There was a time in Ireland when coffee meant Nescafé Gold Blend couples or sophisticated visitors, while the concept of a cafe culture was something we only saw in the TV show Friends.
We might have flirted with instant cappuccino sachets, or added syrup to our coffee after J1 summers in the US, but still this dark brew was tasked with just one job – to wake us up. But when Australia and New Zealand joined the Irish rite-of-passage travel list, more and more of us came back with a newfound love for flat whites, filter brews and the rest. Without getting too involved in the first or second waves, we very quickly found ourselves jumping with both feet into third-wave coffee.
This third wave refers to the shift in the past couple of decades, focusing on what’s in the cup, sourcing, roasting and terroir. The first wave was in the 19th and 20th centuries, when coffee houses and espresso machines appeared. The second wave was the growth of commercial coffee in the 1970s to 1990s, when cafes became cool places and Starbucks was born.
The third wave had started to ebb into Ireland around 2007 when Colin Harmon, now one of the best-known names in Irish coffee, was getting interested, researching and making connections on Boards.ie and Twitter. On a visit to London, he sought out an Australian and Kiwi-founded cafe called Flat White. “I remember going in and getting a flat white and taking one sip, realising this is what I want to do. It was just so different to anything I’d ever seen before.”
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Harmon is speaking over a perfect flat white in his own place, 3FE in Dublin’s IFSC, one of the eight cafes he runs along with a roastery and wholesale business.
He started his 3FE coffee business in 2009 in the lobby of Dublin nightclub Twisted Pepper on Abbey Street. When he first told people he was a barista, “they thought I worked in the Four Courts”.
Others were dabbling in speciality coffee, but nobody else had yet stripped it back the way he had, focusing purely on what was in the cup.
It wasn’t really a business plan, he says. “We did it from a place of poverty and privilege at the same time. I didn’t have to pay any rent at the start. It was just me and a machine. Money wasn’t the objective. So I could use specially graded coffee, single origins, latte art, Chemexes and all that stuff that no-one had fully committed to in Dublin yet.”
He sold 16 coffees on day one. Word spread, people returned. By 2011, he had opened a second 3FE on Grand Canal Street in Dublin 2. In 2013 he sold the Twisted Pepper business to Tom Stafford, who had caught the coffee bug in Melbourne and returned to Dublin excited by what was happening. “Back then, it was seen as an emerging trend,” says Stafford. “A lot of our customers were people who had travelled and were looking for that third-wave, small-cup culture. Before that, coffee was about quantity over quality; what we were doing was the reverse.”
He rebranded as Vice Coffee and began carving out his own identity. Most cafes used one roaster; he took a multi-roaster approach. “That was the thing we did differently. We bought different coffees, guest roasters from the UK and all around Europe. As the Irish speciality roasters started getting more serious, we added them.”
Meanwhile, Harmon had begun roasting his own 3FE coffee, and those beans, along with his approach, started to sell. Specialist Dublin food retailer Fallon & Byrne was the first big customer, followed by cafes such as Roasted Brown and Murphy’s Ice Cream, which opened in Dublin.
Susie Kealy was the barista at Murphy’s Ice Cream at that stage. Her path there began with a flat white at Vice Coffee – a Kenyan single origin around 2012, she recalls. “The beans, roasted by Square Mile, had the unmistakable flavour of blackcurrant. I became obsessed and started researching and learning all I could about coffee. Soon after, I decided to take a year out of college. It led me to that first role in Murphy’s.”
She immersed herself in the growing community of baristas and roasters, swapping ice cream for espressos at Roasted Brown in Filmbase in Temple Bar, which then became First Draft coffee, where the menu featured a coffee flight: a trio of tasters of one bean brewed three ways. Everything felt new, fun and experimental. There was a lot to learn, and the baristas were there to teach it.
Kealy remembers that some customers needed hand-holding. “The idea that your coffee didn’t need a big splash of milk and several sachets of sugar felt like we were tricking customers.”
Harmon remembers people loved a spiel with their coffee, “They wanted to understand it and know about it, which was amazing but insanely exhausting when it was a 12-hour service.”
Stafford was lucky to inherit a lot of his Vice customers from 3FE, which meant a little less education was required. “They knew what a flat white or cortado was. Then we learned how to identify whether people wanted information or not. Some people want to know about the processing, the producer and how it was roasted. Some people just want a good coffee.”
Robyn Butler committed properly to the coffee world around 2014, when, she says, the scene was in full swing. “There was a lot of energy around it, and people were really excited about working in coffee,” but customer reactions were still sometimes mixed. “People weren’t always used to small cup sizes, unusual flavour profiles and smaller menus. Customers tended to either love it or hate it. The coffee community took a much more purist approach at the time, and there was a lot of talk about educating people. It’s funny because that paid off to some extent in that consumers seem to have a lot more knowledge of coffee now.”
Butler sees that now in her own cafe in Kilkenny, Low Lane, where she aims to serve really high-quality coffee and food. “We’ve moved away from that desire to influence customers’ preferences to be in line with our own.”
Kealy has since left customer-facing coffee but stayed in the industry and now works in marketing at Acaia, a company focused on aesthetic and functional coffee tools.
Spotting these fancy tools and gadgets in the early days became part of the visual clue that coffee-lovers were getting a proper cup. Brew bars were another marker; they started to pop up as dedicated spaces focused on hand-poured methods such as pour-over, V60, Chemex, Aeropress and siphon.
Stafford calls this the Scandi wave, when “super light roasts became popular, we had coffee from roasters like Koppi and Coffee Collective. Then a lot of the Irish roasters took influence from that Scandi wave”. It might sound complicated, but it was still a purist approach. Everything was about getting the most from the beans.
You can get good milk in petrol stations. People forget that about Ireland. The milk is good
— Colin Harmon
And thus, Dublin’s speciality coffee circuit grew. Dublin suddenly had Vice and 3FE, Coffee Angel on Pembroke Street, Brother Hubbard, Roasted Brown, The Fumbally. Love Supreme opened in Stoneybatter, then Proper Order in Smithfield. Every opening pushed things a little further. Around Ireland, more places popped up too: Coffee Werk & Press in Galway, Soma in Cork, and Rift in Limerick. Belfast had already been ahead of the game, with Established opening in 2012, then Pocket and Root and Branch.
Things went up another notch when the World Barista Championship came to Dublin in 2016. “That had a big impact,” Harmon says. He remembers visiting competitors asking where to source good milk: “I was like, everywhere – you can get good milk in petrol stations. People forget that about Ireland. The milk is good. The water quality is very good too.” He says Dublin city water is about 100ppm (parts per million), which is how baristas measure water in terms of its Total Dissolved Solids or TDS. Even he admits it’s a complicated science, but all the coffee drinker really needs to know is that Irish milk and Irish water are excellent raw ingredients to pair with well-sourced beans.
Milk was another big change with the new wave. We’d been used to scorching hot lattes and frothy cappuccinos. The flat white was different; the milk was flatter and silkier. Thermometers in milk jugs became standard, aiming for 55–60 degrees, a temperature that lets you taste the coffee. It also perfectly suits latte art, or designs on top of the coffee.
Speciality coffee was slow to embrace alternative milks at first, because the quality wasn’t there and it affected the latte art. Then oat milk arrived. Stafford was an early adopter in Vice: “I think we were the first in Dublin. One of my baristas, Dave, convinced me after trying it in London.” Oat milk also worked better for latte art, holding foam where other alternative milks had failed. Now, barista-grade milk alternatives are big business.
Harmon and Stafford both admit they’ve chilled out since their earlier purist days. There was a time when 3FE was known as much for what it refused – no tea, one cup size only, no decaf, no alt milks. These days, Harmon is more open-minded, even adding matcha: “Over the years, we’ve learned to broaden horizons. Personally, I don’t like matcha or oat milk, but we do both.”
Stafford has also shifted over the years, carving out a niche with Vice’s speciality coffee cocktails – especially Irish coffees that draw tourists. “Coffee shops have a life cycle unless you expand or pivot. We focused on speciality coffee drinks and cocktails, giving us a whole new customer base.”
Both are impressed by the overall Irish cafe scene, with much growth occurring during the Covid years. Harmon reckons that while those years felt like a bubble, they were really an acceleration.
“We saw about 10 years of growth in the industry happen in about three,” he says. Another layer, he adds, is “that social currency we as Irish people have, wanting to meet people and talk”. Once, those conversations happened in post offices, pubs and churches; these days, coffee shops have become the same type of hub.
“Those years felt like peak coffee,” Stafford remembers. “Places opened everywhere, some have closed since, but it was the biggest demand we’ve seen, even in suburbs and rural towns.”
Low Lane in Kilkenny, was a Covid baby: when the pandemic hit, Butler realised it was time to leave Dublin and build a life in her hometown with her chef partner, Mark. “It just made sense to try to build a life for ourselves outside of Dublin.”
Harmon, a pioneer, hopes to see more local businesses like it thrive: “It’s really great to see cafes open everywhere. Coffee is for everyone – it fits in anywhere.”
