About Us
The world's most read coffee and espresso resource
CoffeeGeek is a fiercely independent, long form content website with community features. Our goal (listed in our Mission Statement on the About Us Page), is to provide coffee and espresso consumers with valid, fair, and truthful information about the products and efforts surrounding specialty coffee.
In this day and age, long form content that is honest, true, written by real humans is starting to fade away online, replaced by AI generated “best of” listicals, and SEO-generated content that serves no purpose beyond making an income for the producer.
We have been producing long form, written content about coffee and espresso since 2001. If we are to continue, we rely on you, our readers, to do your part in keeping our website healthy and productive. There’s many ways you can help, and most don’t involve very much effort (and no cost) on your part.
The number one way you, as a reader and consumer of the content on our website can help us is just by promoting what we do in whatever social media circles you participate in, and do it regularly.
If you enjoyed or learned from one of our How To articles, hit the “share” buttons on the left side of the page to share the article with your social circles on Facebook, Reddit, Threads, Mastodon, or other platforms.
You might be surprised to learn that, even though our typical How To Articles get about 45,000 “reads” in the first day, they have nearly zero recorded shares. That’s probably because everyone assumes someone else is doing it. But they are not.
Support us by sharing our content as often as you feel comfortable doing so.
An equally important way for you to help us is, if you are shopping for coffee and espresso gear, buy it from one of our active advertisers. Even better: when you do, make sure to tell them (in the shopping cart checkout comment field) that you are shopping with them specifically because they advertise and support this website.
That is worth absolute gold to websites like ours. Our Senior Editor wrote about this recently on Mastodon, it is so important.
Wondering who our active advertisers are? We have them in a brand carousel at the bottom of every page; here it is for reference:
CoffeeGeek gets income from two sources: Our site sponsors, who pay to advertise on our website and in our newsletters; and our sole affiliate link program through Amazon.
Not going to lie here, I’m not happy that we have to use Amazon, because it’s Amazon and all that entails, but from a content creator perspective, Amazon is the least likely to affect our site’s independence and non-biased reviews and opinion articles.
If we started using specialty coffee vendor affiliate links, many of them have direct policies about no-negative content about their products — any product they sell — whether its being reviewed or not. Even for vendors without this policy, there is always the unwritten rule that we would have to play nice with them, to get their affiliate income.
Amazon places zero restrictions on the content we produce, in terms of editorial policies. We choose when and where to put the affiliate links, and to what products. We don’t make a lot from those links (in the interest of transparency: if people buy $10,000 worth of gear in a month through via our links, we make about $375), but the lack of editorial strings makes it enough of an income source to keep maintaining.
Bottom line: if you’re going to be shopping at Amazon, all you have to do is shop via our main affiliate link redirect, or by visiting our curated shop at Amazon, and you’re helping us run this website.
If you want to donate directly to us, we have a Paypal donation link program in place. Buy us a cup of coffee!
We’ve been asked this a few times in various social media circles. Why don’t we have a Patreon account set up?
Patreon is a fantastic service for creators, but it also requires a lot of time and effort, producing original, detailed and unique content to satisfy the audience who are paying a monthly charge to be a Patreon supporter of content creators. We decided some time ago that we wanted all our content to be “free” and not behind any kind of paywall. Patreon is in many ways a paywall for both access and content.
We’ve never charged our readers (or folks who email questions) a dime for any kind of access and information we provide, and we don’t want to change that. You are free to contact us through our various social media channels and our contact forms and we’ll do our best to get back to you.
If we did establish a Patreon channel, this kind of access and full content would change, because… it would have to. We’d have to start “feeding the beast” that is Patreon exclusive content, video, and interaction, and there would be less open and free content on this website as a result.
We do not want to go down that road.
Instead, we rely on your good will and participation in promoting our website via your social media channels, your shopping with the vendors who advertise on our website, and your use of of our sole affiliate link through Amazon. In return, every bit of content we produce is free and accessible by all.
If you do want to financially support our efforts, use the donate button above, and consider making it a monthly donation. Even $3 a month from you helps more than you know.
