The State of The Pourover 2025
My five favourite Pourover pieces from last year, plus musings on the future of the newsletter.
Welcome to 2025, which so far feels very similar to 2024. This is my second year publishing a “State of The Pourover” article, a slightly rambling piece wherein I try to make sense of what this newsletter is and can be.
This time last year I launched paid subscriptions, an attempt to make my work here sustainable and—more importantly—hire an editor to improve the quality of my writing. I decided to go ahead with the latter pretty early in the year, which I hope you’ll agree was an excellent decision: my editor, Claire, has proven invaluable in raising the level of the articles I publish on The Pourover.
At the time of writing, 25 of my readers have chosen to support my work financially with a paid subscription, for which I am very grateful. Beginning this month I am moving into a full time freelance writing role (eek) and thus will now be able to provide extra bonus content for paid subscribers—something I promised last year but never managed to fulfill due to my busy coffee roasting job.
I have some fun bonus pieces lined up—including exclusive interviews with interesting coffee people—so if you haven’t already please consider becoming a paid subscriber:
The other big change, that I mentioned last year but now have time to carry out, is moving the newsletter from Substack over to a new platform, Ghost, which already hosts the website version of The Pourover. This is due to the many issues with Substack as a company—specifically, its lack of moderation and willingness to host (and therefore profit from) neo-Nazis and white supremacists—but I also want to grow the website as well and Ghost will allow me to do both.
It shouldn’t make a difference in your inbox, and paid subscribers should also just move over smoothly, but please let me know if you notice anything weird over the next month or so.
With that out of the way, let’s move on to some navel-gazing.
Five Favourites
I published 26 Pourover articles in 2024, covering topics from civet coffee to pesticides, and from disposable cups to coffee meme accounts. I wrote about the coffee industry’s continued silence on Gaza, and the increasingly dystopian use of tech within the sector.
The following are the five articles from last year that I’m most proud of—in no particular order—and if you’re a new subscriber, perhaps they offer a good way to decipher what my whole deal is.
Fionn Pooler
This was the first of four pieces I wrote exploring the problems—but also the nuance and potential—of private equity in the coffee industry. I went on to write about private equity’s impact on workers, the way it is reshaping the specialty scene in the Midwest, and how equity crowfunding could offer an alternative to coffee investing.
However, this article from early February provides an introduction to the topic and grapples with some of the problems that can occur when big money pours into an industry that is unprepared for it.
Fionn Pooler
I think this is the Pourover article about which I think about the most—the idea of an old-school, worker-owned coffee brand that is somehow still going in the face of India’s modernising coffee scene is just fascinating to me.
(The incredible header image comes from the book ‘The Palaces of Memory’ by Stuart Freedman, and my first paid subscriber bonus article will be an interview with Freedman talking about some of the other photos from that book.)
Fionn Pooler
This was originally going to be a coffeewashing case study about Nespresso’s Reviving Origins project, but the more I researched the company’s “sustainability” initiatives the more Clooney kept popping up. So I pivoted:
The Reviving Origins project, as well as the wider Positive Cup strategy, positions Nespresso as a sustainability trailblazer, an example of how big corporations can combine growth with impact, and can balance improving the lives of their workers and suppliers with their pursuit of profit. But the simple comparison of the $10 million budget for Reviving Origins with the $40 million paid to George Clooney reveals the company’s true priorities.
Fionn Pooler
I am keenly aware that most of my articles present the coffee industry in a pretty bad light—corporations hoarding revenue or doling out charity rather than sharing profits, for example.
So occasionally I try to spotlight some positive or hopeful aspect of the industry. In this case, that meant exploring the ways in which farmers are challenging the industry’s accepted supply chain dynamics by taking control of—and earning income from—the retail sale of their coffee.
Fionn Pooler
I wrote this article in a few hours after becoming overwhelmed by the piece I was working on at the time. It sums up my view of the industry pretty well, I think:
Why is it that companies that rake in billions of dollars every year, whose executives make salaries in the millions, and which dominate the direction of the coffee industry keep having to issue mea culpas and promises to do better? The purpose of a system, after all, is what it does.
Thank you for reading and supporting The Pourover over the last year. If you have any feedback, comments, or suggestions for future topics, please reply to this email or message me thepourover@gmail.com
