It’s CoffeeGeek’s 20th Anniversary this Month!

I’m so excited and to be honest, I can’t believe it. It’s been twenty years, as of February 3, 2022, that CoffeeGeek has been online! We launched as a private beta on December 12, 2001, but officially launched (with very early community oriented features) 20 years ago today! That’s centuries in Internet time, and we plan to celebrate this milestone in style, all month long. 

Giant Giveaway Contest!

First and foremost, our 20th Anniversary Sweepstakes Giveaway, open to people in the USA and Canada, is the biggest giveaway contest we’ve ever had with over $7,000 in prizes! And you can gain multiple entries into the random drawing, improving your chances of winning some amazing specialty coffee gear.

We have two Grand Prizes in our Sweepstakes Giveaway:

• Whole Latte Love, a Grand Prize sponsor, is providing an ECM Classica PID Espresso Machine with Tiger Wood Maple Components, a $2,200 value machine, to one lucky winner in the USA or Canada.
• iDrinkCoffee, our other Grand Prize Sponsor, is providing an ECM Puristika Espresso machine, valued at $2,100 CAD, to one lucky winner in the USA or Canada.

We also have some fantastic prizes from other companies as well. 

• 1st in Coffee is donating a Jura Super Automatic, TBD, to one lucky winner in the USA.
• Breville has graciously donated a Barista Pro Espresso machine, valued at $800, to a lucky winner in the USA or Canada.
• Baratza is offering up a Sette 270 grinder, valued at $400, and will ship to one lucky winner in the USA or Canada.
• Aeropress Inc. is offering up an Aeropress Coffee Brewer to three lucky winners, in the USA and Canada. 

All told, there’s over $7,000 in prizes, which makes this the biggest ever giveaway we’ve ever had on CoffeeGeek. There’s a whopping 18 different ways you can enter the contest, which can really increase your odds of winning; and one of the entries (tweet about our contest) can be entered daily, increasing your entries even more!

The full contest details can be found here, and the contest runs from 8am February 3, 2022 to 11:59pm, February 28, 2022 (all times PST).

Celebrating CoffeeGeek’s History

Almost every day this month, we’re going to be rolling out content that celebrates CoffeeGeek’s history, and looks forward to our future of celebrating awesome specialty coffee and continuing to grow our global community. I don’t want to give all the surprises away, but here’s just some of the things you can look forward to:

• A complete redo and revisit of the very first Detailed Review we ever published. Back on December 12, 2001, as we were building this website for the first time, we needed content to populate it at launch; that’s when I worked another coffee professional and also sought advice from the owner of a very popular photography website at the time about what we should focus on when doing hyper-detailed reviews of high end coffee equipment. With their help, I authored two “launch” detailed reviews. For our 20th Anniversary, I’m redoing one of those product reviews – from scratch – to not only pay homage to one of our founding principles on this website, but also because this particular product is stunningly beautiful and functional to this day.
• Complete re-write of the most popular Guide we’ve ever hosted, relaunching it as a CoffeeGeek MasterClass. This is something I’ve had in the works for several months: a complete update to what was the most popular and most-read guide we hosted in the 20 years of CoffeeGeek. When we launched the new version of this website last year, I still had not fine tuned the Guide section, so this project was put on the back burner. To celebrate our 20th Anniversary, well be launching our new MasterClass section at the end of February. What Guide is it? I’d like to keep that a surprise, but the original guide changed how professional baristas approached and steamed milk for espresso.
• Daily Blog Posts highlighting past content on CoffeeGeek. During our 20th Anniversary event, we’ll be diving into the CoffeeGeek archives, and re-publishing original content from our past, written by a wide variety of authors. I’ll give some background and information about that content and why I hope it’s just as enjoyable reading today as it was when it was first published.
• There’s also a lot more coming, including some feature interviews, retrospective pieces on some of the major events this website covered, our forum and product review community, and a lot more.

I want to end for now by thanking each and everyone one of you reading this. We’ve seen a lot of people interested in coffee come and go over the years vis a vis this website. Many world class baristas got their start in our forums. Many folks who now make a career out of coffee learned their first bits about specialty coffee from the content we published. Many of you first learned about barista competitions, trade shows, and unique, rare products for coffee through this website. 

How many of our past members and website visitors still visit, I don’t know, but if you’re reading this, I really want to thank you for staying a loyal reader, and for sharing your passion about specialty coffee and espresso. My sincere hope is, we continue to develop and improve our community aspects for this website in the coming year and next, bringing back some of the best features of this website’s history.

Mark has certified as a Canadian, USA, and World Barista Championship Judge in both sensory and technical fields, as well as working as an instructor in coffee and espresso training. He started CoffeeGeek in 2001.