Tuesday 24 May 2011

Origin Barista Training

So have you may have noticed, I now have a job. It's nothing special, just a waitressing/barista job in a cafe. If you live in Cornwall, or the Falmouth area, you may know of Gylly Beach Cafe- a hugely popular beach cafe in my town. Well, I scored a job with them! Sadly (or lucky in some circumstances) all of my work experience is with restaurant and cafe work, so I'm pretty well trained for the catering industry. As you may also know, I had a while ago, arranged some further Barista training with Origin Coffee, as I love to make coffee (even though I hate to drink it) and wanted to take my skills a bit further. I've been using a coffee machine in cafe's since my first job at Loe Beach Cafe when I was 13, since then I have had the pleasure of training with Origin twice, and through experience as well, could make a pretty good coffee. However I still wanted to know more- I felt I was lacking some specifics and had a few gaps in my knowledge of coffee. Plus, as my training was at least a year ago, and I have been living and working so sporadically, I lost touch with the science and the details to the coffee making. For instance I knew from experience that whole milk is better for steaming, but had no idea why. Small little things like that. So I got in touch with Origin, and lucky for me they could squeeze me in! So, yesterday I popped over to the warehouse and spent the afternoon with Dave :)



Origin have some of the best branding I have seen. Whilst I think about how I will begin to brand my business, I often think of them. They're delivery vans have these fun designs on them too, and they stick to the basic colours orange and brown, synonymous with coffee and them.


I also had no idea about the selecting and roasting processes, so Dave took me through that. He laid out samples of the different stages of roasting, showing them in their ripe green stage, all the way through the finished product 15 minutes later. Origin are getting ready to open a new roasting warehouse over in Helston soon, which I would have been very interested to see, had there been more time.









Plus the famous latte art. I can do it while I'm at work, but not always that consistently. So we broke it down to the basics yesterday. And I failed. I didn't even do a single leaf . Or heart.... :( so neither of the hearts you see above are mine. Boooo


Abiento x

2 comments:

  1. Nice little article complemented by some cracking photos. You've clearly got an eye for detail Lucy

    You made a good choice in engaging with Origin. Lovely people, great roasters and a lot of fun to work with too

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  2. Thank you Glenn! They're great, and after 4 years of being in contact with them I'm still going back! Nice to have a look at your work too!

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