New York

Having recently returned from New York I thought it might be a nice idea to write a few words about the coffee ‘scene’ there. Well, that’s as much as I had written when I started to write this article several weeks ago. The trip is now only recent if we’re speaking in terms of seasons or longer. It’s been so long, Dave has even stopped asking me how it’s coming along. He hasn’t stopped writing snarky remarks about me on boards.ie as one of my colleagues pointed out to me the other day.

[Ed: It's called motivation!]

I’m writing from Managua, Nicaragua, one of the world’s coffee capitals – where it’s nigh on impossible to get your hands on a good cup of coffee. The crème-de-la-crème is exported – it’s just too valuable for local consumption. I guess Iraqis have a similar problem with oil. I’m home in a few weeks so expect a Nicaraguan article say…around Christmas!

My first triple ristretto. I spent longer taking the photo than drinking it, but boy was it good!

My trip to NY was hastily planned so Dave furnished me with a list of must-visit cafes and street numbers which I thought was very nice of him. That is until I went looking for 9th Street Espresso. 9th street stretches the entire width of Manhattan Island as do all the other streets. What’s absolutely essential is to find out what Avenues the place you’re looking for is in between. So 9th St, between C and D Avenues is helpful. 9th St. is not so much. Cheers Dave. It took a while to get there but boy was it worth it. 9th St Espresso exclusively serves Stumptown coffee and its signature blend is the Hair Bender Blend. They buy in small batches and get deliveries every week. You barely notice the shop until you’re right upon it and at first it appears very welcoming. There’s a wooden bench all along the store front for customers to sit and relax in the sunshine. We went in an ordered an espresso. The staff were friendly but were not overly enthusiastic about putting up with my inane questions. They were quite busy, but still, didn’t they know it was my first time in The Big Apple? It was my first New York espresso. And, as I was soon to find out, my first triple ristretto. I found out that serving triple ristrettos as the standard espresso was quite the norm in New York. These people are die-hard.

Well I couldn't come home empty handed, now could I? A fine selection of coffees and one of my Cafe Grumpy espresso cups. The Cafe Grumpy Heartbreaker got a bit scared in the plane on the way home.

Ristrettos are a strange beast. You see, I like coffee a lot and I like a lot of coffee. I like volume in my coffee – americanos, lattes and filter coffee all tick this box. Each sip brings a little bit of pleasure, which added up over a mug is a lot of pleasure. The thing with espressos is although they are beautiful and intense, they are small. A couple of sips, sweet, sweet sips, and they’re gone. They suck you in and leave you desperate for more. And ristretteos are espressos squared. You take one sip and and it’s smooth and magical and intense. Soon you begin to doubt yourself – can it have been that good? You go for a second sip. But the cup’s empty and you’re left feeling a little empty too. The perfect tease. So, when I go around to Dave’s and he says ‘Coffee?’ followed closely by a disapproving ‘I suppose you want a latte?’ and I accept, it’s not just because I like to see him work that little bit more, or even because I like to laugh at his latte art attempts (he swears it’s gotten better since I’ve left..we’ll see) but because it’s so damn good I want it to last that bit longer. Potential solution: mug of ristretto (TheOtherBlackStuff.ie in no way condones drinking a mug of risretto). But I digress..

Having been walking all morning we were tired and hungry so we decided to check what they had in the food department. To my surprise all I found was some croissants and biscuit type things (biscuits I guess). It began to sink in: it’s the coffee, stupid. Anything that wasn’t about the coffee, detracted from the coffee. If it couldn’t be prepared, put on a plate and given to the customer in the time it took for your shot to pull then it wasn’t for sale. It wasn’t just 9th St either, it was the majority of places I went to. Not cafes, but speciality coffeehouses. I was trying to think of similar Irish examples and Butlers was the closest I could think of – although they hardly use Intellegensia or Stumptown, or Bald Barista due to the fact that the coffee making is kept in isolation from the food. Americans are the kings of speciality. They have that sort of narrow focus and determination to do something really, really well. We were in one bag shop that can’t have had more than ten bags for sale. Ten really nice bags apparently.

Two Clovers! Coming to a Starbucks near you!

Another stop on my itinerary was Cafe Grumpy in Chelsea. This is a really great cafe (or coffeehouse – damn, I’m confused). Its signature drink is a coffee called Heartbreaker and is roasted by Novo and yes, they serve it triple ristretto style. This seems to be the only constant on an ever changing menu. They also do guest coffees by Intellegensia and Verve. The cafe itself is long and narrow and the bar runs nearly the entire length of the shop. Mid-way down the bar I caught my first glimpse of a Clover coffee machine: an $11,000 one cup at a time coffee machine that allows infantismal degrees of control over the whole brewing process. They have two of them. I had to try it. Based on the baristas recommendation I had a cup of Columbian coffee and I can safely say it was the best cup of filter coffee I have ever had. I got talking to some of the staff there and they were all really friendly. Not in an American “Have a nice day, Sir” sort of way – but in a genuine and interested way. I talked to both Caroline the owner (co-owner perhaps) and another chap called Ed and they seemed as eager to talk to me about coffee as I was to them. What became clear very quickly was that these people were very enthusiastic about their coffee. Both Caroline and Ed (whose role is not exactly clear – Barista, cupper, scout – all of the above) had been to source and further trips were planned. They weren’t content with letting the roasters have all the fun. They hand-selected the beans used for their Heartbreaker blend. I believe they have plans for their own roastery in the pipelines too. As it happened there was a free, open to all, cupping session going on in the cafe later that evening. It must have been my birthday! Well, actually it was and that earned me a free cup of Joe! Nice, nice people. Although it might have had something to do with the half-dozen of their custom cups that I bought from them!

My first cupping session. We tasted three different coffees, each split into four batches. The four minute brewing time was almost up by the looks of it!

Later that same night..

My first cupping session. I was a bit apprehensive going back to the cafe that evening. I still hadn’t gotten much further than “it tastes like coffee”. I was wired from drinking too much coffee which probably didn’t help my cause either. About 10 people showed up in the end, many first timers, and Ed started us off. We had a tasting chart to guide and Ed made us feel perfectly at ease, insisting that there were no wrong answers. We were to taste 3 different types of coffee and there were 4 batches of each. One bad bean in a batch could throw off the taste of the whole cup so it’s best to taste different batches. I won’t go into the details as we were following standard cupping procedures: smelling the dry, ground beans; smelling the brewed coffee and then tasting the brewed coffee. Afterwards we compared notes, talking about different things we tasted and smelled and debated which coffees were the nicest. Ed picked up notes of strawberries and cream in one of the coffees. I did not. And that’s no reflection on Ed!

Coming home from New York I was left deeply jealous of the coffee scene there. It wasn’t just the two cafes I mention, but a whole host of them using premium beans from the best roasters. Manhattan does have the right ingredients to make speciality coffee work: high population density, high disposable incomes and people willing to pay a premium for the best. Could it work in Ireland? I wish someone would grasp that nettle and let us find out..

The Other Black Stuff

Sitting in a courtyard in Covent Garden, drinking a cappuccino, this is where coffee came to life for me. I had drunk coffee before (mostly instant) but this was a watershed coffee, ordered in a whimsy. It made me aware that there was more to coffee than I had previously realised – warm, sweet, and satisfying. The problem now is that being ten or more years further along this coffee journey; I cannot remember if this coffee was any good. I suspect modern me would probably never have sat down in the place in the first instance. Instead I would have surreptitiously identified a glaring flaw with some element of the coffee preparation technique and exited stage-left without delay. That or I would have sat down, glanced at a neighbouring table, identifying “soap bubble” foam on top of a latté and resigned myself to having a tea or a soft-drink. If past me had not ordered that cappuccino though, modern me might not exist. The space-time continuum is in jeopardy.

Modern me, despite being more than a little obsessed with coffee, does not drink a lot of coffee outside of the home. Modern me is an embittered snob. To my discredit I look down my nose at the unwashed masses drinking their lattés (most often), accepting mediocrity, unaware of the flaws – ignorance is bliss. I held myself back as I witnessed a woman who received a latté and complained that she had ordered a cappuccino was satiated by the addition of some cocoa powder to the top of the foam. I look at coffee chains opening new stores all the time, and my heart breaks for the shiny new La Marzoccos and Mazzers that will never produce a great espresso, or cappuccino, or latté.

I go to restaurants, award winning restaurants whose chefs clearly have an appreciation for taste and flavour, chefs so skilled that they make haute cuisine seem effortless. These same restaurants produce espresso that can only be described as effortless; a dark black liquid bereft of flavour and aroma, with an imperceptibly thin crema. I just spent €30 on some halibut – couldn’t you spend 50c on some fresh coffee beans? Needless to say, more and more I am rounding off my dinner with a glass of port instead (Coffee 0 Alcoholism 1).

The situation is not uniformly grim though. Both established and up-and-coming pioneers exist who are driving quality coffee in all parts of this country. Some of these are nationally and internationally recognised names, while others have a more local reputation. Irish coffee importers travel the world; they cup samples of the latest crops. They taste the coffee at origin, trying to identify that lot of coffee to add to their next blend. They often spend far more than fair-trade price on these coffees. There are big roasters who supply supermarkets, multiple independent coffee retailers, and some of the coffee chains. Bewleys for example has done more to push speciality coffee in Ireland than anyone else and have been doing so since well before coffee became trendy.

Latte Pour

There are medium sized roasters supplying cafés and also the end-user (you and me). One advantage these guys have perhaps is that they do not have the unjustly quaint reputation that Bewleys has in some quarters. Despite the growing commercialisation of these medium sized roasters they still have an air of the independent “artisan” about them. Then there are the smaller guys selling roasted coffee on the internet, in farmers markets, or in their independent café. At all points on this scale you can see that there is appreciation for what makes great coffee. Conversely, even down to the artisan guys, you can see the concessions made in the name of remaining viable (pre-ground beans going stale on supermarket shelves).

At the retail end the chains dominate, and the masses flock, comforted by the familiarity and uniformity. Not all of these chains are equal, but nearly all have a lot of room for improvement. Typically observed problems are: filter baskets insufficiently cleaned between shots, stale beans, dosers full of ground coffee going stale, under-extracted shots, topping up already hot milk with cold for steaming (mmm bacteria), and overheating the milk. Many independent retailers are equally culpable, and the increasing domination of the market by the chains is inevitable if these independent retailers don’t demonstrate the potential for greater quality.

There are some great examples to follow. Perhaps they are not immediately obvious, but if you search them out you will find them. There are the Italian guys whose heads were wetted in the Italian espresso scene, whose baseline for a good espresso tends to be quite high. If you follow a group of Italians around for long enough maybe they will lead you to these places. There are plenty of Irish guys too, in Dublin, Galway, Cork, and elsewhere who “get it”. They understand the importance of freshly roasted, freshly ground beans. They train their staff to know the difference between good and bad coffee. They insist on better coffee. These guys don’t live in isolation though. Behind them there is the chain. The chain goes back from retailer, to roaster, to importer / buyer, ultimately to the co-op or farm where the green coffee emanates.

Naked Portafilter

Surely the guys making the brilliant coffee are rolling in the euros and like a virus the idea of quality speciality coffee is spreading? It’s not that simple. The unwashed masses I referred to previously are in fact the greatest obstacle to improving the standard of coffee commonly accessible in Ireland. No one really wants to create crap coffee, everyone wants to take pride in their product, but the roadside is strewn with the corpses of coffee shops with principles. What’s the point in getting the finest beans, and observing the best standards and preparation techniques if your customers neither understand nor appreciate the difference? Despite the increasing familiarisation with terms like macchiato, ristretto and arabica, they are little more than buzz-words to many.

With this in mind it is the objective of this website to draw attention to those in the Irish coffee scene who strive for excellence, not to criticise those who fail to meet these standards, because ultimately the market defines the standards, and our market is not there yet. This website wants great coffee in Ireland to become the norm. Moving the standard of coffee forward in Ireland need not be an exclusive elitist effort. In fact to really succeed it cannot be that. Through awareness, passion, and example the bar can be raised for everyone. If this website, in any small way can put a little spotlight on those whose cross this is to bear, then it will have succeeded.

Modern me wants to drink more coffee outside of the home.

P.S. This website does not advocate stalking Italians.

P.P.S. Maybe a little.