Six years ago this month Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman founded Sprudge.com during a busy chimp shift at the Stumptown Coffee Roasters Pine Street cafe in Seattle. In the years since we’ve grown from an inside joke amongst friends and coffee industry insiders into the world’s most popular coffee publication, with a wide-ranging readership of mainstream consumers, cafe goers, media types, coffee geeks, caffeinated tech folk, thirsty randos, and many of those same industry insiders who got the joke from day one. It remains an honor and a privilege to publish this website.
We’re a very different site than when we started, but that’s to be expected after six years—if you’re doing the same thing for that long in media, you’re doing something wrong. Today we’re lucky to work with a remarkable team of staff writers, freelancers, photographers, illustrators and assorted creatives around the world, none more important than Liz Clayton, our associate editor, whose professionalism, eye for quality, and even keel has helped mold our dumb website into the (usually) competent dot com you see today. Liz Clayton bats third in the line-up and puts up like 100+ RBIs a season. She’s a star.
Michelman, Carlsen, and Clayton—Your Sprudge Editors–sat down earlier this week to pick two personal favorite features apiece from our heaving Sprudge archives. These are six of our own best-lvoed stories in Sprudge history—our six for six. Thank you for allowing us this break from regularly scheduled programming to look back at some of our favorite moments, and we hope you enjoy the look back.
Liz Clayton
It’s a tall order to distill six years of breaking coffee news, political intrigue, and essential life survival tips into two favorite stories, but I’ll try.
“A Good, Single Serve Coffee For Myself” — Our Interview With AeroPress Inventor Alan Adler from May 8, 2014
Beyond the cult of the AeroPress itself—that curious, TSA-confusing cylindrical coffee brewer that’s garnered even more fame abroad than in its birthplace in the United States—is a yet bigger spectre of intrigue: that of Alan Adler, its inventor.
To the layperson and weekend-brew-warrior, the mom or pop pressing down on “the best espresso maker I’ve ever owned”, Adler is but a quiet unnamed hero behind this beguiling and delicious-making coffee preparation device. To those deeper within the coffee industry, namely anyone who’s ever attended a Coffee Fest or similar trade show and seen the humble, dare we say pared-down, Aerobie/AeroPress booth, humbly staffed by Adler seated in a folding chair—well, this man is both a cipher and a legend.
In spring 2014, Zachary Carlsen finally secured what would best be referred to as a “get”—a rare sit-down chat with the man behind the AeroPress, about how a little company in Northern California changed the face not only of flying ring toys, but of how to brew coffee creatively. Anyone who loves inventions, and inventors, will be charmed by Adler. After all, how many floutist-turned-sport-toy-manufacturers are world-coffee-famous these days? By my count, it’s still just the one.
8 Cats that Did Not Attend La Marzocco’s Out of the Box from October 24, 2013
I know you were waiting for one of us to pick a cat story as an example of the journalism and industry pacesetting that’s made us who we are today, and, well, okay, I did. Of the many stories we’ve done that highlight the cat-coffee symbiosis, this one truly pinpoints all that, and who, we are at Sprudge. While including readers at all levels of coffee knowledge in a technologically leading event, namely La Marzocco’s esteemed Out of the Box event series, we also shine a light on the everyday amusements brought to us from the feline world.
At Sprudge we believe it’s as important to stand by the classics as it is to gauge and report on the newest trends in our sphere of influence. As such, these animated GIFs truly reflect both the timeless comfort and humor of cats while reporting on the thought leaders and innovations at this particular Out of the Box event. Plus, like, the cats are stuck in boxes, so, like, it’s also just a really long extended cheap pun, get it? I am so proud to work here.
Zachary Carlsen
Shell And All: Identity, Family, And Why Immigrant Coffee Narratives Matter from August 20, 2013
So, okay, a little context first. We buy features from writers. Always.
In 2011 we made the leap from writing our own original content to sourcing, vetting, and buying content. “Buying” was important for us, because at the time, the coffee press usually relied on the “free” part of the word “freelancers” (many still do). Since 2011, we’ve published thousands of features from nearly a hundred different creatives that we continue to work with, all of it paid.
This piece by Kristen Crouse-Orser from 2012 was the first piece we bought that brought me to tears. Her take on the Scandinavian immigrant tradition of “egg coffee” and its importance to her family history is beautiful. While cat listicles bring in traffic, and cafe opening exclusives get us clips in the press, it’s the timeless and creative long-reads like this one that bring us the most joy to publish.
Roy St Coffee & Tea Opening from January 1, 2010
Six years ago this month, Jordan and I were sitting at Oddfellows Cafe in Seattle, drinking greyhounds, and writing coffee headlines. Our website looked like the Drudge Report. I’d gather links from around the internet (mostly from Coffeed and Google News), and we’d get drunk and try to make each other laugh. Then we’d publish this weird Sprudge Report website.
Roy Street came along a few months later and changed all that. This new stealth Starbucks was opening in our neighborhood and we knew we wanted to write about it. That’s when we decided that we were going to stop being an aggregate and start writing original content.
We originally published this feature on a quickly thrown together blog site called Breuters, but realized that we simply needed to scrap the whole Drudge Report/Breitbart parody. About 1 in 10 people understood the parody and it just looked like we were bad at web design.
To get this Roy Street story Jordan and I rushed the shop at 6am on opening day. We got the press tour, shook hands with Howard Schultz, and the whole moment was surreal and hilarious. Jordan penned the feature and we published it under the pseudonym Llewelyn Sinclair. I remember fondly the ensuing lols when we saw Mr. Sinclair quoted in the New York Times.
It was a weird moment in time, capsulated in this piece about a stealth Starbucks cafe that doesn’t exist anymore (now it’s just a Starbucks). It’s a good piece. It’ll always make me laugh. It’ll always be one of my favorites.
Jordan Michelman
A Quest For The World’s Best Restaurant Coffee At Noma by Eileen P. Kenny from August 20th, 2014
We have many mantras behind the scenes at Sprudge, and one of my favorites is: “If you can’t do it first, do it best.” Eileen P. Kenny’s feature from 2014 was not the first to be written about the restaurant’s ambitious coffee service—conceived during a speech from Rene Redzepi at the now-shuttered Nordic Barista Cup—but it is undoubtedly the best, and most complete.
To our benefit Redzepi and his sommelier, Mads Kleppe, were very generous with their time, providing Eileen the ability to get in there and tell this story properly, complete with quotes and insights from both (very busy) story principals. The feature feels intimate and direct—no small feat when you’re talking about two subjects with serious pedigrees and press fatigue from running the world’s best restaurant. It’s a credit to the reporter’s interview style and her experience writing with Sprudge (Eileen is the site’s longest-tenured staff writer). Subject matter aside, the story zooms.
Like the Nordic Barista Cup before it, Noma will soon close. It makes EPK’s survey of their coffee program all the more important as a historic document, capturing the moment and the men behind it in a rich tableau. This was a big assignment—a big story—and I think the feature does it justice.
Breaking The Ramadan Fast With Coffee In Tehran by Safa Haratian from August 12th, 2015.
Let me preface this by saying: today half our readership comes from outside the United States, and we’re very stoked and honored by this fact, but Sprudge is edited and published by Americans. Hence no new content on Labor Day, the frequent baseball and American football references, etc.
In America I feel like we’re given one set narrative about Iran, which follows along the lines of the movie Argo, spliced with over-the-top Mahmoud Amadinejad quotes. The truth is of course much more complex. America and Iran have a weird, deeply complicated relationship going back generations, with bad actions and good people aplenty on both sides. This is what makes TV programs like the ones produced in Iran by Rick Steves and Anthony Bourdain so important: these shows offer a modern window into Iranian culture. We want to tell more stories from the Middle East on Sprudge—Brownbook is a major inspiration—and so getting to buy and publish work from Safa Haratian, Iran’s foremost coffee writer, is a major privilege for all of us.
Safa publishes the website Icoff.ee, which is Iran’s leading Farsi-language coffee publication. Tehran has a kicking coffee scene—who knew?—and this story is about Sam Café, a gorgeous looking spot built into one of Tehran’s big luxury malls. It features an interview portion with the cafe’s manager, Reza Kowsar, a native Californian of Iranian descent who now lives and works in Tehran—as an interviewee, he’s a cross-cultural mix that happily underpins the feature’s narrative.
The story also features beautiful, understated photography from Hadid Golab, who shot the cafe full young patrons going about their everyday routine, be it studying, networking, or just hanging out. This kind of scene—interesting young people chilling in a cafe—is pretty dang different from how Iranian youth culture is typically depicted in the American media.
Coffee can provide a window into the world that challenges our assumptions, and those are the stories I love the best. This one feels really special and this “Six for Six” thing was an excuse to highlight it again. Big ups, Safa, and we’re all looking forward to more features from you soon.
seen 1st on http://sprudge.com
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