Airport coffee is mostly bad. Entirely necessary, but save for a few places, generally not great. There are exceptions, like the Stumptown in the Portland International Airport, the Cartel Roasting Co in the Pheonix Airport, and a Solberg & Hansen in Oslo (not to mention a cafe in Austin’s cellphone waiting lot), but these are few and far between. The Dublin Airport, though, is stepping up their game pretty significantly with the announcement of three in-terminal Cloud Picker cafes, and the first one opens this week.
In a press release published earlier this week, Dublin’s Cloud Picker Coffee announced “three flagship cafes” to be opened over the course of 2023 at the international hub. For the new spots, Cloud Pickers is teaming up with SSP Group, a London-based contract foodservice provider that serves over 180 airports around the world. The project has been in the work for three years—halted, like so many cafes, by the pandemic—and sees Cloud Picker looking to bring the specialty cafe experience to the airport. This includes being “meticulously outfitted with top-of-the-line specialty coffee equipment, including Slayer espresso machines, Mahlkönig grinders, and cutting-edge coffee equipment from Marco Beverage Systems.”
“Bringing Cloud Picker to Dublin Airport is an amazing achievement for our business and something we never anticipated in our wildest dreams when we first began in 2013. Now as we celebrate our 10th anniversary year, we are further driven to provide the very best specialty coffee offering Ireland has to offer Irish and global travelers.”
Commemorating the new cafes, Cloud Picker has created a new blend that will serve as the main espresso offering at the airport spots. Called “Amelia”, the blend is a nod to Amelia Earhart, the first female pilot to make a solo Transatlantic flight.
Per the press release, the first of the three cafes, designed by Dublin’s NE Studios, will open Thursday, July 27th and will be located at Terminal 2, Departures Gate 409.
This is just Reason Number-I’ve-Already-Lost-Count to get back to Europe with great haste. I’ve had enough not so great Americanos in Heathrow and I’m ready to book my connection through Dublin.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
