed with a little T&A and the illusion of seduction, but we’re talking coffee. Is it possible?

They say the largest sex organ is the mind and coffee often stimulates the mind, doesn’t it? So, perhaps, it can be…

 Coffee Art at Milstead Co. Doesn’t it just make you want to smile?

Milstead’s ambiance may fit the bill.

No doubt, we could all stay home and brew our own cup of coffee if we wanted to, right? We can even put our homebrew in our thermos, which I actually use from time to time, instead of paying $3-$6 for a cup of coffee. 

A part of me believes that we go to cafes for a bit more than coffee itself. We go to connect (and I’m not talking just the free WiFi here.). We go to rub shoulders. Catch up with friends. Capture a little community vibe and see what’s happening in the neighborhood. Sure, many of our modern day cafes aren’t the same boisterous cafes that Voltaire, Jefferson, and Nietzsche socialized and argued in, but they do offer a sense of ambiance. And by creatures of habit, we long for an ambiance that captures our imagination and removes us from home and work.

Bold, Sweet, Aromatic – when it’s not altered too much, coffee requires us to slow down to enjoy it. Even our tentative sips are delicate to its touch and requires careful maneuvering of our lips. And so, inherently, coffee is conducive to ambiance creation.

Today you can get 50 shades of coffee at your favorite cafe – from iced-soy lattes to straight up double shots –  I generally stick to a few simple choices, most of them traditional and hot. But regardless, we all notice the ambiance of where we buy our coffee – even if we only stay just a few minutes.

One could even argue that coffee and ambiance go together like sex and foreplay. “You can have one without the other. But the latter is better with the former,” as one writer put it.

 And so it is at Milstead Co. Sexy Ambiance. Sexy Coffee. Check out how good Seattle coffee can be at Milstead’s.

 Ah, and a little 4-1-1: They serve Coava beans (among others) and a variety of pastries.

Check out the map below (and the trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey is available on Amazon.com) Do you like, hate, love the post? Like Us on Facebook and comment below.

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