Specialty Coffee Wiki

Zachary Carlsen

Properties3
descriptionThe American barista-turned-journalist who co-founded Sprudge with Jordan Michelman in 2009 — how a Drudge Report parody written on café Wi-Fi became specialty coffee's daily newsroom, and what is and isn't documented about the man behind it.
tagsperson, united-states, media, journalism, barista, third-wave
aliasesZach Carlsen, Zachary Carlsen Sprudge

7 min read

Zachary Carlsen

Zachary Carlsen is an American coffee journalist and editor. With Jordan Michelman he founded Sprudge in 2009, and the two are still listed as the site’s founders and editors.12 He is based in Portland, Oregon, where Sprudge keeps its mailing address, though the publication describes itself more loosely as based “in the American Pacific Northwest.”12

He is a media figure, not a farmer or a competitor. That matters for a wiki like this one, because most people arrive at a coffee name expecting a farm, a variety or a trophy — and there is none here. What Carlsen did instead was build the place where those farms, varieties and trophies get written about. Almost every English-language coffee story a drinker has read in the last fifteen years passed through a newsroom he half-owns, or through one of its imitators.

Before Sprudge

Carlsen grew up in University Place, Washington, and has known Michelman since childhood.3 He came to writing from behind the bar: before and during Sprudge’s early days he worked as a barista at Starbucks, at Murky Coffee in Washington, D.C., at Ninth Street Espresso in New York City, and at Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Seattle — he was still on Stumptown’s payroll when the site launched.3

That résumé is the reason the site reads the way it does. “Sprudge” is not a word; it is barista slang for the crumbs, splashes and milk spray that coat your clothes by the end of a shift, and someone who had not worked a shift would not have chosen it.

Founding Sprudge

Carlsen and Michelman put the site up on 3 September 2009 as a side project, writing it in cafés.3 It began as The Sprudge Report, a visual parody of the Drudge Report — a wall of sensational headlines, but about coffee.23 Within a few years the joke layout was gone and the thing underneath it was a working newsroom covering cafés, competitions, roasting businesses and the politics of the trade.

The founders took no outside money to start it, and the venture has never been described in any source consulted here as having investors. What it has is a house style: chatty, opinionated, very online, and willing to run a story the trade would rather it didn’t. The full account of the publication — its podcast network, its awards, its sponsors and the one episode that still gets raised against it — is on the Sprudge note; how to weigh it as a source sits in Coffee media.

Carlsen’s name is also attached, as co-owner, to the two awards programmes Sprudge runs: the reader-voted Sprudgie Awards and the Sprudge Design Awards.

To verify

“Chief Espresso Officer.” The research report behind this note records that Carlsen presents himself with this title on LinkedIn.4 It is plainly a joke title rather than a corporate office, and the profile could not be read directly here — LinkedIn blocks automated fetching. Sprudge’s own About page calls him simply a founder and editor.1 Treat the fancier title as self-description on a social profile, not as a role.

Recognition and books

YearRecognitionAwarded to
2013Distinguished Author Award, Specialty Coffee Association of AmericaZachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman2

The 2013 award is worth more than a media prize normally would be, because it came from the trade body itself — the SCAA, one of the two associations that later merged into today’s Specialty Coffee Association. The industry being covered formally applauded the coverage.

The pair have also written two general-audience books together:2

YearBookPublisher
12018The New Rules of Coffee: A Modern Guide For EveryoneTen Speed Press (Penguin Random House)
22023But First, CoffeeUnion Square & Co.

The New Rules of Coffee is the short, illustrated one — 55 rules for how to think about coffee, aimed at someone who has just started caring.3 But First, Coffee is the brewing book: methods and recipes.2 Neither publisher’s own catalogue page could be reached from this machine, so the titles, years and imprints above rest on a single encyclopedic source.

To verify

Nothing lot-level, and nothing competitive. The research report behind this note is explicit that no competition result, cupping score, auction price, buyer, altitude, processing method, farm ownership or producer history exists for Zachary Carlsen in any source it found, and none turned up here either.4 He is not recorded as a producer, an exporter, a World Barista Championship competitor or an auction lot owner. If you find a coffee lot or a farm carrying this name, assume it is a different person until a primary document says otherwise.

To verify

The personal biography, and what he does day to day. No birth year, education, family detail or prior career outside coffee was found in any source consulted. His current editorial output could not be checked either: the obvious author-archive address on Sprudge (sprudge.com/author/zachary-carlsen) does not resolve to a byline page. He is listed as a founder-editor on the About page today,1 which is the strongest current statement available — it does not say how much he writes, edits or owns.

Why he matters

Specialty coffee spent the 2000s inventing a vocabulary — single origin, direct trade, third wave, the roaster as author — and had almost nowhere to publish it. Trade associations wrote standards nobody read; roasters wrote marketing. Two friends with barista jobs and a rhyming domain name filled the gap, and the gap turned out to be enormous.

The consequence is structural, and this wiki lives with it daily. When a note here cites a competition placing, an auction price or a café closure, the chain of custody very often runs back through Sprudge — which means back through editorial decisions Carlsen and Michelman made. That is a lot of influence for a publication with no institution above it, and it is exactly why Coffee media argues that trade press should be trusted for narrative and checked for numbers. Carlsen built the narrative machine; the numbers still need the auction house.

He also belongs to a recognisable generation. James Hoffmann won a title and became a teacher; Duane Sorenson built a roastery that trained half the American trade; Carlsen and Michelman skipped both and built the record of it. Different jobs, same wave.

Footnotes

  1. About | Sprudge Coffee — the publication’s own About page; source of “Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman are the founders and editors of Sprudge,” the Pacific Northwest / Portland, Oregon base, and the editorial staff list — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Sprudge — Wikipedia — independent source for the 2009 founding and co-founder role, the Portland base, The Sprudge Report / Drudge Report parody, the 2013 SCAA Distinguished Author Award, and both books with publishers and years — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. The Fathers of the Coffee Internet — Taste Cooking — independent profile of both founders; source of the University Place, Washington childhood and lifelong friendship, the barista jobs at Starbucks, Murky Coffee, Ninth Street Espresso and Stumptown, the 3 September 2009 launch date, the cafés-and-Wi-Fi working method, and the description of The New Rules of Coffee — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  4. Research report compiled for this note — records the LinkedIn “Chief Espresso Officer” self-description and states explicitly that no competition results, cupping scores, prices, buyers, altitudes, processing details or producer history were found for this name ↩ ↩2

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