15 years ago this month, two old friends from a nondescript Tacoma suburb huddled together behind a single laptop in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. They launched a coffee website. It had a weird name.
2009 was a vastly different time in the world of coffee, and the world at large, but it was from within this primordial stew of post-financial crash Millennial ennui and aspirational Gen X indie sleaze that Sprudge emerged, loud and thirsty, yearning to be read. Now a decade and a half later it remains an improbable and exciting privilege to publish this website each day.
The greatest accomplishments of Sprudge, by far and without question, can be found in its stories. Thousands of original stories have been published on Sprudge over the last 15 years—more than 9,000 in total as of today—platforming so many different voices from around the world, helping to expand, zoom in, venerate, and criticize coffee culture as it happens in real time. Some writers may only join us once or twice; others have become part of the voice of the site, contributing indelibly to the publication’s point of view and helping us all to understand coffee better.
To celebrate 15th anniversary of Sprudge, we thought it might be fun to share 15 of the stories that we love the most from the last 15 years of publishing Sprudge. These aren’t necessarily “the best” stories we ever ran, nor are they certainly the most popular or trafficked. They’re the stories that meant something to us and felt special and memorable, and we want to share them with you again.
To everyone who has ever read Sprudge, written for Sprudge, supported for Sprudge, shared Sprudge, debated Sprudge, emailed Sprudge, worn a Sprudge t-shirt, or otherwise made our work a part of their life, thank you.
—Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen
15 Stories for 15 Years
The Debt Payer: Coffee Pests, Climate Change, And Hopes For A Better Harvest In Northern Sumatra
Originally published: August 2023
Tonggo Simangunsong zooms in on the village of Lintong Ni Huta in Northern Sumatra, offering a vivid portrait of the coffee farmers in this part of Northern Sumatra. We used to dream of being able to publish work like this—stories that reminded us of the glory days for publications like National Geographic and Roads & Kingdoms—and now we have a platform, Special Projects Desk, dedicated to this style of work thanks to a partnership with La Marzocco.
8 Espressos In Milan, Or How I Nearly Lost My Mind On An Italian Cafe Crawl
Originally published: May 2013
Zachary Carlsen’s gonzo spro-fueled tour through the streets of Milan, pounding one euro shots with the old guys behind the bar and gazing longingly at great heaping plats of pastry. Taxi, taxi! Pronto, pronto!
Originally published: May 2021
Editor-at-large Jenn Chen’s entire byline is worth exploring. Her unique ability to zero in on subcultures within subcultures has resulted in so much phenomenal reporting, from dog cafe menus to coffee antiques to biodynamics to coffee houseplants, not to mention her ability to move the coffee culture through fierce editorial takes (“Stop Calling It ‘Geisha’ Already” is just one major example.). Jenn’s open-mindedness, and her ability to link arms with the reader and take them along to explore nooks and crannies of coffee, has made for some of the best stories coffee writing of the last decade by anyone, anywhere. Her story above on cafe miniatures is a distillation of all that and more: funny, curious, sympathetic, self-aware, and endlessly readable.
Originally published: December 2013
Eric J. Grimm’s tribute to the unlikely delights of keeping the cafe open on Christmas is both a staff and reader favorite. This is Sprudge’s equivalent to “All I Want For Christmas Is You”—it’s something we share year after year with the holiday season.
The Reluctant Partygoer: Liz Clayton And The Nightlife Of SCAA 2015
Originally published: April 2015
Liz Clayton has been part of the regular publishing voice of Sprudge since the very beginning, and her byline has helped define coffee over the last 20 years. For many years she was our intrepid party reporter at the annual SCAA (yes, a second A) coffee conference, as it bounced around the United States. This was sort of funny because Liz does not particularly enjoy parties, which gave way to a series of headlines like “The Reluctant Partygoer” and “We’re Leaving Now” and “We Partied ‘Til They Ran Out Of Syrup.” Paired with original illustrations from Zachary, this combination of voice-y, vivid, insider/outsider reporting still feels compelling, though the parties now are tame by comparison.
Originally published: August 2024
Zac Cadwalader is Sprudge’s managing editor, and his byline has become a regular and much-loved companion to our daily readers. Zac’s news coverage is something we get so much feedback about, but every so often he stretches out on a bigger story and does vivid, hilarious original reporting. This story, from the hot height of summer 2024, fell into our laps by accident; 7/11 announced this new dumb Slurpee thing at just a couple of locations, and it turned out one was within driving distance of his home. Only Zac would report it this way: funny, dystopian, personal, conceptual. This feels like something you’d have read on the internet 10 years ago, when websites had the freedom and wherewithal to let themselves be weird and literary. We love that Sprudge still reads this way.
A City Of Love And Hate: Latin Culture Rising In The Phoenix Coffee Scene
Originally published: September 2017
It was obvious immediately that Michelle Johnson was going to do incredible things, but along the way—before she founded Ghost Town Oats—it was our distinct privilege to publish her original journalism. This story has so much love for its subjects, including the city of Phoenix itself, and is supported immensely by original photography by Shaunté Glover.
Originally published: August 2014
Eileen Kenny’s enormously influential reporting for Sprudge helped introduce Americans to the splendors and excesses of Australian cafe culture, long before there was avocado toast and fancy coffee brekky in every major city. But it’s this story from Copenhagen that really captures a moment, when the collision between fine dining and specialty coffee felt sudden and thrilling, and anything seemed possible. We were among the first in the world to do this kind of coffee-focused reporting on Noma, and Eileen’s words and photos still land fearless.
Originally published: July 2022
Many, many readers first encounter Sprudge via our series of City Guides, which we’ve published in one form or another since 2011. It’s nearly impossible to choose just one for this list—James Hansen’s London guides, Zinara Rathnayake’s Colombo guide, Hengtee Lim’s Tokyo guides all stand out—but Dhaval Mehta’s Mumbai guide sort of captures what the program is all about in a neat way. His writing is vivid, familiar, lyrical. He has a deep affection and earned knowledge for the place he’s writing about. This is the sort of person you would hire as a guide, or beg to share his recs if you were friends, except instead you’re reading it for free on a coffee website. We sometimes personally use these guides in our own travels, and this is one of those.
Originally Published: April 2021
Another one from the Special Projects Desk, this time an interview between Sprudge co-founder Jordan Michelman and Daniel Brown of Gilly Brew Bar. This is really the sort of extended sit-down, paired with beautiful images, that we built Special Projects for. You lose yourself in this interview in the best way.
Originally published: March 2023
Every once in a while you get lucky in this business. Tung Nguyen is one of our favorite newer voices on the site, and in 2023 he sat down with Indonesia’s major force for specialty coffee, Mikael Jasin, for an in-depth interview on everything from coffee sourcing to cafe culture. Less than a year later Jasin won the World Barista Championship—and here we were, with a major interview cut and ready to share out again the next day.
More than a decade after it was originally published, and on the 15th anniversary of Sprudge’s existence as a website, we’d like to make a somewhat shocking revelation: this was all a hoax. We faked the original posting on Craigslist, cackled with unbridled blogatorial glee as the story was picked up by local media (including Eater and the Willamette Week), then watched somewhat aghast as the story made national waves (including spots in the Huffington Post and Jezebel, which used to be really big websites). It only seemed right, as best as we can recall, to follow it all up by penning a ridiculous travelogue, our imagined journey into rural Oregon to meet the human poop coffee man and cup his offering.
We regret nothing.
Originally published: May 2015
It seems like just yesterday we unleashed our giant anthropomorphic coffee bean mascots on the world. But verily, it was almost 10 years ago Buzzy and Spesh descended upon the SCAA (with an extra “A”) trade show in Seattle, spreading joy and mirth and weirding people out wherever they went. The beans have become an indelible part of the fabric of Sprudge, photoshopped in every imaginable scenario and sent to the moon and back on their caffeinated adventures. But it all started here.
Jooyeon Jeon Of South Korea Is The 2019 World Barista Champion
Originally published: April 2019
Covering the barista competitions has long been—and continues to be—a fundamental part of Sprudge’s publishing DNA. Looking back across the last 15 years, our dedication and enthusiasm for these competitions is evident: nobody covers the comps like Sprudge, and we are immensely proud of the body of work the site has produced around coffee competitions.
Zac Cadwalader has for many years helped helm this coverage, and his champion essays are a yearly highlight. This one from 2019 stands out, capturing the magnetism and emotion of Jooyeon Jeon’s championship run, and in the process helping to crystallize a style of writing about these events that feels more like memorable sports journalism.
Originally published: March 2018
A television activation. A wayward bus. A lot of actors playing actors playing robots. A band called Dallas Acid. And a search for coffee that goes nowhere. This is the sort of story only Sprudge could run, and it was true in 2018 as it is today.
For more on these stories and the writers behind them, listen to this week’s new 15th Anniversary episode of the Coffee Sprudgecast. To anyone reading this far, chances are you’ve been reading us for years, so let us take one more moment to say a heartfelt thank you for your time and for making Sprudge part of how you take in the world. It means so much to all of us. Now let’s return to our regularly scheduled programming, which today includes coffee robots getting horny on main and a helpful cafe guide to Reykjavik.
There is one more thing: it’s been emotional.
