Yo! I'm Saul, a professional barista, barista trainer, and all round coffee nerd currently based around Nottingham. I've recently founded Wandering Goblin Coffee, a company which focuses on sourcing excellent coffees from unusual roasteries, and setting up pop-up cafes with no set permanent home. In 2023 I've also started my coffee competition career, competing in the Northern Heats of the UKBCs, and the first Extracted Development on July 9th.
I have recently joined up with Forum Specialty Coffee in Draycott on a part time basis working as a barista for this new-open speciality coffee shop. This is a pretty classic espresso bar set-up, in a quieter area, with a strong focus on high quality coffee (serving Assembly as our house roaster). I have been brought on board partly to help with staff training and building up a filter coffee offering.
I have recently launched my own coffee venture, initially focusing on setting up pop-up temporary cafes in a range of spaces around Nottingham sourcing high quality tracable coffees and teas which are from novel roasteries most local people would not get a chance to encounter without going out of their way. These pop-ups have been mostly focussed on serving excellent filter coffee, and serving tea prepared right. As an offshoot to this, I also source retail coffees from the same roasteries, utilising a pre-order system to pass on some discount to my customers. If you place an order before I put my wholesale order in, you can get up to 15% off. I implemented this to make unusual coffees more accessible to people outside of the coffee industry. Wandering Goblin also offers cafe consultancy and barista training.
In this role with Blend Coffee House, I worked across three sites, managing the coffee standards, making sure all staff were serving high quality beverages (appropriately dialed in), ensuring the equipment was properly cleaned and maintained, and also acting as a barista in this time. I did this job in parallel with designing and running the training courses for Stewart's Of Trent Bridge (Blend's parent company).
When I started with Blend and Stewart's, they had no staff training program at all, and the quality of their cafes was actively suffering because of it. When I was hired, I started designing and piecing together courses that could be delivered to staff and adapted to be delivered to the public which we have been able to implement with great success. This included a 3.5 hour all-round training session for staff, which consists of an introductory cupping and discussion about how we approach talking about flavour, a filter brewing session focusing on techniques and common mistakes for V60 specifically, and a ground-up approach to a scratch dial-in - calling back to how we talked about flavoour and texture in the first section. This is all rounded off with a little milk steaming practice and troubleshooting, then a mini latte art throwdown. For the public, I designed three courses, a "homebrew" focusing on filter brewing across a range of methods, an "espresso basic" covering the fundamentals of brewing good espresso and demystifying a lot of the process and jargon, and an "espresso advanced" which is a little more freeform to help people with a little more experience get what they want to get from their time, be it advanced latte art or espresso troubleshooting.
I aided in the opening of a second branch of an established local bakery in a new area in Nottingham. In this role I established drink standards for coffees and teas, and ensured consistent quality of beverages day in and day out. This role also included serving food, drink, and pastries with good presentation and friendly customer service.
I occasionally take on extra work via Baristas On Tap, often at large events like The London Coffee Festival, as I enjoy getting to work in different environments, meeting new people within the industry, and learning more from other business' and barista's approaches to brewing coffee.
This role oriented around two main parts - making and preparing from memory a long list of vietnamese inspired coffee 'mocktails', and preparing standard specialty coffee beverages using a Slayer espresso machine, coffee siphons, and V60s. This was often a very busy job, with no real break between bursts of tickets, and relied very heavily on my ability to properly prep what I needed, organise my workflow efficiently, and work as part of a tight-knit team.
I worked on one of the busiest coffee bars in Nottingha, on a VA Black Eagle. This included dialing in to a set specification every morning, and ensuring no drink ticket took more than 8 minutes to complete, regardless of how busy I was. This role also included brewing an assortment of filter coffees, prepping food in the kitchen, upselling retail, and managing some stock.
I, as part of a small team, developed and set up a wesbite for the Fine Tool Journal in Watervliet, Michigan, and helped categorise, identify, and upload a whole host of antique tools.
In this role I was working as a barista for a french-korean fusion bakery in Chicago, IL, serving coffees and baked goods. I was also often pulled into the kitchen to aid with baking, when a large order needed to be fulfilled or we were shortstaffed.
This role oriented around three things (ignoring the customer service aspect, which I feel is kind of implied). There were 6 different single origin coffees from 6 different US based roasteries at any given time on the brew bar, all of which had to be dialed in perfectly each week. There were also two single origin espressos that had to be rotated once a week, which required dialing in each morning, on an older style of modbar. There was also a full menu of 12 mixed drinks, coffee or tea based, that also had to be prepared fresh for each order (in a style very reminiscent of a cocktail bar). I will say I learned a lot in this role, not thanks to the company employing me, but because I was privelaged enough to meet more experienced baristas who took the time to help me improve and hone my craft. This coffee bar got very busy, and relied heavily on solid workflow and teamwork to operate effectively.
I wasn very lucky to be invited to work for Serek Basses, and be trained as a luthier. This role involved working in a fast paced production environment, creating semi-custom boutique basss guitars from scratch.
Working as both a barista and a FOH staff member across multiple sites in Chicago. This included dialing in, making coffees to a high standard, serving customers, training other staff members, and upselling retail coffee.
Developing and supporting coffee professionals
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