In 2025, we published over 200 articles on Sprudge. 228 exactly. I should know. I wrote them. (It’s me, hello, it’s me with the problem.)
2025 was honestly a strange year for coffee. The biggest stories, by any objective metric, were U.S. tariffs pushing the entire coffee industry toward global reorganization, if not outright collapse, and the continued unionization efforts sweeping the nation (and resulting anti-union efforts). Add to that some scientific articles on the health of coffee and news about how people are trying to protect the future of coffee from climate uncertainty, and you have a pretty good picture of the state of coffee in 2025.
But these are not the stories I care about, at least when it comes to summarizing the year. Stories that make me express a different side of specialty coffee. Often silly and perhaps a little out of touch with reality, they remind me of raucous coffee times before the word “specialty” became a common adjective. Back when specialty coffee seemed inferior and we were all thumbing our noses. Some of these articles remain true (Hello Starbucks, thank you for reading).
The rest is attenuated to the same frequency, but in a different way. These articles are about being a Coffee Person©. The idea is to look at the wider, crazy world through the prism of specialty coffee. Because that’s what happens when you love something so much that it affects every part of your life. That’s what these stories are like. They say that coffee is fun because coffee is fun. It is also very earnest and affects the lives of millions, if not billions. But it’s also fun. It can be both.
In 2026, there will come a time when coffee becomes earnest again. I’m sure it will happen whether we want it or not. But at the end of 2025, I decide to look back at the stories that made me the happiest. The ones I had the most fun writing and I hope you enjoyed reading as much.
There will be more of these next year, because I am chronically unable to take myself and what has come to define me too seriously. Here are some of my favorite pieces of news from 2025.
Fudge Pot
Crowk’s pot is a crow-shaped moka pot
There was probably no story more popular this year than Krówka Garnek. It’s a moka pot in the shape of a crow. It’s a stupid play on words that honestly had no reason to be as gigantic of a hit as it was. Except that it was executed flawlessly. 2025 was the Year of the Moka Pot and Crowka Pot was the It Girl.
Serving espresso macchiato at Eurovision
Please listen immediately to “Espresso Macchiato” – Estonia’s official entry for Eurovision 2025
As a coffee lover, I get excited when words about coffee are used internationally (which is basically the only reason I’ve written about Sabrina Carpenter as many times as I have). So when Estonian singer and rapper Tommy Cash invited to Eurovision, the most watched non-sporting event in the world, it was a gigantic deal. It helps that the song is hypnotically weird and has an equally weird music video to boot.
Coffee on the Bear
“Niedźwiedź” now has a coffee program (and we have questions)
Talking about coffee in a larger zeitgeist. The fourth season of the popular FX series The Bear premiered earlier this year and showed Carmie and his team struggling to keep up under the weight of running a gourmet restaurant. One of the additions to The Bear restaurant was a coffee machine. And let’s just say that the series, praised for its realistic portrayal of restaurant life, does an excellent job of dealing with the inequities of coffee service in fine dining. Who knows if it was intentional or not.
There is no wrong way to do Fufu
Nékojita FuFu is here to save you from coffee that’s too heated
We see a lot of silly coffee gadgets here at Sprudge. (See: Fudge.) The easiest way for a possibly unnecessary invention to get our attention is to be extremely cute. That’s what Nékojita Fufu is. Couldn’t I blow the coffee myself if it needed to be chilled? Of course I could, but then I’d have a cute little buddy to hang from my cup.
Starbucksing things
Starbucks just introduced an 8-ounce Cortado
The term Columbus describes a situation where a person claims to have discovered something that has been around for years. There is a coffee version of Columbusing, where a gigantic corporation “discovers” something and objectively makes the situation worse. It’s called Starbucksing. They did this with a cortado, which they say is an 8-ounce drink. They did it thanks to comfortable sofas and the atmosphere of a 90s café, secret menus and even barista competitions. And that was just from this year.
101-year-old barista
The oldest barista in Italy has just turned 101
My two absolute favorite stories of the year happened two days apart. The first was Anna Possi, who turned 101. Possi is the owner of Bar Centrale in the northern Italian town of Nebbiuno, where she has worked since the 1950s. He’s still shooting and has no plans to snail-paced down any time soon. We could all be so lucky.
Let the bird drink a little coffee
Hero Ptak arrested for *allegedly* stealing coffee
The second story is about a guy, a yellow-crowned Amazon parrot, who allegedly stole coffee from alleged customers at a cafe in Seoul. Allegedly. There are some questions about how he (allegedly) stole the coffee and what kind of coffee it was, but the gigantic question is: who stole it? Mind your own business. Let my boy saturated his beak.
Tori Amos, creator of pumpkin spice lattes?
Did Tori Amos invent the pumpkin spice latte? Investigation
I thought I knew everything about the Pumpkin Spice Latte. At least as much as I wanted to know. Then an article from a 1990s Seattle alternative weekly resurfaced, providing concrete evidence that singer Tori Amos was the progenitor of PSL. Over 10 years before Starbucks introduced it (another Starbucksing).
One last time for David Lynch
David Lynch loved coffee and coffee loved David Lynch
David Lynch died earlier this year. He was an iconic TV and film author and a coffee fanatic (who owned not one, but two GS3 coffee machines). He was the first renowned coffee drinker and left an indelible mark on many personalities in the world of specialty coffee. Many articles were written about Lynch after his death, and rather than join in the eulogies, we dug deep into the Sprudge archives to find some accounts of Lynch during his lifetime. We hope that in this way we have been able to show how significant Lynch and his work was to people in the coffee world, not only after his death, but in real time.
Thank you for joining Sprudge and following coffee stories, gigantic and compact. It was very similar to the world in which it happened: strange, uncertain, and generally confused. But I hope it was also humorous at times. See you in 2026 to keep you updated on the coffee stories that matter and hopefully also the ones that don’t. Either way, that’s where the good stuff is.
