In 2017, Evan Oeflein wasn’t thinking about launching a cold brew coffee company. Like many students in the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, he was just trying to complete a class assignment.

But the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship’s “Create a Company” program wasn’t your typical lecture — it pushed students to turn an idea into a functioning business. It was in that class that Oeflein and other students developed the cold brew coffee company, Seattle Strong Coffee. But what started as just another school project quickly turned into something more when they began offering their cold brew to local companies. One of the students, who was interning at Meta, pitched Seattle Strong as part of the office’s “beverage of the month.” Orders started rolling in, and the team realized it might be onto something.

“We came into it as consumers,” Oeflein says. “The cold brews we were finding were extremely bitter, or sour, or just loaded with cream and sugar. We wanted something cleaner, smoother, and simpler — just coffee.”

Made by steeping coffee grounds in cold water for 12 to 24 hours, cold brew is naturally smoother and less acidic than hot-brewed coffee. Seattle Strong took it a step further, crafting a proprietary process that infuses the coffee with nitrogen for a frothy finish. Its cold brews come in cans that are meant to be shaken gently to activate the nitrogen. They’re made with organic beans, brewed locally in small batches. The purified water used to brew the coffee comes from Seattle’s Cedar River watershed.

Photo courtesy of Seattle Strong Coffee

By 2018, when Oeflein graduated, Seattle Strong had outgrown the classroom. “We ran it during our senior year on the side,” Oeflein says. “We saved all the profit to create runway, and after graduation, we went full time.” Oeflein, the last remaining founding member, is still running the company. But the journey wasn’t without challenges.

When the pandemic hit, Seattle Strong lost 95% of its revenue overnight. The company, which had built its early success on office deliveries of cold brew in larger formats like 5-gallon kegs and bag-in-box options, had to pivot quickly. “Grocery kept us alive,” Oeflein says.

Oeflein has resisted the temptation to take on outside investors. Now, with the pandemic behind it, Seattle Strong is growing again. The company is expanding into restaurants and bars. You can find Seattle Strong’s nitro cold brews at major retailers including Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Haggen, and Safeway.

“We want to show what Seattle cold brew coffee can be,” Oeflein says. “You see New York, Texas, and California brands on grocery store shelves, but where’s Seattle? We’re the city of coffee. That’s our long-term goal — to represent Seattle and show the world what we can do with cold brew.”