Houston White was in his 30s the first time he actually liked coffee. He’d tried it as a kid and wasn’t impressed. Then he had a cup at a restaurant in Atlanta with friends and something clicked. Like everything else Houston White has ever done, what came next was not moderation — it was total immersion.
He called up Dan Anderson, owner of Dogwood Coffee in Minneapolis. The two of them started talking over barbershop visits and late-night sessions about what a specialty coffee brand rooted in Black culture could look like — not the snooty, unwelcoming specialty coffee world White had encountered when he first tried to learn, but something that felt like the community he had been building for twenty years in North Minneapolis. Something soulful, dynamic, and unapologetically itself.
The Get Down Coffee Co. launched in 2021 at the corner of 44th Avenue and Humboldt in the Camdentown neighborhood of North Minneapolis. Lines around the block for two days straight. Critics who said no one would pay $7 for a latte in that neighborhood were answered immediately and definitively. The Get Down created 30 jobs, built a loyal customer base that crossed every demographic line in the city, and became the anchor of the cultural corridor White had been constructing for over a decade — alongside his FRESH barbershop, Camdentown Flats apartments, and the Mixtape Strategy nonprofit.
The coffee itself was the point. Small-batch blends with names like Sweet Potato C.R.E.A.M. and Turntables carry the flavor and intention of a community that refuses to be overlooked. The roastery in Northeast Minneapolis, built with Dan Anderson and the Dogwood infrastructure, produces coffee that is now available far beyond the neighborhood — at Target stores nationwide, through the Get Down website, and through wholesale partners across the country. The brand that started as a conversation in a barbershop is now on shelves in hundreds of Target locations. That is not an accident. That is a strategy.
In October 2025, White closed the Get Down cafe. Not because it failed — it succeeded completely — but because he had outgrown it. He compared the move to A Tribe Called Quest releasing People’s Instinctive Travels, Low End Theory, and Midnight Marauders in three years and then evolving: you don’t keep making the same album when you’re ready for the next thing. ‘I think in this town, we stagnate because we just accept the best of what we have instead of expecting to continue to evolve it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to keep moving it forward.’
The space is being transformed into Blue in Green — named for the Miles Davis track — a bistro with ‘approachable opulence’ that will serve Southern-French fusion, feature a coffee bar built again with Dan Anderson and Dogwood, and bring in cocktails developed with Four Seasons talent. James Beard Award-winning chef Alex Roberts is consulting on the menu. The corner that launched The Get Down is already becoming the next thing.
What remains constant is the brand. The Get Down Coffee Co. is still roasting. Sweet Potato C.R.E.A.M. is still available. Turntables is still shipping. The Coffee Academy through the Sweet Renaissance program — which has trained baristas and helped launch independent roasters like Yadira Ruda of Ruda Coffee, who now runs a residency at the Get Down roasting facility — is still running. And Houston White is still building Camdentown: the barbershop, the apartments, the nonprofits, the $50 million Main Street vision that would make North Minneapolis the cultural epicenter for Black middle-class life in Minnesota that has never existed before.
The cafe chapter closed. The brand did not. Buy the coffee. Support the vision. Watch what comes next.
getdowncoffee.com · @thegetdowncoffeeco
Available at Target stores nationwide · Online at getdowncoffee.com · Wholesale available
Roastery: Northeast Minneapolis · Blue in Green bistro opening spring 2026 — 1500 N. 44th Ave, Minneapolis
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