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Coffee Stories

Juliya Drozdova

By 29th March 2021May 19th, 2022No Comments4 min read

"Coffee is an important part of life for a huge number of people. By improving our work, we improve our living environment." Juliya Drozdova

Juliya Drozdov cover

Juliya Drozdova is making pour-over coffee

Meet Juliya Drozdova, a barista trainer from Russia. Her adoration of coffee began in childhood when she often came to visit her grandfather. He would always make Juliya a hearty cup of coffee in a small rip coffee maker. They would talk about everything, and since then the simple act of ‘having a coffee’ means so much more.

“Coffee has evoked the warmest feelings”, Juliya Drozdova tells us.

When Juliya Drozdova was 20, she moved out of her hometown and got a job as a waiter in a coffee shop. She tells me that the baristas there were trendy guys with tattoos wearing aprons, who only talked about coffee!

“I looked at them and thought ‘cool’”, says Juliya.

Juliya Drozdova coffee story

Juliya Drozdova

This sparked her interest in barista work, where she started looking for books and articles on speciality coffee and trying new and distinctive flavors.

This was about 9 years ago. Since then, Juliya Drozdova moved from Siberia to the city of St. Petersburg, where the coffee culture was developing faster, and she could grow in her profession. However, many companies didn’t understand Juliya’s yearn to improve coffee culture when everything works. She wanted to improve the qualification of the employees; however, many managers did not see commercial interest in this.

When Juliya started working as a barista, she did not see any prospects for her professional growth. She loved coffee but didn’t know where to take her passion.

This changed when she visited a coffee roasting factory. “It shocked me”, Juliya tells us.

“I saw people roasting coffee, which I make every day in the coffee shop. She met a Q-grader and roast-master who told me about their work”.

From then, she saw that the work of a barista is just the beginning.

Juliya Drozdova’s favourite part of her daily work is improving the living environment. Every day she has new tasks and encourages her employees to multitask. Her job consists of training baristas and organising events for guests of different coffee houses. She also tries new varieties of coffee and finds interesting lots for their roasting, which develops her personal coffee recipes for clients.

Success to Juliya is movement.

“Free movement forward, daily work on quality and the response that I get from people. I don’t drive an expensive car, I don’t have apartments in a prestigious area, but every day I get a response from the people I work with. I feel that I am doing what I love, I am developing, every day I learn something new and get new interesting tasks.

The team I work with is called “The Coffee Soldiers”, and every day we win little battles for taste. And each such victory is a success”, Juliya says.

Despite coffee culture in Russia being appreciated, not everyone understands the value of a good product. “For many people, good coffee is just bitter coffee. Because of this, coffee shops make drinks from low-quality coffee, explaining this by the fact that people buy it and drink it anyway,” Juliya exclaims.

To solve this, Juliya Drozdova takes consistent steps, working with this problem every day by showing and telling people how delicious coffee can be.

Besides her love of coffee, Juliya loves Scandinavian, German, and French folk music. She also loves reading science fiction and books about coffee. As well as his, Juliya frequently goes rock climbing, fencing, and riding motorcycles.

You find out more about Juliya on her Instagram @luk.lukinsky

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