Kyle Rutten

professional goals

New year, new you: how to achieve professional goals in 2019

New Year’s celebrations have well and truly finished and some of you may have already drafted resolutions to keep your personal and professional goals on track for the year ahead. The start of a new year presents no better time than to evaluate your career, so ask yourself: what do you want?  Where do you want to be by the end of 2019? What would be your ideal job? Even if you’re dead-set in love with your current position, what skills or qualities do you want to develop? Whatever your goals are, you can get there if you start identifying them. 
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grinder calibration

Suntory Coffee’s grinder calibration calculations

When it comes to training, one of the biggest questions I get asked is: when should I calibrate my grinder?  Calibration is simply the process of adjusting your grinder, moving the blades of the grinder closer or further apart, to ensure you get your desired outcome from the coffee. That outcome could be consistency or based on hitting a specific coffee recipe or hitting a specific taste/flavour. For example, the dry weight of ground coffee is commonly referred to as the “dose”, let’s say 20 to 21 grams. The time it takes to extract the coffee (usually measured on the coffee machines screen or by using a timer) at 25 to 30 seconds pouring time and a yield of 40 to 44 grams.
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How to have healthy communication in the workplace

It’s 9:03am on a beautiful Friday morning in Sydney. It’s a fresh 22°C. The sun is shining and you’ve just started making a three-quarter skinny flat white for one of your loyal customers. You’ve got a smile on your face and your customer is pumped to see you. After a few minutes chatting, they leave for work with their coffee in hand.  From the outside everything seems perfect. But little did that customer know you’d been standing with direct sunlight in your face since 7am. The glare from your shining polished coffee machine is starting to give you a headache, and although you’ve mentioned it to your manager, nothing gets done about it. This has been happening for the last month since summer started because your boss wants to let in as much sunlight as possible. Apparently, “customers love it”. The situation has become so bad you dread coming to work and standing in the sun for six hours until it passes at around 2pm. What would you do?
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