WHILE CAFFEINE FANS debate the benefits of AeroPress, cold brews and espresso, a new service is cropping up all over Ireland for the seriously coffee-obsessed.
Coffee suppliers are offering monthly subscriptions to give drinkers a sample of the range of flavours available from the humble bean.
Several Irish coffee roasters have started offering the service, including Dublin’s 3fe and County Wicklow’s McCabe’s. But rather than being a simple delivery offering, the suppliers say the point is to give their customers variety.
In County Cork, roaster Badger & Dodo has been delivering coffee subscriptions for several years and its owner, Australian import Brock Lewin, said it shipped about 50kg of beans each month.
“Because our subscription is a tour of the world of coffee, people who are interested in exploring that would come to us,” he said.
We do 12 different single-origin (roasts) a year. All the coffees that we put out, we include the bean type, the altitude, the variety and what you can expect to find from that coffee – it’s just like tasting wines, or whiskey, or beer.”
Some of the batches Badger & Dodo supplied through its subscriptions were only with the service, which cost less than €10 a month for 250g of beans.
Fresh beans
Meanwhile, Rebel Beans is about to start shipping its first coffee-subscription orders, but rather than producing its own the Cork-based supplier will be giving coffee drinkers access to fresh roasts from around the world, starting with Berlin’s Bonanza Coffee Roasters for its debut.
Rebel Beans’ Colm Keohane said Ireland had lots of good roasters, but his company was about expanding people’s options.
“What we are trying to encourage people to do is get fresh beans,” he said. “The ones you get in Tesco could be months old and the freshness has gone and the taste is gone and they’re really bland.”
At €25 per month for two, 250g bags or for the lighter user, €15 for two, 100g bags, Keohane said he expected most customers to be home drinkers, but he also hoped to sign up businesses as more people became interested in coffee.
Ahead of the pack
The amount Irish people spend on the drink has been steadily rising is expected to continue growing at over 10% a year for the near future, although locals are still outside the world’s top-5o coffee consumers on a per-capita basis.
Lewin said roasters like his company, which started sales in 2009, and 3fe had been ”ahead of the market” in Ireland, but in recent years emigrants had been bringing their appreciation of coffee culture from places like Melbourne and New York back to the country.
“Coffee’s a very dynamic industry, it’s changing all the time,” he said.
Keohane said people were drawn to drinking coffee because it was often a social activity, replacing traditions like the office water-cooler chat.
Even in Ireland, it has started to replace the pub – people are going out for a coffee instead and they’re enjoying that. I think coffee culture is here for the long run really.”
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