James Hoffmann Is Coffee’s Original Influencer

With more than 2.4 million YouTube followers and hundreds of thousands more scattered across other platforms, odds are that if you’ve ever searched for something coffee-related online, you’ve bumped into James Hoffmann. Or at least, “an avatar of me,” as Hoffmann refers to his internet persona.

With his swoop of silver hair and tortoiseshell glasses, Hoffmann’s look isn’t entirely unique in the barista world. But even in short form online videos, he’s uniquely engaging, exuding a magnetic presence that slices through the screen barrier and hooks the viewer into an immediate feeling of connection.

Part of what makes Hoffmann so instantly endearing is how totally at home he seems chatting through a screen. In a recent video about the coffee siphon, he opens with a disarmingly accurate description of how most of us feel about coffee siphons (intrigued, mystified, slightly intimidated), then dives into the history of the brewing method in a monologue that’s rapid-fire, deeply informative, and easy to follow. Before you know it, you’ve spent seven minutes with him, and you’re clicking to the next video to watch more.

He seems at home here, casually pouring coffee expertise for an online audience that he defines broadly as “coffee-interested” people. And at home he should be: Although he’s played many roles in the evolution of coffee culture in the 25 years he’s been working in the industry, talking about coffee online is Hoffmann’s most natural dwelling place.

Hoffmann came up in coffee at a crucial moment in the early 2000s, when specialty coffee culture—coffee’s third wave—and internet culture rose alongside each other. The waves crested simultaneously, and Hoffmann rode both to where he stands today, at the nexus of coffee culture and online culture as arguably the OG coffee influencer (a title he dislikes, for what it’s worth). Both coffee culture and tech culture have negative tropes, but Hoffmann bucks the trends. Far from being a “coffee bro” or a “tech bro,” he’s well-liked in the coffee world and offers a refreshingly kind and whip-smart voice online.

Since launching his blog, Jim Seven, in 2004, Hoffmann’s curiosity and passion for coffee have earned him a collection of devotees who’ve followed his online evolution from platform to platform for more than two decades—an incredible longevity in the attention-challenged online world. “Consistency is what really pays off,” explains Giovanni Fillari, a coffee content creator since 2017. “He just makes it about the coffee—and then obviously it’s about him as well, because he’s the consistent voice—but he makes coffee the center point, which I think speaks to who he is.”

The history of third wave coffee in London is entwined with Hoffmann’s own trajectory and cultural influence. “The effect, influence, and impact that James Hoffmann has had on the worldwide coffee industry is insurmountable and will never be beaten,” says Peter Dore-Smith, founder and director of London’s Kaffeine coffee.

Hoffmann’s role in modern coffee culture was perhaps best demonstrated … when online coffee culture outlet Sprudge declared Hoffmann “literally more popular than coffee” …

Hoffmann’s role in modern coffee culture was perhaps best demonstrated this past March when online coffee culture outlet Sprudge declared Hoffmann “literally more popular than coffee” after he won their Ultimate Coffee Bracket Challenge. Hoffmann squirms at this characterization; “I didn’t like that whole thing, but it was a thing that existed.”

This humility may sound disingenuous from someone so internet famous, but Hoffmann’s exuberance for coffee above all has helped make him successful for so long. Growing up in the 1980s in England’s Lake District, Hoffmann wasn’t raised in a rich coffee culture. “I have a memory of tasting coffee for the first time. It was Nescafé Gold Blend and I remember instantly spitting out onto the floor,” he says. “I was allowed to press my mum’s French press down sometimes, like once a month if we were out for a fancy coffee. That was exciting. But coffee was not culturally anything to us at the time.”

In his early 20s, Hoffmann found himself looking for a job in London. After a few stints in “various horrific sales jobs,” he stumbled into a job selling Gaggia espresso machines in a department store. Despite not yet being a regular coffee drinker, Hoffmann took the job because Gaggia paid weekly instead of monthly. At age 23, “that was quite the attraction.” Meanwhile, European coffee culture was beginning to germinate in London, thanks to the rise of cheap flights throughout Europe and the arrival, in 1998, of London’s first Starbucks.

After taking the job with Gaggia, Hoffmann felt that he should know more about coffee, so he went to a bookshop and bought “the one book that they had on coffee,” Stewart Lee Allen’s The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee, which traces the global journey of coffee. The book showed Hoffmann that coffee had woven itself into every culture, an idea he found captivating. Because of it, “I taught myself to drink coffee through a sort of force of will,” he says. From there, he descended down the rabbit hole of the coffee world.

“I was quite aggressive in learning in any way I could,” he says. It was 2003, and London’s coffee culture was still in its infancy—the city itself couldn’t satisfy Hoffmann’s appetite for coffee knowledge. “I was lucky that the internet allowed me to connect with people when I had nobody around me.”

Late in 2004, he launched the Jim Seven blog as a way of trying to connect with others and to process what he was learning. Blogging about coffee proved to be beneficial in two ways, he says. “Firstly, if you’re wrong, putting something on the internet will be corrected quite quickly. So that’s useful.” Secondly, writing the posts was a way of making sure, for his own peace of mind, that he truly understood what he was learning.

In 2005, Hoffmann began working for La Spaziale and thinking more seriously about barista competitions. In 2006 he won the U.K. Barista Championship, and won the World Barista Championship in Tokyo in 2007. Not long after, in 2008, he started Square Mile Coffee Roasters with Anette Moldvaer (“We waited until the global economy collapsed and then started a coffee company. That was good timing!”), in which he is still a stakeholder.

Coming up in the coffee industry in the age of the internet meant that as he traveled around doing “world champion stuff,” he met lots of people who had encountered his blog. “I enjoy remaining connected and useful, and just having a place to talk.”

In the midst of running Square Mile and mentoring countless coffee professionals in London and beyond, Hoffmann squeezed in time to write The World Atlas of Coffee. “That was another terrible mistake,” he jokes. “I’d written a blog for years, and was used to cranking out thousands of words a year, so I thought, I can do this.”

He was nearly a year late delivering the book, but did finally finish. “After that, I began to deeply respect writing as a job. I don’t like writing a book, but I like to have written a book.” The book reflects Hoffmann’s meticulous attention to detail and contagious curiosity, and it’s since become required reading for many in the coffee industry. In the decade since its first release, it’s been through two rounds of revisions. The third edition, heavily revised and updated, was released this autumn.

… His devotion to making videos speaks to his singular passion for coffee and the strength of his drive to connect with people who care about coffee, too.

The barista championship, the blog, and the book, are perhaps best understood now as stepping stones to Hoffmann’s YouTube channel, the popularity of which overshadows much of his other work. He launched the channel in 2016 out of a realization that people didn’t really want to read the internet anymore—they wanted to watch it. His willingness to evolve from blogging to vlogging, and his devotion to making videos speaks to his singular passion for coffee and the strength of his drive to connect with people who care about coffee, too.

Humble and kind, Hoffmann is also deeply pragmatic. “He’s a very clever boy,” says Gwilym Davies, a mentee of Hoffmann’s and 2009 World Barista Champion. Davies is a co-founder of London’s Prufrock Coffee, and now roasts coffee at The Naughty Dog in Jílové u Prahy, a town close to Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Davies says it’s hard to overestimate Hoffmann’s impact on modern global coffee culture, and adds that Hoffmann would be the last person to acknowledge the scale of his influence. He is a catalyst, Davies explains, who’s as generous with his success and knowledge in person as much as he is online. Everywhere Hoffmann goes, Davies says, “you’ll find that others in that circle have suddenly started reaching their potential a little bit more. He is a natural leader, but in a way that would help shape our thoughts and bring in the opportunities for those around him.”