Jolts to the system Jolts to the system Jolts to the system

Stephen McDonald, '07, was a tax attorney working in downtown Seattle's Dexter Horton Building when he first "smelled the coffee roasting" 20 years ago.

“It was kind of magical,” says McDonald, who now works at Amazon and is an adjunct professor of taxation at the University of Washington, where he got his master’s in taxation.

It took McDonald a while to figure out where this magical aroma was coming from, eventually realizing it originated from a nearly unmarked storefront that had been operating near the Owl ‘n Thistle pub on Post Alley since 1972. Once he discovered the Good Coffee Company, McDonald became a regular, showing up to sip espresso and talk coffee with the GCC’s proprietors, Joe Kittay and son Carl.

“I went in and Joe and Carl were there and I found out they didn’t serve coffee, but Carl kindly offered me an espresso. It turned me into an espresso guy,” says McDonald, who also taught taxation at Seattle University. “I just thought it was such a cool, quintessential Seattle experience. I would offer [Seattle University] students one bonus point to come down to Good Coffee Company.”

Good Coffee Company is always thinking about those beans: Bags in storage await the Probat, a gold-standard piece of coffee roasting equipment.

It wasn’t just his students whom McDonald, who turns 46 soon, would steer to the GCC. Every time his parents, Steve and Debra, would visit from Missouri, he would drag them there as well. The same went for Tyler Henderson, who worked at Ernst & Young with McDonald before both became colleagues at Amazon and then the UW, where Henderson teaches master’s candidates about income tax and McDonald focuses on sales tax.

“He pretty much would take everyone there every chance he got,” says Henderson. “He’s loved that place since as long as I can remember.

After Joe Kittay died, it was up to Carl to keep it going. Carl had a full-time job teaching high school alongside the GCC, so the shop started keeping irregular hours.

“When I wanted to get coffee, it was difficult,” McDonald recalls. “I had to come down when Carl was roasting on Sundays, when they weren’t technically open. It was clear things were trending in the wrong direction. Carl said he didn’t think they’d be doing it for another year, so I asked what the plan was. They said they tried to sell it to someone, but it fell through. I said would you consider selling it to me, just because I didn’t want to see it go out of business.”

The two sides began negotiating a potential sale in 2024. In November of that year, McDonald was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

“Initially, the prognosis I got from my urologist was quite grim,” says McDonald. “Then I went to Fred Hutch, and the oncologist there gave me a 60 percent chance of emerging victorious. After that, things kind of picked up again.”

Eventually, Kittay and McDonald came to terms, with the latter receiving the keys to the business in November 2025—shortly after he found out his wife was pregnant with the couple’s second child.

Not quite Starbucks

The early 1970s were formative years for a Seattle coffee scene that would soon become world famous.

In 1971, Jim Stewart began selling coffee at the Wet Whisker on the downtown Seattle waterfront, later renaming it Seattle’s Best Coffee. That same year, Starbucks was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl. They would eventually sell the business to Howard Schultz, who grew it into a global juggernaut.

Joe Kittay started the Good Coffee Company in 1972 with far more modest ambitions.

“I met Joe once or twice. He really kept himself in isolation,” says Baldwin. “He got the roaster that I learned to roast on from Alfred Peet (of Peet’s Coffee fame). I had a soft spot in my heart for the roaster. Joe just ran his own little thing there. He seemed to make it work. Not serving coffee for 50-some years is a pretty big deal.”

The roaster in question is a 1961 Probat, a manual cast-iron drum that the GCC uses to this day. As for declining to open a cafe in which to actually serve the GCC’s coffee, Carl Kittay explains, “He never wanted to turn into a drink outfit. He always had an espresso machine but didn’t want to turn it into a business. I don’t think he ever wanted to be a manager of people. He fixed machines. All the machines he sold, he fixed up.”

Walking into the GCC when the Kittays owned it was like walking into a dark, cluttered museum, with burlap sacks, old machines, and various and sundry coffee arcana strewn about its vast, spartan interior. They sold bags of beans and, if you asked nicely, would grind them for you, but retail presentation was beside the point.

The Good Coffee Company’s 1961 German-made Probat is where the roasting magic happens.

“At one point, we had several wholesale accounts,” says Carl Kittay. “The Last Exit (in the University District), they used my dad’s coffee forever. My dad had Cafe Allegro as well a long, long time ago. We had Higher Grounds in Charlottesville [Va.]. We had retail obviously as well, but wholesale was a big thing.”

“It’s sort of weird to have a shop that just serves bags of coffee, but it’s part of its charm,” says McDonald.

Kittay said his father would occasionally get inquiries from people interested in buying the GCC, but as he grew older, he had no interest in selling.

“Probably my dad should have sold a long time ago, but he really liked having it around,” says Kittay. “It gave him something to do and a place to go to, and he didn’t really care if he made money later on.”

Joe Kittay died in September 2022 at the age of 96. Carrying on without him was “never anything I wanted to do,” says Carl.

Enter Stephen McDonald.

“I’ve known him for a really long time,” says Kittay of McDonald. “He’s become a friend of mine. We’d sit around and chat. Stephen wanted to do it. It’s something he felt passionate about. For me, you need to get somebody who wants to do it. That could be a lot of people, but running a business is not easy. He seems to have a lot of drive.”

‘A tank that should last forever’

With the GCC losing money, McDonald had designs on devoting some of its space to a simple cafe “to stabilize it quickly.” He placed a call to his father, who lived on a farm in rural Missouri.

Stephen McDonald

“I said, ‘I’d like to do it. I just have no idea how to staff it.’ And my dad called back and said, ‘What if we move out?’ We’d just found out that my wife was pregnant. They moved out last year.”

McDonald’s parents left their farm in the care of another son and began renting an apartment across the street from the GCC, where they have “about a 30-foot walk to work,” in Stephen Sr.’s estimation. He and his wife are at the shop almost every day. He serves as the GCC’s facilities manager and maintenance man, while Debra runs the books and fills orders.

“They just do a ton of work down there,” says Henderson. “I was down there last Thursday, and his parents were down there opening the shop. I don’t know that he could do it without them.”

“My dad just loves it,” says McDonald. “He was an engineer before he retired. It’s like a kid in a candy store times 100.”

With his parents, both in their early 70s, as de facto employees, McDonald hired a “super fantastic barista,” and Kittay still comes in on weekends to roast beans alongside McDonald.

“I’m learning to roast with him,” says McDonald. “I’ve been roasting with him for over a year now. It’s a cast-iron drum. We have the same roaster repair person, Barry, as all the big names in town. He said this thing is a tank that should last forever.”

The cafe opened Aug. 1 to a decent-sized crowd of GCC devotees. The shop is cleaner and brighter than its original iteration but still maintains a rustic charm.

“It’s weird seeing people sitting around and drinking coffee there, but I’m sure I will get used to it,” says McDonald. “To me, it’s just the most Seattle coffee thing you could possibly do and it’s authentic and I love it. How do I make this place not lose money and still maintain its character? I’ve tried to walk that line just as closely as I can.”

While he now has some help, McDonald is still essentially working three jobs and helping to raise two toddlers—all while attempting to beat a potentially fatal illness.

“The fact that I’m spending my young family’s money on a business that’s losing money shows that I’m confident,” he says.

Given McDonald’s passion and intellect, it seems unwise to bet against him.

The Good Coffee Company launched a Good Cause Blend for Fred Hutchinson’s annual giving day campaign. The GCC donated $4 from every bag of beans sold to cancer research. It sold out.