The State of the Pourover

Musings on the past and future of this newsletter, plus an announcement.

Lately, I think I care less about coffee as a drink, the extraction and the flavors and all that, and more about all the stuff around the drink. I’m interested in the people who grow it and make it, the history, the politics and power structures, the way it shapes the world.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the direction of the Pourover over the past few months. What its purpose is, what it should focus on, what it provides to readers and also to myself.

This newsletter (it used to be a website/blog) grew out of an attempt to keep in touch with the coffee industry while I was away (delivering mail in Aberdeen, Scotland, since you asked). It was originally focused on the drink—I used to write coffee reviews, for one thing—but it’s become much more. It has grown to include a weekly coffee news roundup (now hosted exclusively by Fresh Cup Magazine) and a biweekly deep dive into a topic that interests me within the industry.

I’ve written about good decaf and dark roasts, about climate change (a lot), tried to give a voice to farmers and unionizing baristas and I’ve also somehow interviewed a bestselling author-turned-Youtuber. I still don’t know exactly what the focus of the Pourover is, other than “interesting coffee topics”, but I guess we’ll find out together.

I’m pretty proud of what I’ve covered and how I’ve covered it, but in 2024 I’d like to raise the quality and try to make the Pourover even better.

I’ve also heard from various people expressing surprise that I don’t have paid subscriptions—the reason I give is that I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to go that route (or procrastinating and putting it off, depending on your outlook).

So I guess the start of 2024 is as good a time as any to say: Hey why not support the Pourover with a paid subscription?

I’m not going to do a hard sell (I’m not even that comfortable with how often I’ve used the word ‘I’ in this piece) but basically, becoming a paid subscriber will help me hire an editor to improve the quality of my writing, and potentially allow me to collaborate with others—for example, I have an idea for a project but it entails both being in a coffee-producing country and speaking another language, so I would need to find someone who is both of those things to help me.

Beyond that, if you enjoy my writing and think that it brings something worthwhile to the coffee industry, supporting me will allow me to continue and, one day, expand to more written pieces here (I currently do this around my day job, so I’m usually scrabbling to get things finished in time).

What will you get in return? Right now, nothing will change. The biweekly deep dives will always be free, I’m not going to paywall anything to convince you to subscribe. Eventually there will be exclusives for paid subscribers, subjects that are interesting but too small to warrant a whole article or stories from the news roundup that I think need more focus and discussion (I have a few ideas already).

Beyond that, I don’t know. We’ll see. And if nobody signs up for a paid subscription that’s also fine! This really is a labor of love for me—I’ve been writing the Pourover for nearly eight years (!) and I’ll continue to do so until I run out of things to write about.

(A quick note about Substack: it’s a... controversial platform, to say the least, and has become even more so with the recent news that it allows neo-Nazis to write and monetize their work. Hopefully the current pressure will make a difference, but it’s a tricky situation and one that I’ll have to keep an eye on in the coming weeks.)

If you have any feedback, any this-is-less-of-a-question-and-more-of-a-comments, have a tip or ideas for topics you think I should cover, or just want to tell me my writing is too political, reply to this email or leave a comment.

Thanks for reading the Pourover. I’ll be back soon with more articles, but if you’ve made it this far, I would love to also reintroduce our neighbor cat Merlin, an extremely old and extremely grumpy lady who closes out each week’s Roundup summary. She’s great.