Cloud Picker was founded in 2013 by Frank Kavanagh, from a background in graphic design, and Peter Sztal, from corporate banking. It started in Dublin 1 as “Dublin’s first micro roastery”, by its own account. The name comes from the founders’ first visit to a coffee farm, on a mountain on the border between Myanmar and Thailand: on a misty morning they drove up through the clouds and met the coffee pickers at the top.

The roastery is now in Crumlin, Dublin 12, where the team roasts by hand, to order, every week on a Loring roaster, and online orders can be collected from its dispensary counter. Its motto is to “teach & not preach”, and it sells Roast Your Own experiences. It buys from single farmers, such as Alemayehu Hillo Meko in Sidama, Ethiopia, who took out his own export licence in 2020, and from cooperatives such as COMSA in Marcala, Honduras. Two Colombian coffees in its range are shipped to Europe by sail, a project of its long-standing French partner Belco.

The café is in The Projector Room in Dublin 2. Cloud Picker also serves coffee at Dublin Airport, at a counter in the Terminal 1 arrivals hall and at two gates in Terminal 2.

Cloud Picker is a certified B Corp with an impact score of 81.0. Local deliveries run on an all-electric fleet, and the roastery packs coffee in zero-waste paper buckets made in Bray, County Wicklow, to use fewer kilo bags.

Partner cafés

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Cloud Picker