First Trainee!

Meet Bishnu. 

Bishnu lives nearby to Black Kite Cafe and recently finished barista training with a good friend and collaborator of ours, Subash (see November’s ‘New Friendships’ post). In order to help build her confidence, she spent a couple of weeks as an intern with us in February, practising the basics of customer service and latte art. Bishnu now hopes to use her new skills to work as a barista in the Middle East, joining her husband who already lives and works there.

In addition to practising in the cafe, Bishnu joined Subash, other trainees and Varsha’s husband, Jug Rai, for a visit to Blue Mountain Coffee. Nestled in the 1,200m high ‘hills’ surrounding the city of Pokhara, Blue Mountain is a family run business that grows and collects beans from village neighbours. 

The main reason for the visit was to see how coffee beans are processed from red-cherry to parchment and then green beans, ready to roast. To help us at Black Kite, we were able to ‘de-hull’ and then ‘grade’ beans that had been grown and sent to us by relatives of Varsha and Jug from Okhaldhunga in East Nepal. We are now much clearer on the costs involved and will be looking to do much more in the future as a way of both reducing costs, and becoming more closely linked to our growers.

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