Meet the roastery team
Say hello to the roasters with the most-ers, the coffee-intelligent clever clogs who turn our coffee beans into your coffee beans. These wonderful people, with the help of one very big, and very cool, roaster, roast our beans to perfection. And that’s why the cup of coffee you get from any one of our coffee houses, or the homebrew you make with our beans, tastes so very wonderful. You can see why they’re VIPs around here now, we hope. So, who are they?
First up is Roosa (right), our Head of Production.
She is from Finland (aka Funland), loves potatoes and is the second best twerker in the roastery. Curious.
Next up, with a name that uses many of the same letters as Roosa, is Ross (left), our Wholesale and Roastery Manager. He’s from up North, likes chocolate (especially crispy M&Ms) and has great calves (leg muscles not baby cows - we think).
Whataya know, it’s Jo. Jo is our Production Roaster and knows a thing or two about coffee. He intriguingly lists his home town as ‘The Shire’, loves a podcast and is good at fixing - expletive deleted - stuff.
Heyla, it’s Ayla, our Wholesale and Production Assistant Manager. She is from Middle Earth (oh they’re messing with us, the less glamorous content team - ok, we can take it). Ayla is from Middle Earth and loves mayonnaise and her strength is her thrust. Not trust, thrust - we checked.
And finally it is our roaster without a name. The German 12kg Probat roaster that does all the work and is where the magic happens. Its weakness is anything higher than 247 degrees (ie the sun and the concrete by a swimming pool when you get out and have forgotten your flip flops) and its strength is its tremendous resilience - 10,000 batches and still turning.
“To work in this roastery is to completely submit yourself to smells, filth and an array of music tastes.
On Fridays we listen only to Puddle of Mud-esque tunes or Anxious Brioche - a playlist named after how someone was feeling and what they last ate in peak lockdown of 2020.
While being serenaded by Third Eye Blind and Staind we set up for QC and maintenance. As the saying goes, you wouldn’t trust a skinny baker so would you trust an under caffeinated roastery team? Big huge nope. Every Friday we cup every batch of coffee we roasted that week. Quality control is massively important. Not only for ensuring the consistency of our coffee but also for education and development of both our minds and our product. Using data recorded by Cropster we can explore why the coffee tastes the way it does and understand how the data affects the flavour in the cup.
Although we haven’t named our roaster, we do show our appreciation through regular maintenance and a cheeky shammy. Roaster maintenance is equal parts essential and satisfying. Think beats, boilersuits and dust. Not the magical dust like in Philip Pullmans’ world, but regular build up, chaff, oils etc. Anything that over time will increase your fire risk and negatively affect the efficiency of your machine. A tip-top roaster is integral to good well-mannered coffee.
Monday to Thursday we roast to order in small batches enough to fulfil that day’s dispatch. Attention to detail and satisfaction in a job well done are indispensable. To distract from the daily grind (pun intended) we indulge in a few GB specific quirks. Like when Bullseye Paul or Paula pays us a visit, one must celebrate. Bullseye Paul/Paula is when someone weighs out, to the nearest tenth, the correct amount of coffee they need. There is a sliding scale of celebration, the louder the mouth made air horn noise, the more bang on Bullseye Paula was. Sporadic twerking and grooving is encouraged and it’s totally fine to build a comfortable as ever lazy boy recliner from a green bean delivery for you to enjoy your lunch on.”
Thank you Roastery team, you are the best of us. Want to join? Find our latest job postings here.
