A Day in the Life of a Barista

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a barista? We’re spilling all the tea… or espresso… today on the blog!

If you’re the opening barista for the cafe that day, your day starts very early. You’ll arrive to the coffee shop about thirty minutes before the shop opens for the day. This could be anywhere from five to seven a.m., depending on the shop.

You’ll open up the coffee shop which generally means turning everything on, brewing drip coffee, setting out pastries, filling the sanitizer sink, and most importantly tasting the coffee. Every single morning, the openers re-dial the espressos and taste them! This happens at any specialty coffee shop anywhere: it’s how we keep your coffee tasting good day in and day out as the beans age and outside factors change the taste daily.

Now it's going to get busy soon! Though the hour may vary, every shop has a morning rush. Parents taking their kids to school, people heading to the office, overnight shift workers going home for the day, students coming in to study, business people popping down for a meeting, work-from-homers needing a change of scenery. The customer base can be any cross-section of society, and that’s one of the most fun parts of the job! You get to talk to all kinds of people all day long.

Once the morning rush dies down, it’s time to catch up. Midday tasks will include restocking, cleaning, making syrups, baking pastries, catching up on dishes, and more. At this time closing baristas will show up for their shift too. The closers will take over bar and taste the coffees: they might need to be dialed in again! Morning baristas will take a lunch break around this time.

After lunch breaks, there will probably be an afternoon rush. People need a pick-me-up after lunch, or maybe they’ve scheduled afternoon meetings at your shop. As the openers head home for the day, the closers will probably be cranking out drinks!

Once the afternoon rush dies down, the closing baristas will start to close the shop down. There is a lot they have to do, even while the cafe is still open for the day. Closing involves a lot of cleaning, restocking, dishes, and basically resetting the cafe for the next day. The closers won’t stop hustling until the doors are locked for the night!

As you may have gathered from reading this, being a barista isn’t as simple as pouring coffee into a mug. There is a lot of training that goes into the job, a lot of knowledge behind every shot pulled and latte served, and a lot to get done in any given day. It’s a high-energy job. (Good thing there is a steady supply of caffeine.)

The best part of the job? Connecting with people over coffee, tasting countless different coffees from all over the world, pouring latte art… these are just some of the answers different baristas give because there really is a lot to love about this job!