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Serious Eats: Drinks has long been a bastion of interesting, engaging coffee writing on the internet. So much so that we gave the 2012 Sprudgie Award for Best Coffee Writing to Liz Clayton and Erin Meister for their work there, and have hired Clayton to run our NYC desk in addition to her Serious Eats writing. Unfortunately, all good things must come to a hiatus: Meister is stepping back from her Serious Eats contributions to focus on some of her own projects and Counter Culture Coffee‘s burgeoning NYC operations. #Controversial but much-loved coffee gadfly Nick Cho will be stepping in to fill her shoes, covering all things coffee alongside Ms. Clayton.

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Mr. Cho has a long and storied history of opinionating on the internet. In 2005 he co-founded the Portafilter.net podcast, an early hotbed of internet coffee discussion, which he recently relaunched as Portafilter Interviews, a series co-produced with Sprudge Omnimedia. Mr. Cho is well-known as a holder of many strong opinions on coffee, perhaps most famously, his love of the Kalita Wave brewer. He is also the co-founder, along with Trish Rothgeb, of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in San Francisco.

We talked to Maggie Hoffman, the Serious Eats: Drinks editor to hear a little more about the new move.

I started drinking Wrecking Ball Coffee shortly after moving to San Francisco, and so when I first met Nick & Trish I was a little fangirl-nervous. Of course, they’re lovely and have so much knowledge to share. Nick’s a great writer and I think he’ll bring just the right mix of technical and scientific know-how with an approachable tone. Some of our readers are coffee fanatics, but others are just getting into it, and so it’s important that the pieces be inclusive to everyone. Nick totally gets that.

Serious Eats has a long history of wonderful coffee coverage. Meister, who is taking a break from her regular column, actually predates me on the site–when I launched Serious Drinks in 2011, she’d been sharing her infectious enthusiasm and coffee knowledge for a long while already. Nick, alongside Liz Clayton, will help keep it going, and he’s full of topic ideas for the new year!

Nick’s first piece for Serious Eats is on whether or not you should roast coffee at home.

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