Sprudge

Sprudge is a specialty-coffee news site founded in 2009 by Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman, and run out of the American Pacific Northwest — Portland, Oregon — with editors and contributors worldwide.¹² For most English-speaking coffee drinkers it is the closest thing the trade has to a daily newspaper: if a café opened, a champion was crowned, a roaster was bought or a barista got fired, Sprudge is usually where the story first appeared.

It is not an official body. Unlike the Specialty Coffee Association, the Coffee Quality Institute or the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Sprudge certifies nobody, sets no standards and runs no auctions. It reports on the organisations that do. That distinction is the whole reason to read it carefully, and it is the argument made at length in Coffee media.

The name

“Sprudge” is barista slang, not a word. The site’s own About page defines it as the “coffee crumbs, blotches, and splats present on a barista’s clothing and shoes after a long shift” — the fine spray of grounds and milk that coats your trousers and shoes by the end of a busy service.¹ The founders have described it in interviews as exactly that: the residue of the job.

The rhyme came first, though. The site launched as The Sprudge Report, which for its first three months was, in Wikipedia’s phrase, “a direct visual parody of the Drudge Report” — the wall-of-links American news aggregator, restyled with sensational coffee headlines.² Taste Cooking, which profiled both founders, calls it “a caffeine-fueled spoof of the Drudge Report—hence the rhyming name.”³

From aggregator to newsroom

Carlsen and Michelman are childhood friends who grew up together in University Place, Washington, and started the site as a side project.³ Taste Cooking gives the exact launch date as 3 September 2009; Wikipedia and the site’s own pages confirm the year but not the day.³¹²

The timing explains a lot. In 2009 Starbucks had just reached 16,635 stores internationally and was still most Americans’ benchmark for good coffee, while third-wave coffee — single origins, pour-overs, latte art, the roaster as author — was only beginning to rise.³ There was no trade newsroom covering that shift daily, and the aggregated-links format worked because someone finally gathered the industry’s scattered news in one place.³ As the industry grew, Sprudge dropped the Drudge-style layout and moved into original reporting.³²

What it covers now, in Wikipedia’s summary, is “the modern specialty coffee industry, coffee history, and coffee within cultural and sociopolitical contexts.”² Its own framing is broader still: interviews with “restaurateurs, chefs, baristas, bartenders, entrepreneurs, small business owners, artists, ceramicists, and cafe creators,” and examinations of coffee’s “colonial legacy.”¹ In practice that means competition coverage (World Barista Championship, World Brewers Cup), auction and origin reporting (Cup of Excellence, Best of Panama), café openings, business news, and long history features — on the evolution of the café menu, on coffee’s links to religious practice among Oromo peoples and Sufi mystics, and on the natural hybridisation that produced Coffea arabica.⁴⁵⁶

The network

Sprudge is a small network rather than a single blog. The Sprudge Media Network is the parent; Wikipedia names Sprudge Maps, Sprudge Live and Sprudge Wire as sister sites.² The About page today foregrounds Sprudge Maps — a directory of coffee bars, built with Apple Maps — and Sprudge Special Projects, a long-form strand supported by the espresso machine maker La Marzocco.¹

It also calls itself “the world’s first coffee podcast network,” and lists seven shows: The Coffee Sprudgecast, No Free Refills, A Better Table, Seed To Cup, Cascara, In Good Taste and Hype Juice.¹ The Sprudgecast, the flagship, launched in 2016 and interviews business owners, baristas and others across the coffee world.²¹

Two recurring franchises are worth knowing by name. The Build-Outs of Coffee documents new café construction and design, and Sprudge Twenty, run in partnership with the barista-milk brand Pacific Barista Series, names people the site considers industry leaders.¹ Sprudge also owns two awards programmes: the Sprudgie Awards, its reader-voted “Oscars of Coffee,” and the separate Sprudge Design Awards for packaging, products and art.¹

Recognition

	Year	Recognition	Awarded to
1	2013	Distinguished Author Award, Specialty Coffee Association of America	Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen2
2	2017	Webby Award Honoree, Cultural Blog/Website	Sprudge Media Network2

The 2013 award matters more than a media prize normally would, 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 it covers formally recognised its coverage.

The founders have also written two general-audience books: The New Rules of Coffee: A Modern Guide For Everyone (2018, Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House) and But First, Coffee (2023, Union Square & Co.).²

In 2018 Sprudge partnered with South by Southwest to curate a Roasters Village, an extension of the festival’s SouthBites Trailer Park food programme; the concept survives on the site as a spotlight on interesting coffees available to buy online.²

The Bitter Barista episode

Sprudge published the identity of the anonymous author of a blog called The Bitter Barista, and the author lost their job as a result.² It is the episode most often raised when the site’s editorial judgement is questioned, and it illustrates the difference between a trade newsletter and a newsroom: an editorial decision with real consequences for a named person, made with no institution standing above the publisher.

How to use Sprudge as a source

Sprudge earns its money from the industry it covers — sponsored strands like Special Projects carry the La Marzocco credit openly, and franchises like Sprudge Twenty are run with a brand partner.¹ This is normal for a trade press of this size; there is no advertiser-independent funder for coffee journalism. But it means the practical rule set out in Coffee media applies here too:

• Excellent for narrative, access and context. Sprudge gets the interview, is at the competition, and explains a method clearly.
• Secondary for anything numerical. A cupping score, an auction price, a lot size or a competition placing should be traced back to the auction house or the official results sheet before it is treated as settled — including on this wiki, where Sprudge is cited often.

To verify

“The world’s most popular coffee publication.” Sprudge makes this claim of itself on its About page.¹ No audited traffic figure, comparative ranking or circulation audit was found for Sprudge or for any competitor. A third-party interview quoted in the research report behind this note goes further and calls it “probably the world’s most important coffee news company,” which is a journalist’s opinion, not a measurement. Treat both as self-description and reputation, not fact.

To verify

What Sprudge Live and Sprudge Wire actually are. Wikipedia names both as sister sites of the Sprudge Media Network but describes neither.² The About page read for this note lists Sprudge Maps and Sprudge Special Projects but does not mention Live or Wire,¹ so the two sources disagree on what the network currently contains. Plausible readings — Live as competition live-blogging, Wire as a newswire — are inferences from the names and are not asserted here. Whether either is still running is unconfirmed.

To verify

The Bitter Barista timeline. Wikipedia is the only source consulted for this episode and gives no date, no publication link and no detail about the employer or the sequence of events.² The research report behind this note dated it to roughly 2013 without a citation. Nothing beyond the bare fact of the outing and the job loss should be repeated.

To verify

Roasters Village contents. Wikipedia records the 2018 SXSW partnership and the surviving online shopping feature,² but no source consulted lists the specific coffees, roasters, prices or scores that have appeared in it. Nothing lot-level about Roasters Village can be stated.

To verify

Ownership and business structure. Sprudge is consistently described as founded and run by Carlsen and Michelman,¹²³ and Michelman has said in interview that it started “without any kind of investment or backing.” No company registration, equity split or later investor was found in any source consulted, so the legal ownership of the Sprudge Media Network is simply unknown here.

Related

• Coffee media — the wider trade press, how it is funded, and why its numbers need checking
• Sprudgie Awards · Sprudge Design Awards — the two awards programmes Sprudge owns and runs
• Zachary Carlsen · Jordan Michelman — the founders and editors
• Perfect Daily Grind — the other outlet that carries most of the English-language coffee beat, education-first rather than news-first
• Coffee YouTube — where the biggest coffee audiences went, and a beat Sprudge now covers
• James Hoffmann · Barista Hustle — individual-scale coffee publishing, the competitor-turned-educator model
• Specialty Coffee Association · Coffee Quality Institute · World Coffee Events — the institutions Sprudge reports on rather than belongs to
• World Barista Championship · Cup of Excellence · Best of Panama — events whose results reach most readers through the press rather than the source
• Specialty coffee · Third wave coffee — the movement Sprudge launched alongside and helped document
• History of coffee — the subject of much of its long-form work
• La Marzocco · Starbucks — the sponsor behind Special Projects, and the benchmark the third wave defined itself against

Official links

• Official site — Sprudge
• Official site — Sprudge About page

Footnotes

1. About | Sprudge Coffee — the publication’s own About page; source of the 2009 founding, the founders, the Pacific Northwest/Portland base, the “sprudge” etymology, the editorial staff, Sprudge Maps and Special Projects, the seven-podcast network, Build-Outs of Coffee, Sprudge Twenty, both awards programmes, the La Marzocco and Pacific Barista Series credits, and the “world’s most popular coffee publication” self-description — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. Sprudge — Wikipedia — independent source for the 2009 founding and founders, The Sprudge Report / Drudge Report parody, the Sprudge Maps / Live / Wire sister sites, the editorial focus, the 2013 SCAA Distinguished Author Award, the 2017 Webby honouree listing, the Bitter Barista episode, the 2016 Sprudgecast launch, both books with publishers and years, and the 2018 SXSW Roasters Village — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

3. The Fathers of the Coffee Internet — Taste Cooking — independent profile of the founders; source of the 3 September 2009 launch date, the University Place, Washington childhood, the Drudge spoof and rhyming name, the shift from aggregation to reporting, and the 2009 Starbucks figure of 16,635 international stores — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. A Brief History Of The Specialty Coffee Menu | Sprudge — example of the site’s long-form history writing, cited via the research report behind this note ↩

5. The Unexpected History Of Coffee, Religion And Faith | Sprudge — example of its cultural and religious history coverage, cited via the research report ↩

6. Explore The History of Arabica On Sprudge Special Projects — example of the Special Projects strand, cited via the research report ↩