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Roastery Assistant / Junior Roaster

Roastery Assistant / Junior Roaster

Location: Cloud Picker Coffee Limited, Sheriff Street, D01 F8C2, Dublin 1.
Commitment: Full-time (8am-4.30pm / Mon-Fri)
Remuneration: Negotiable 
Start date: 21st Aug 2017

As a self standing position we will rely on your self motivation and strive to succeed. Your position is crucial in the smooth running of our business and further development of the Cloud Picker Brand. In order to achieve it we’d like you to work towards below points:

Qualities:

• Always possess honesty and integrity
• Give our customers more than they expect 
• Be creative and resourceful 
• Optimize our financial resources 
• Never stop learning and growing 
• Embrace change and reevaluate systems 
• Communicate clearly and openly 
• Recognize individual and company success 
• Protect our commitment to quality 
• Be friendly and have a sense of humor
• No big egos allowed!

Duties:

• Loading / unloading deliveries including green coffee
• Working closely and reporting to Head Roaster
• Grinding and packing of roasted coffee in an organized manner 
• Careful and precise application of bag labels and roast dates
• Dispatching orders
• Cleaning and maintenance of the roastery equipment and work space 
• General assistance around the roastery 
• Regular cupping and quality control 
• As required, undertake roast training with a view to production roasting

Essential Skills and Knowledge:

• Excellent written and verbal skills 
• Competency in use of email, spreadsheets and other computer applications
• Reliable and self-sufficient 
• Good problem solver 
• Attention to detail
• Clean full driving licience beneficial
• Roasting experience beneficial
• Barista experience beneficial

CV & Cover letter: hello@cloudpickercoffee.ie

Roses are.... ?

Anyone who’s ever tried to describe a coffee can tell you it’s not easy. We experienced this recently in trying to pick flavour descriptions for Kelloo - a wonderful washed Ethiopian - (currently available in our webshop).

Photo Credit - Hannah Campbell

Between us we settled fairly quickly on mandarin orange and pear to describe the fruity sweetness and acidity of this coffee - but Kelloo has a strong floral top-note that we were struggling to pin down. The closest we could get was ‘rose’, but none of us were really satisfied with it as a descriptor. In the end we picked ‘rose water’, trying to convey the extra weight and sweetness in the rose-like aroma of this coffee.

I didn’t feel like we’d nailed it, but gave it no more thought until some weeks later, when my partner and I spent a rare, glorious summer weekend camping at The Apple Farm in Tipperary. It is a perfect idyll, sleeping tucked away between the apple shed and the orchard, huge vats of cider slowly turning to vinegar on the one side, strawberry beds stretching away on the other. In the farm’s shop, stacked bushels of apples fill the air with the most incredible perfume.

As well as being redolent of the sweetness of the ripe fruit, the aroma of those apples had intense floral overtones - a reminder that roses and apples are, after all, distant cousins. The wonderful scent of those apples called to mind an old post of James Hoffmann’s talking about how difficult it is to describe their flavour, and set me thinking again about how to be more precise in our flavour descriptors.

Later the same day we visited Swiss Cottage, a faux-rustic folly of a thatched cottage, surrounded by climbing roses. Stopping to smell one of these - called ‘Albertine’ - in the doorway, I was surprised to find it smelt uncannily like the boxes of apples I’d been greedily sniffing earlier that day. 

Which made me think - perhaps the reason we’d struggled so much with ‘rose’ as a flavour descriptor for Kelloo is because roses don’t all smell the same. So I started making a point of smelling roses, first around the cottage, and later in the collection at the Botanic Gardens in Dublin, and trying to describe their scent.

The Albertine

Plenty of roses, of course, just smell like rose - more or less the sort of idealised rose scent that you find in rosewater and old-fashioned perfumes. But more often than not, the scent was distinctive, if not always easy to describe.

Sure enough, apple came up a few times. ‘Albertine’, the rose that started it all at Swiss Cottage, but in several others, especially in the bouquet-like clusters of ‘Many Happy Returns’ in the Botanic Gardens.

Many Happy Returns

Citrus notes also seem to be pretty common - from a yellow rose (that I couldn’t identify) with a distinctive lemon fragrance, to ‘Harry Edland’, which has, under its heavy perfume, the sharp tang of grapefruit.


Harry Edland

A couple had the riper scent of peaches - ‘Red Devil’, and the stunning ‘Honore de Balzac, which combines a peachy sweetness with a fresher cucumber-mint aroma. Indeed many of the most powerfully fragranced roses, like ‘Mme Isaac Pereire’ had a fresh menthol-eucalyptus type intensity to them.

At the other end of the scale ‘Alexander’ is barely fragranced, but a deep sniff yielded the distinctive smell of the inside of a church - candlewax and perhaps a faint hint of incense.

The last rose I came to that day had a classic old-rose scent that made me think of bathroom soap, and I was tickled to discover it bore the unfortunate name ‘Radox Bouquet’.

Radox Bouquet

With all these very different fragrances, does it make sense to just use ‘rose’ as a descriptor? On the other hand, trying to be more specific about which kind of rose you mean is not going to be useful to someone without fairly specialist knowledge, and liable to be confusing. Even in ‘Le Nez du Cafe’, Lenoir writes that the rose scent given is specific to the Damask rose - the type most commonly used to make rosewater and rose oil - but then labels it as ‘Tea Rose/Redcurrant Jelly’. Tea roses are a quite different group to Damasks - originally cultivated in China, with a scent variously described as like tea leaves, clove, or honeysuckle. Where redcurrant jelly fits into this is anyone’s guess.

So having tried to pin down the fragrance of all these different roses, which one would I now use to describe the wonderful floral aroma of Kelloo? Well, the honest answer is that if you asked me now, I’d say it was actually more like sweet pea. Just don’t ask me which variety…

Tom Hopkinson

A version of this article originally appeared on www.PerfectDailyGrind.com

Zip it up and save the cup

At Cloud Picker, we are always working to improve. We know that in order to get the best from our coffees as possible we don't just need to roast them well; we need to be able to source and store them well. With this in mind, we are always asking ourselves "is that the best way to do that?" To get the answer we often have to carry out small experiments.

Last November, we were wondering how vital it is to store our green coffee in airtight bags while they were in production. The vast majority of our coffees arrive in GrainPro - that is, with a plastic lining inside the jute sack to protect the beans from the atmosphere, which keeps them tasting fresher for much longer than traditional sacks. However, once we open the bag to start roasting that coffee, it’s exposed to the atmosphere. We wanted to see if this was impacting our coffees and if we could do anything about it

We decided to take two 100 gram samples from the same bag of coffee. For those interested, the coffee was our Los Pirineos from El Salvador. We took the samples on the 16/11/16 and sealed one in an airtight bag, and left the other out in a sample tray. We roasted them on the 20/06/17. Before roasting them, we recorded their moisture content. Moisture content is very important when it comes to roasting coffee. It affects how we decide to roast, as more moisture allows more heat and vice versa. If the moisture content is too low the coffee can taste dry and hollow, and if it's too high it runs the risk of producing mould. The optimal moisture content is roughly 9.5 - 11.5%. The samples we took both had a moisture content of 9.7% in November, and we recorded the moisture content again before roasting them last week. The sample we kept in the re-sealable bag was 9.3%. Not too bad at all, however the sample we left out in the sample tray had dropped an incredible 2.4% to 6.9%.

After roasting (attempting to roast as similarly as possible), we allowed a day for the coffees to rest and degas, we then cupped them. I set up the cupping and didn't tell the team what we were cupping for. We always cup blind (hiding the info of the coffees) to help minimise bias. 

THE RESULTS:

• Sample left in resealable bag - well rounded / balanced / sweet.
• Sample left in tray - hollow / dry / acidic.

Although the results seem logical, we feel it is always good to carry out these tests for ourselves. You can read or be informed about the effects of something over and over, but seeing it - and tasting it -  for yourself is a different story: that's when it really hits home. 

CONCLUSION:

After the cupping we got our heads together, we are now working towards repackaging some of our coffees when they arrive into vacuum sealed roast size batches. Although in reality our coffees don't hang around the roastery aslong as in this experiment, so the effect on flavour is likely to be smaller than we tasted here, we are all about marginal gains, and getting the best from our coffee.

Darren Kelly - Head Roaster

A video about what we do... worth a gooo!

Irish Brewers Cup 2017

In association with SCA we are thrilled to have hosted the 2017 Irish Brewers Cup here in Cloud Picker roastery. Thanks to our friends in White Hag & Pickler there was beautiful craft beer & delicious hot dogs on hand! A big congrats to Stephen from Bailies who scooped first place! What a weekend of fun!

Read about Peter's journey from Krakow to Dublin!

Wholesale Account Manager / Barista Trainer

Start Date: Immediate 

This role is a key point of contact with all our wholesale clients - representing the brand to existing and new customers, helping train their staff, and supporting them to grow and develop their business. It also involves coordinating production, taking orders and ensuring that those orders are fulfilled efficiently.

You will be an experienced barista trainer, and enjoy the challenge of training people at all levels. Some technical/machine maintenance experience will be advantageous, too. You should have confidence in your knowledge, but also be diplomatic, approachable, and take a pragmatic approach. You will actively build positive relationships with our coffee partners and their staff, fostering a sense of community among the baristas working with our coffee.

You will also need to be an organisational whiz, with a flair for complicated excel spreadsheets, who takes satisfaction in getting all your ducks in a row. You will take an active role in ensuring that production is as efficient as possible, actively seeking ways to improve systems in all aspects of production: ordering, stock control, roasting, packing, and delivery.

And finally, as well as a love of coffee, you are passionate about the coffee industry and hospitality in general, committed to keeping up with innovations and developments in the field, and to furthering your own education.

Duties include:

• Deliver barista training to wholesale customers
• Help wholesale accounts develop quality and grow business
• Provide first-line technical support to wholesale accounts
• Take wholesale orders and communicate to production team
• Develop sales to wholesale accounts
• Coordinate and plan production with Roastery team
• Assist with production, packing, and delivery as required
• Manage stock and ordering of retail products and packaging
• Ensure HACCP policies followed at all times
  
  

Some travel will be involved, and a full driving licence is a requirement for the position. While it is an integral part of the production team, roasting will not be a part of this role.

Please email your CV and Cover Letter to hello@cloudpickercoffee.ie 

TOM'S WINNING VICE IRISH COFFEE COMPETITION RECIPE

Recently Tom won the Vice Irish Coffee Competition 2016! Here he is parading his loot! Check out his recipe below. 

Spiced fruit syrup
10 cloves
5 star anise
1 tsp coriander seeds, crushed
1 tsp allspice berries, crushed
3cm stick cinnamon
150g prunes, quartered
150g raisins
100g demerara sugar
Zest of one orange

LEO - DUBLIN LOCAL ENTERPRISE BOARD!

Local Enterprise Office Dublin City and Cloud Picker Coffee from LEO Dublin City

DONEGAL NEWS!

Nice to get a mention in my home county!