Now We're Wired
Coffee and tea communities on the Web
by Chris Ryan

As the summer of 2001 winded down, Mark Prince was working at a software development company and spending his free time developing a Web site called Coffee Kid—a place where he discussed his opinions about coffee and espresso. Then the events of September 11 transpired, and things changed for Prince. His employer lost $250,000 of work scheduled over the next six months, and Prince was left with little work for his staff and little money to pay them with. It was then that he decided to live on his company’s line of credit so he could pursue an idea he had been considering for a while: the creation of a community Web site—called CoffeeGeek—that could serve as the focal point for a worldwide coffee and espresso community. “For the next two and a half months, my entire company worked on designing the first version of CoffeeGeek,” Prince says. “So CoffeeGeek was kind of born out of 9/11.”

CoffeeGeek launched in December 2001 and has since become the comprehensive Web community Prince intended, offering frequently updated content, reviews, forums and more. The site boasts roughly 25,000 members, receives nearly 700,000 visitors a month and is one of many online communities now available to specialty coffee and tea enthusiasts and professionals. With an array of Web sites espousing the virtues and discussing the details of coffee and tea, a buzz is surfacing that is helping the sites attract legions of Internet surfers and significant attention for the industry.

CoffeeGeek is a truly comprehensive community for specialty coffee, offering not only forums for member discussions, but news, product reviews and podcasts. And the site has always been on the cutting edge of technology as one of the first to allow visitors to leave comments on individual articles and to allow its members to rank and rate the qualities of others’ reviews—features that are commonplace on blogs these days. “We really tried to foster a sense of community—a sense of identifying who the community leaders were by establishing a site ranking system that would reward people who were the most helpful within the community,” Prince says.

Forums for discussion

While forums are one feature of CoffeeGeek, there are many online communities in the specialty beverage industry that are more closely centered around the forum concept. Free software can be downloaded to Web forums for participants to post and read messages and to create dialogues. A good starting place for those wanting to jump into an industry forum is the SCAA’s scaa.org, which includes a retailer forum, a sustainability forum and a general forum. Mike Ferguson, SCAA marketing communications director, says that moderators look after the sites to ensure quality postings and to remove spam. “As a trade association, we have some obligations in terms of content, but we try to keep them as free flowing as we can,” Ferguson says. “I can only think of two or three times in seven years that we’ve ever interceded or removed a post, other than spam.”

Two other SCAA-related forums are the Roasters Guild and the Barista Guild of America—both of which are more active than the aforementioned SCAA sites. Both Guild forums have public and private forums, and Ferguson says the Barista Guild is the more heavily frequented of the two. “The Barista [Guild] is easily the most active, although the Roasters Guild member board is pretty active,” he says. “You never see a day go by without a post on the Barista Guild member forum. You may see a day or two go by on the Roasters Guild forum. … On our association forums, you can see several days or weeks go by.”

Another coffee industry forum is Coffeed.com, which creator Alistair Durie started to “provide coffee professionals with a place to exchange ideas, research and opinion.” The site has about 280 members and a strict policy about its membership. Whereas members used to apply to become a member, registration is now granted on an invitation-only basis and is limited. In fact, membership is so exclusive that some sources interviewed for this story spoke favorably of Coffeed but wanted to keep Durie’s name a secret. Durie says he doesn’t wish to disassociate his name from Coffeed, but he does prefer to keep the site small. “I believe in focused interest groups,” he says, “A smaller group of people will get to know each other and be more productive together than any large crowd.”

Durie says the small group of members keeps the number of post counts low, the forum manageable for reading and the content quality high. Though only members can post, anyone can read the site, and Durie expects readership to continue to rise. Billy Wilson, barista/co-owner of The Albina Press in Portland, Ore., says he doesn’t visit many coffee-related forums, but he makes a point of checking in regularly at Coffeed, where he is a member. “As far as heavy hitters and people in the industry that I go to learn from, they’re all sitting right there,” Wilson says. “If there’s anything I’m going to post on, it’d be Coffeed.”

Implementing the blog

While forums have existed since the dawn of the Internet, the blog (short for Web log) has emerged as a hot trend in the last few years. A blog is essentially a journal intended for public consumption, and millions of bloggers rant and rave daily on topics from fashion to music to, yes, coffee. One popular industry site that features a blog is Viva Barista, the work of Matt Milletto of Bellissimo Coffee InfoGroup. The Web site collects blog entries, articles, stories from baristas and more.

As a community site, Viva Barista’s content is generated by a combination of writers. Milletto plans to expand that vision in 2007. “I’m going to focus a little more time into the Web site,” he says, “putting together a group of people from all over the world who are going to be contributing more regularly.” The Web site has about 500 registered members, and its most popular feature is its employment resources. “I have companies from all over the world now posting jobs,” says Milletto. “I just recently had someone from Vienna, Austria, post job needs.”

Another blog-based site with a twist is T Ching, a tea-themed Web site started by Michelle Rabin and Sandy M. Bushberg, psychologists who moved from the East Coast to Oregon three years ago to focus on health and wellness, particularly tea. “We’ve really been focusing… to see how can we bring tea to the United States in a bigger way,” says Rabin. “The biggest undertaking was really an educational effort to help people wrap their brain around the fact that, here is this beverage that everybody can drink and that could have a profound impact on your health and wellness.” To convey their message, Rabin and Bushberg enlisted tea professionals such as author James Norwood Pratt and tea importer Ankit Lochan, both of whom contribute regularly to the Web site.

Another blog-style site generated by a community effort is Portafilter.net, created by Nick Cho of Murky Coffee. Cho wanted to create a place for coffee people to initiate discussions. “My idea was, ‘Let’s create kind of a dream team blogging group where certain individuals are able to post, and people are free to comment on it and converse with each other that way.’ ” Cho and cohorts such as Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee and Matt Riddle of Intelligentsia Coffee update the site regularly with an array of coffee news. Another feature of the site is a coffee-news podcast that Cho regularly records with co-host Jay Caragay of Jay’s Shave Ice. “The podcast for me was born from wanting to have some kind of TV show or radio show devoted just to coffee professionals—not about coffee professionals, but for coffee professionals,” Cho says.

A lot of professionals are blogging, and it’s no longer unusual for coffeehouse owners to maintain their own sites. Brian Franklin, owner of DoubleShot Coffee in Tulsa, Okla., uses his blog to update customers on goings on at the store and to post his regular podcast. The blog allows him an additional connection to customers, and people will often comment at the counter about what they read in the blog or hear in his podcast. “The store is me, really, so whatever’s going on in my head is pretty much what’s going on in the store,” he says. “The more outlets there are for that, the better it is to get people joined together with the company. People want to feel like they’re a part of the company and not just coming here to get coffee.”

Wave of the future

Coffee and tea information can be packaged online in many ways, but there is a uniting characteristic to all of it: the good that it does the industry to dispense the information. As the industry grows, many see the Internet as the most important tool to help in the process. “The Internet is a powerful, powerful thing,” says Cho. “It is a tool to push the conversation forward.” Cho encourages everyone in the coffee industry to become active online because of how much industry progress is being made as a result. But he says more people need to get involved. “It’s just as interesting who’s not discussing things or not participating,” he says. “That’s actually the larger segment of the industry.”

Prince says Web-based communities are playing—and will continue to play—an integral part in educating consumers about quality coffee. “The Internet has driven specialty coffee since probably the mid-’90s,” he says. “It just keeps getting bigger … and there’s nothing but good out of that. Overall, I don’t think anything has had an impact on improving the availability and quality of specialty coffee as much as the Internet.”

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