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Posts Tagged ‘Barista’

London Coffee Jobs website

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Today I created a simple website with a simple goal:

Connect quality focused cafes/coffee roasters/coffee suppliers with potential staff.

I get a lot of emails, and meet a lot of people looking for barista jobs in London, and I know shops are always looking but I forget to keep track of exactly who. The idea of the site is very simple – shops can easily create a listing for a range of positions and hopefully we can drive people towards it who are looking for jobs.

There is the potential to monetize it but I’d rather it worked, so at some point I might put on a small posting fee to cover the cost of the website. If there is sufficient demand I might open it up to outside of London, to maybe the whole of the UK. Thoughts on this are welcome? In order for it to be useful then it needs people to know about it and use it. I’d really appreciate people’s support on this one.

London Coffee Jobs

I know I am technically biased when it comes to coffee in London but the site is completely neutral and open to anyone, I won’t be moderating/editing unless there is some genuine misuse/spam.

Tags: Barista, jobs, london, roaster
Posted in Announcement | 7 Comments »

Brewed coffee and the UK

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

This is something of a summary of the short talk I gave at the Allegra Strategies UK Coffee Leader Summit a week or so ago. Please also bear in mind that this talk was directed at the UK market specifically so won’t necessarily hold true for other national coffee cultures.

For me this talk was a moment of crystalisation about how I feel about coffee right now, and what I want to focus a lot of my energy on. I had initially planned to talk about how quality focused businesses were doing well right now, but in the process of writing the talk that seemed to shift. I should add a final caveat to this by saying that I do love making and drinking espresso.

My talk was titled “How the coffee industry lost the public’s trust, and how good coffee can win it back again.”

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Tags: article, Barista, brewing, Coffee, consumer, drinks, economy, Espresso, history, innovation, italy, london, marketing, pricing, quality, tradition, trust
Posted in Opinion | 43 Comments »

A grand unified theory of espresso

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Not too long ago I posted on Home Barista about trying to find a good way to measure the density of coffee beans. ¹

As always the paricipants there were way smarter than me and offered several interesting options. I dropped into the thread that this was part of my idea of a grand unified theory of espresso, and subsequently a few people mailed and pm’d me asking what on earth I was talking about and what density had to do with it.

Well, I should probably explain what I have been thinking. ²

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Footnotes:

There really is no better place on the web for these kinds of questions! [↩]
Some of this is based on personal preference, some on what seems to be fairly well agreed upon within the community of people who worry a lot about their espresso. [↩]

Tags: Barista, blending, brewing, Coffee, cupping, drinks, Espresso, experiments
Posted in Coffee, Espresso, Food Chemistry, Green Coffee, Opinion, Roasting | 30 Comments »

A bit of (bad) news

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

When we started Square Mile our goals were fairly traditional for a startup roastery. After the last Nordic Barista Cup that changed. We had the chance to hang out with (the now newlywed) Chris and M’lissa Owens. As anyone who has met them can attest – they are astoundingly wonderful people.

We had a new goal – to be the kind of company that they would want to come and work for, and to be big enough to sustain them. This is a much healthier goal for a new company and we worked very hard to achieve that.

Chris and M’lissa (unbelievably) wanted to come to London to work with us and that was incredibly exciting. We, foolishly, got excited and told people about this. However one final hurdle stood in the way – the UK visa process.

The UK visa process has changed this year and try and try as we did we couldn’t overcome the challenge. We, with great sadness, couldn’t get them over to work legally for any length of time and so disappeared an incredible opportunity to work with some of the most talented, inspiring and undeniably wonderful people we’ve met.

We’re gutted. No other words for it.

Usually I wouldn’t post about this kind of thing on here. However, with SCAA/WBC coming up I am sure a few people are going to be asking them about London and I am sure it isn’t something they are wanting to talk a great deal about – not for any secretive reason, it just makes us all quite sad.

I can’t wait to see them and hang out in the next few days, and it was lovely to find out Gwilym’s barista buddy was Chris. As you’ve probably gathered we think the world of Chris and M’lissa and are sure they have an amazing coffee career ahead of them. We just wish we could have shared some of it with them.

Tags: Barista, career, square mile coffee roasters
Posted in News | 20 Comments »

Unblended espresso

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Forgive the ugliness of the title, but I think talking about SO (Single Origin) espresso does a great disservice¹ to what people are beginning to achieve and push for. I am aware that in a way every lot of coffee is a blend on some level but that isn’t what I want to talk about.

Nick Cho highlights the potential advantage of the simplicity of using a single estate or lot in competition over on Portafilter but what is most interesting about all this is that I think we can acknowledge how far we’ve come in coffee recently.

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Footnotes:

as well as diverts away from the traceability we often want to highlight [↩]

Tags: Barista, blending, brewing, Coffee, Espresso, single estate, single origin, tradition
Posted in Coffee | 21 Comments »

5 more tips for barista competition

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Last year I wrote a post with 6 tips for barista competition. This year, with the rule changes and all, I wanted to write another little post (though still give the first a quick re-read…).

I really want to encourage people to enter, it isn’t as difficult or scary as it seems. Everyone who competes, as long as they do it for the right reasons, gets a lot out of it and doesn’t regret a minute of it. What’s more – I guarantee it will make you a better barista.

1). Make sure you put an espresso into every sig drink.

Now to begin with this might sound painfully obvious, but every year people make this mistake and up until now the rules haven’t been very clear. Just brewing those 4 espressos isn’t enough. If you blend them into something and don’t pour it all out then it doesn’t count as an espresso per drink. Under the new rules you would get 0 from all sensory judges for this category so DO NOT make that mistake.

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Tags: Barista, Barista Competition, competition, Espresso, howto, judging, learning, rules, tips, ukbc, wbc
Posted in Barista Competition | 5 Comments »

Who is to blame for bad coffee?

Monday, January 5th, 2009

I’ve written a lot recently with an industry readership in mind. This post I write with the consumer firmly in mind. This isn’t about exonerating lazy cafe owners and baristas, or excusing the chains or making allowances for restaurant coffee. Anyone who loves or even likes coffee will often complain about how bad a lot of it is, how hard it is to get a good cup.

You, the consumers, are to blame.¹

Now you certainly can’t take all the blame but consumers have an enormous power over the people making the coffee. After all – you’re paying for it. You are staggeringly tolerant of incredibly poor product. You can do something very simple that would have a huge effect on the quality of coffee served: when it is bad – take it back.

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Footnotes:

I ought to make it clear at this point that obviously consumers are not really to blame, but to start a discussion about the power of the consumer and also – heaven forbid – have a little fun with this topic! [↩]

Tags: Barista, Cafes, cupping, customers, drinks, feedback, job, not too serious, Opinion, quality, trust
Posted in Opinion | 32 Comments »