Our story
We started mewmilk to fix the milk, not the coffee.
Baristas kept asking for an oat milk that foamed like dairy without the candy sweetness, and nothing on the market delivered. Della Quan decided to make it herself.
As lead barista and green-coffee buyer at a Portland roastery, Della had watched the oat milk options fail in the same ways for years. The ones that foamed well were too sweet. The ones that tasted clean split at the steam wand.
In 2018, she rented time in a commissary kitchen on SE Division and started testing after her shifts. Soren Vestergaard, her co-founder, joined her later that year. He came from a food-science background and focused on getting the oil-to-oat ratio stable at scale. The goal was narrow: dense microfoam from an unsweetened oat base.
The name came from the shop cat. Biscuit, a calm tabby who had the run of the roastery, sat on the counter and supervised every test batch Della brought in. mew is the cat. milk is the job.
How it began.
Test batches in a rented commissary kitchen on SE Division. Four months to get the formula stable enough to share with a few trusted baristas.
Three cafe accounts in the first six months. Small enough to keep the quality tight, large enough to cover the cost of the next batch.
Moved into the converted 1940s creamery on SE Bybee Blvd. First time pressing at 200 liters a batch with enough cold storage to do it properly.
Added Barista Almond and the first limited Barista Pistachio. The pistachio sold out in three weeks.
Forty-plus independent cafes and grocers across the West Coast, still pressed in the same building on SE Bybee.
The creamery.
The building at 1841 SE Bybee Blvd was a working dairy creamery from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. It had what a milk press needs: cold storage, tiled press rooms, and floor drains.
We press in 200-liter batches. Small enough to check every run before it goes into a carton. A team of nine works the full cycle from grain delivery to packed pallet, in the same building where the milk has been made since 2021.
What we keep doing.
Buy from one farm family.
The Hargroves have grown our oats in the Columbia Basin since the first batch. Same field, same grain, same flavor from one carton to the next.
Press in small batches.
200 liters at a time. Small enough to catch anything off before it leaves the building and goes into a carton on a cafe shelf.
Pay our pourers fairly.
Everyone on the press floor earns above Oregon's living wage. That has been true since the first week in the creamery, and it is the floor, not a ceiling.
"The milk has one job: hold the foam and then disappear. If you can taste the milk in a flat white, we missed something."
Della Quan, Founder