Bitter Barista is Going to Crowdsource His Blog

It's been nearly two weeks since a shitstorm rained down on 30-year old Matt Watson, also known as the Bitter Barista — the name of the blog that ultimately got him fired from his gig at All-City Coffee. Before his identity was blown, the blog got about 1,000 hits a day. At its peak, after he was outed, it shot up to 31,000 visitors:

I underestimated how much people would care. Once it blew up and became not anonymous, I got why it was a story.

Watson says he has some barista and blog writing offers on the table, but that he's not exactly eager to jump back into that right now. Hell, he's not even sure he wants to write his own blog anymore, which is why crowdsourcing Bitter Barista is the direction he's leaning towards.

I think that's going to be the next move, and then I'll kind of curate from there. So, people can still hopefully vent anonymously and then I can take the heat for it because I've already set up spam filters to deal with that kind of thing in the last few days! There are so many shared experiences and you don't really get a chance to...there is no water cooler. The most you see people is during a shift change and that's it and you don't have time to say, 'I have 8 crazy stories to tell you and they're going to make you feel way better about the crazy stuff that just happened to you yesterday!'

Watson says if he had to do it over again, he'd make his intentions more clear:

It was dark humor but I don't think I did a good enough job originally making clear how satirical I was being, and how any of the dark stuff was more towards the Looney Tunes end of the spectrum than it was the diary of a mad man.

He's also got a Bitter Barista coffee table book in the works that's already 95-percent funded through Kickstarter. But his real passion is music. His hip-hop band Spekulation is getting ready for a record release party April 12 at Lo-Fi.

I was already planning on taking three weeks off to promote this record that's coming out, so it just happened three weeks earlier than I had expected!

Watson says he still hasn't heard from his All-City boss who fired him and admits:

I think he thinks I put his business in jeopardy and I probably would have made the same call if I were in his position

· All Bitter Barista Coverage [~ESEA~]
· Bitter Barista loses job over snarky blog about customers, boss [Seattle Times]
· Snark's Labor Lost: The Bitter Barista, Unmasked [Sprudge]