20 Years of Coffee and the Internet – Part 1: Baratza

I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe that this website, which has been a core part of my being for so long, is 20 years old this year, this month. But there it is: CoffeeGeek is officially 20 years old as of this writing.

Twenty years is a lifetime and then some on the Internet. And that lifetime of this website could be the scope of this series of blog posts I have planned: how CoffeeGeek started, what the Internet was like back then, what stages we went through with the website, achievements we had, community we built, yada yada. But as I put pen to paper, that’s not the scope I want to cover.

Instead, I want to talk about many of the people and companies that came along during the last twenty years of specialty coffee. Many have interacted with the community we built on CoffeeGeek; many have been part of that community. Many have gone on to great things in specialty coffee, developing multimillion dollar businesses, teaching hundreds of thousands of people how to make better coffee, and even have learned skills to share their passion for specialty coffee with their neighbours, friends and family. These stories I want to share are so long; I’ll split them up into 3 parts. This is the first one.

Any conversation about the whos, whats, and hows of CoffeeGeek has to start with two people: Kyle Anderson, and Kyra Kennedy from Baratza, full stop. Because if it wasn’t for Baratza, I wouldn’t have found my way in specialty coffee early on, and it’s quite possible this website would have ceased to exist in its first year. 

Baratza

When this site was in a closed beta test, having launched on Dec 12, 2001, I already had a working relationship with Kyle and Kyra; I was introduced to them by Joe Monaghan from La Marzocco, and Barry Jarrett, a guy I knew through the alt.coffee usenet newsgroup a few years before. This was back when Kyle and Kyra first formed Baratza and were importing espresso machines from Solis, and trying to sell roasted coffee from a local roaster. We hit it off, and they hired my web design company to build their first Baratza.com website, using the same software that would eventually run this website. They were (and remain) truly special people: easy to work with, very friendly, and extremely ethical in their business practices.

I showed Kyle and Kyra my plans for CoffeeGeek, and how I wanted it to be an information, education, and community hub for people who loved specialty coffee. Nothing else like it existed online during this pre Facebook, pre YouTube, pre Twitter, heck pre Myspace days of the internet. They were so entirely enthusiastic and encouraging about the project, that even before we created one line of code for the website, they wanted to support it and be our primary advertisers. 

And they were. Indeed, they were the very first advertiser on this website, and 20 years later, they have never, ever missed a beat in that support. But there’s even more to the story.

2002 was a pretty bad year for me financially, and while I had lots of volunteers writing for CoffeeGeek, most of my paid work in my regular job and career had dried up. In January and February of 2002, when CoffeeGeek officially launched and came out of beta, Kyle and Kyra were talking up the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s trade show coming that spring, and how I should attend and cover it (no one had ever reported from the SCAA Trade Show, at least online, by that point in time). I told them I couldn’t afford it, so they ended up sponsoring my trip – airfare and hotel – in exchange for me putting in a few hours at their booth: the rest of my time could be my own, reporting from the trade show. 

That first year covering the SCAA trade show and convention in Anaheim in 2002 opened up an insane amount of doors for me and this website. I met George Howell for the first time (the grandfather of specialty coffee on the east coast and the primary founder of the Cup of Excellence); I met Doug Zell, the then-owner of Intelligentsia Coffee. I met vendors and manufacturers who in turn learned about CoffeeGeek for the first time and signed on as advertisers, sponsors and supplied products for us to review. I met future writers. I met future friends in specialty coffee.

Attending that show literally changed my path in life.

And I owe it to Kyle Anderson, and Kyra Kennedy. Because if I had not attended that show, there’s a good chance CoffeeGeek would have died a slow death in 2002, the same year it launched. Who knows where I would have been instead – working some government job, being a wedding photographer (God help me), who knows.

Instead, I discovered and embraced specialty coffee in several roles: as a student, as an educator, as a community leader, and as a critic of the industry and products, always speaking for consumers. 

That latter role – the industry critic as well as a fair and honest product reviewer, was something I embraced early and this is another area that Baratza and Kyle and Kyra shined. They always expected – nay, demanded – that I be fair, honest, and objective when reviewing their products, and they never expected preferential treatment or glossy kind words in return for their early support. I cannot say the same for many of the other companies I’ve been involved with, when it comes to the reviews of their products and services.

The behind the scenes ethics and trust Kyle and Kyra both showed and really helped chart how we developed and did product reviews on CoffeeGeek. The same went for the thousands of consumer-written reviews we hosted over the years: not once did the Baratza owners ask me to edit, delete, or censor any third party consumer review, even the ones that covered really negative experiences. Again, I cannot say the same for too many other companies.

Kyle especially has become a mentor of mine over the years, and he probably doesn’t even know it. He’s an incredibly smart business person (both he and Kyra are), and every time I’ve chatted with him I feel I learn something: something about how to live life, how to conduct business, how to interact better with people (a definite weakness of mine). If I am 1/10th the person he is, I’d be fortunate.

Kyle also has gone to incredible lengths to help me in my own ventures. I remember I was trying to host public tasting and educational sessions at cafes in Vancouver in 2008, and I wanted to do something on the importance of the grinder to quality coffee in the home. I talked to Kyle about my plans, and he just straight up volunteered to drive up from Seattle to Vancouver to speak at one of the hosted events. On his own dime. And the event was completely sold out as a result. He’s just that kind of guy.

And Kyra. Kyra is one of my biggest cheerleaders in the specialty coffee universe. She always has great feedback and I cannot recall a single time we’ve ever talked where she wasn’t upbeat and filled with positivity. Especially in the early days of CoffeeGeek, I always enjoyed and embraced that.

I owe these folks more than they will ever know. If you ever got anything out of reading and participating in the CoffeeGeek community or on the website, you owe these fine folks as well, because without their early support, this website might have never survived its first year.

Next time around, I’ll introduce you to some of the other people and companies that helped CoffeeGeek take off and thrive in the early 2000s, and how barista competitions became a very important part of this website for a while.

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.