A coffee company is reliant on many team members to be successful. As in any industry, our team members with their individual responsibilities and goals, come together to tackle big initiatives for the company. Behind every coffee launch and the ongoing quality assurance of our products is the Lucky Goat Roasting and Cupping Team. Crucially involved with the process, this team is made up of members from our roasting, education, and executive teams, and they make important decisions on coffee sourcing, roasting profiles, and quality assurance adjustments. Let's take a look at the team members that make up this important team.  

The Lucky Goat Roasting Team 

Our roasting team is comprised of a few highly specialized employees. For many, roasting is a skill that’s honed over years of an apprenticeship or assistantship. As a coffee professional, you learn quickly that roasting is as much a science as it is an art, and it doesn’t simply boil down to learning the steps of roasting and letting the machine do the work for you—it takes constant sensory evaluation. As a roaster, you are listening to, smelling, and seeing your roast and adjusting temperature and airflow accordingly. During the years of an apprenticeship, you are also developing your coffee palate: the ability to taste the nuanced tasting notes of coffee and determine levels of sweetness, acidity, bitterness, and body. It’s important to be able to pick up on even the most delicate of flavors and defects so that you can consistently provide high-quality coffees.  

Throughout the day of a member of the roasting team at Lucky Goat, they will be managing green coffee inventory, watching harvest seasons to order samples of new coffees, sample roasting & setting up roast profiles (the unique roasting recipe) for new coffees, cupping current coffees for quality control, and managing production needs for shipments to our cafes, wholesale customers, and online customers. This all goes on while they are churning out thousands of pounds of roasted coffee per day—what a busy eight hours! While it’s a highly coveted job for many coffee professionals, the job of a roaster isn’t glamorous. It involves plenty of heavy lifting, long hours on your feet, and sweltering temperatures next to the roaster. You must have a passion for coffee to be up for the job and the talent to do it well. Our roasting team never fails to stand up to the challenge, and we are grateful for their expertise and years of knowledge in the industry.  

The Lucky Goat Cupping Team  

In collaboration with the expertise of our roasting team, Lucky Goat maintains high-quality coffee products and launches innovative and exciting new coffees through regular cuppings. These are standardized tastings that involve strict brewing parameters and allow us to evaluate our coffee objectively. Our cupping team meets weekly to evaluate existing products, source new products, and continue developing their pallets for tasting coffee well. To learn more about cupping, read our blog here!   

Quality assurance cupping occurs on a rotating schedule to evaluate our existing products. Our educators and roasters come together to assess a wide array of coffees and follow up with changes to the roast profile or coffee blends whenever coffee crops change.  

Every few months, our team finds a need to source new coffees—a venture that our roasting and education teams work on together. They order samples of potentially fitting green coffees from our importers, roast small amounts of them, and cup them with our team. If you want to get a good idea of our team's talent in sourcing excellent coffees and roasting them to perfection, try some of our Single Origins; this is where they really get to shine!