Sprudgie Awards

The Sprudgie Awards — usually just “the Sprudgies” — are an annual set of awards for the specialty coffee industry, run by the coffee news site Sprudge since 2009.¹² They are decided entirely by readers: anyone can nominate anyone, and anyone can vote. Sprudge calls them “the Oscars of Coffee.”¹²

The most useful thing to understand about them is what they are not. Nearly every other event in this wiki’s competitions folder measures coffee: Cup of Excellence and Best of Panama score lots on a cupping table and sell them at auction, and the World Barista Championship runs competitors past certified judges against a written rulebook. The Sprudgies measure reputation. There is no cupping, no score sheet, no auction, no lot, no price per pound, and no certified judging panel — the winner of a category is whoever the site’s readership liked best that year. Treat a Sprudgie the way you would treat a magazine’s readers’ poll, not the way you would treat a cupping score.

That still makes them worth a note. Specialty coffee is a small trade with almost no other industry-wide honours for the non-competing side of the business — the café owners, packaging designers, podcasters, writers and video makers who never enter a championship. The Sprudgies are the main place that work gets named out loud.

Who runs them

Sprudge is a Portland, Oregon news site founded in 2009 by Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman, and it both owns and edits the awards; there is no independent awards body, board or secretariat behind them.² The awards launched in the same year as the site itself.¹² Sprudge also runs a second, separate programme — the Sprudge Design Awards — which its own FAQ describes as “a user submitted global platform honoring the best in coffee and drinks design, with a focus on original packaging design, products, and art.”³⁴ The Sprudgies are the broad one; the Design Awards go deeper on packaging, products and art alone.³ That second programme launched in 2023 and, like the Sprudgies, decides its winners by public vote — its 2024–25 edition drew more than 50,000 votes across roughly two dozen design categories.⁵

Being publisher-owned cuts both ways. It means the awards are cheap, fast and genuinely open — but it also means the organiser, the electorate and the outlet reporting the result are all the same party. The wider point is made in Coffee media: the specialty trade’s press is funded by the industry it covers, and its awards are no exception.

Format

The process runs in two stages, and both are free.⁶

1. Open nomination. Anyone may submit names in any category, at no cost. Sprudge states plainly that the awards are “free to enter and open to all,” with “no fee to submit a nomination, and no membership required to vote.”⁶ Voters supply an email address, which Sprudge says is only to “protect our awards process from bots.”⁶
2. Finalists, then a public vote. Sprudge narrows each category’s nominations to a shortlist of finalists, then reopens voting so readers pick the winners from that shortlist.⁶⁷ Voting in every category is optional — a ballot may be partly filled in.⁷

For the 15th edition, nominations opened on 18 December 2023 and closed on 8 January at 11:59pm PST — a deliberate over-the-holidays window.⁶

Recent editions carry a title sponsor: the 17th Annual Sprudgie Awards were “presented by Pacific Barista Series,” a barista-milk brand.⁷⁸

Categories

The categories shift from year to year. The ballot for the 17th Annual edition carried twelve:⁷

Category
Notable Roaster
Notable Coffee Producer
Best New Cafe
Best New Product
Best Coffee Writing
Best Coffee Magazine/Book
Best Coffee Social Media
Best Coffee Influencer
Best Coffee Podcast
Best Design/Packaging
Best Coffee Event
Sustainable Coffee Company

Read that list as a portrait of what the trade currently values. Two slots go to coffee itself — the roaster and the producer — and the other ten go to media, design, retail and events. A dedicated Best Coffee Influencer category sitting alongside Best Coffee Writing is the clearest sign of the shift described in Coffee YouTube: the audience moved to video and social, and the trade’s own awards followed it.

Editions and dating

Editions are numbered rather than dated, and the numbering straddles two calendar years, so a “17th Annual” award is best written as a season rather than a year. Two fixed points anchor the count: the 15th Annual edition opened nominations in December 2023,⁶ and the 17th Annual edition is described by Sprudge as 2025/2026.¹ Both are consistent with a first edition in 2009.¹²

To verify

Individual winners. Sprudge’s own awards page was read for this note and a summary of it named several past winners — Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Four Barrel Coffee and Aida Batlle for 2009; Onyx Coffee Lab and Substance Cafe for 2019; Portrait Coffee and Drip Coffee for 2020. None of these was confirmed against an individual results announcement, and the summary that produced them also mis-stated a sponsor (see below), so it is not reliable at the level of specific names and years. No winner is asserted as fact anywhere in this note. Separately, James Hoffmann’s note records a claimed runner-up placing in the 2023 Sprudgie Awards for best coffee video, sourced from a tertiary page and likewise unchecked against Sprudge’s results.

To verify

A contradiction on the ballot page. The live ballot at sprudge.com/vote is headed as the 17th Annual Sprudgie Awards but its body text refers to “the official nomination ballot for the 16th Annual Sprudgie Awards finalists.”⁷ One of the two is a stale edit. The 17th is the more likely current edition, since the page’s sponsor line and Sprudge’s awards page both say 17th,¹⁷ but the page contradicts itself and the discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved.

To verify

Sponsor history. Pacific Barista Series is confirmed as presenting sponsor of the 17th edition⁷ and as sponsor of the 15th.⁶ A reading of the awards page also mentioned Oatly as a presenting sponsor of a recent edition; no edition-by-edition sponsor list was found, and which years carried which sponsor is unconfirmed.

To verify

The full year-by-year record. Sprudge states a 2009 start and an ongoing annual run,¹² and the report behind this note quotes a Sprudge FAQ saying the awards “will continue in 2024 and beyond.”³ But no archive mapping each ordinal edition to its calendar year and its winners was located, and the awards are not covered at all by the Wikipedia article on Sprudge,⁹ so there is no independent record to check against. Every date and edition number here traces back to Sprudge’s own pages.

Related

• Sprudge — the news site that owns, runs and reports on the awards
• Sprudge Design Awards — Sprudge’s sibling programme, design-only and running since 2023
• Coffee media — the wider trade press, how it is funded, and why its numbers need checking
• Coffee YouTube — the creator economy the influencer and social categories exist to recognise
• World Barista Championship · World Coffee Championships · World Brewers Cup — judged skill competitions, the opposite model
• Cup of Excellence · Best of Panama — cupping-and-auction competitions that produce scores and prices, which the Sprudgies do not
• Good Food Awards — the closest comparison in this wiki: another American awards programme covering roasted coffee, but blind-tasted rather than voted
• Specialty Coffee Association · World Coffee Events — the institutional award-and-competition machinery the Sprudgies sit outside of
• James Hoffmann · Stumptown Coffee Roasters — figures and companies that circulate in Sprudgie coverage
• Specialty coffee · Third wave coffee — the culture whose internal pecking order these awards describe

Official links

• Official site — The Sprudgie Awards
• Official site — Sprudgie Awards ballot
• Official site — Sprudge Design Awards

Footnotes

1. The Sprudgie Awards | Sprudge — the awards’ own page; source of the 2009 first edition, the “Oscars of Coffee” nickname and the 17th Annual (2025/2026) current edition ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. About | Sprudge Coffee — the publisher’s own page; source of the 2009 founding, the Portland base, the founders and the “Oscars of Coffee” self-description ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Frequently Asked Questions — Sprudge Design Awards — cited via the research report behind this note; the live page returned an HTTP 429 rate-limit error on three attempts and was not read directly ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Sprudge Design Awards — the sibling design awards programme ↩

5. Announcing The Second Annual Sprudge Design Award Winners | Sprudge — published 17 January 2025; source of the Design Awards’ public-vote method, the 50,000-vote figure and the second-annual edition that dates the programme’s launch to 2023 ↩

6. Nominations Are Now Open For The 15th Annual Sprudgie Awards | Sprudge — published 18 December 2023; source of the two-stage nomination-then-finalist-vote process, the 8 January deadline, the free-to-enter and no-membership statements and the email anti-bot measure ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

7. The 17th Annual Sprudgie Awards Finalist Nomination Ballot | Sprudge — source of the twelve-category ballot, the optional-voting rule, the Pacific Barista Series sponsor line and the 16th/17th edition contradiction ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

8. Sprudge — “The 17th Annual Sprudgie Awards presented by @baristaseries” (Instagram) — cited via the research report; corroborates the sponsor for the 17th edition ↩

9. Sprudge — Wikipedia — read for this note; contains no mention of the Sprudgie Awards, which is why no independent record of editions or winners could be cross-checked ↩