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Blog
Big Change 14/10/2015
Over the past few months things have been very quiet on coffeeshop.ie, not a lot of change happening. This was down to few things but mainly because we (myself & Catherine) were unable to give the site the attention it needed, because of this we have been unable to give the variety of product and quality of service that we wanted too, but things are about to change.
Over the past few months we have been talking to a company who have our passion for coffee but also have the experience of running successful online business, they have agreed to come on board and help with the future development of the online shop and many other ideas that we have for the business.
So what does this mean? Well, at the start not a lot, but over the next few weeks you will begin to see big changes, more stock, much larger range and a far better service. All orders will go out the same day they are placed (orders placed before 3pm) we will be working hard to expand our range and be a competitive as possible with our prices.
If you have any suggestions or questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thanks
Craig & Catherine.
We are now on Instagram :-) (shortest blog ever!)
Click the button and see where it takes you!
New to Coffeeshop, corporate gifts ireland!
Everyone loves coffee, or at least knows someone who does!_______________________________________
Are you looking for something other than a food hamper or bottle of wine to give as a corporate gift? Coffeeshop.ie will help you find a suitable gift and then have it delivered direct to your recipients or in bulk to your chosen address.
Choice. We can assist you in the choice of gift and deliver direct to recipient ensuring your task is hassle-free, comes within your budget and is well received. Simply get in touch and we will be more than happy to talk you through the options that are suitable for your budget.
Personalise it! We can add your own business cards or compliment slips to go with the gifts, if required, along with other promotional literature or signed cards; all you have to do is send the required literature to us prior to shipping and we will do the rest.
Payment. We accept payment via the following methods: VISA, MasterCard, Laser Cards and PayPal. Gifts will be despatched once full payment has been received.
Christmas. When ordering for Christmas it is always better to order early to avoid disappointment. Orders can placed in advance (eg, October, November) and they will arrive closer to Christmas.
Postage. There is a €4.95 shipping charge for orders in Ireland and Northern Ireland. If you are sending more than one gift to the same address there will be no extra postage charge. We have flexible shipping options - Next business day delivery to all 32 counties, world-wide express. All gifts can be delivered to one address or delivered individually to each recipient's address.
Use Coffeeshop.ie For Corporate Gifts All Year Round ..____________________________________________
Our unique range of coffee related products are an ideal way for your company to promote other occasions all year round such as:
Just Say Thanks - reward your customers, motivate and encourage your sales team, project completions, retirement gifts, birthdays, great prizes for golf outings, competitions, draws, etc. We take the hassle and guesswork out of buying gifts, we will always give you a number of options for your budget.
Ordering___________________________________________________________________________________
We love to talk coffee so simply contact us by telephone (Call us on 01 2011016) or Online (use the contact form and we will be in touch) or simply drop us an email (catherine@coffeeshop.ie, craig@coffeeshop.ie). We will listen to what you want or if you’re not sure we will offer plenty of suggestions.
Time To Cook
I recently started watching ‘Breaking Bad’ on Netflix; I quickly became addicted and managed to watch the complete series in about 3 weeks, I loved it! It got me thinking about my days of ‘cooking’ (roasting coffee) and I realised how much I missed it. Now, I didn’t roast out of an RV but was not too far from it. I use to roast in a little shed, out the back of my office, on a 1KG roaster. Just like Jessie and Mr. White I had many an adventure learning the process (although mine did not include murder, hookers and millions of dollars) it was still a little adventure every time I fired up the Cafemino.
It has been 6 years since I roasted any coffee and things have moved on a lot in that time. After a bit of research I quickly realised there is only one ‘real’ home roaster on the market, the ‘Gene Café’. I ordered it from www.bellabarista.co.uk (great website) and it arrived two days later…oh the anticipation… it’s a long time since I was excited about new coffee equipment. Coffee roasting is not like baking or cooking it’s more like alchemy and chemistry. You have to take many things into consideration like ambient temperature, how and where your green bean was grown and processed, moisture content of the coffee and so on. You also need to take safety into consideration too as fires are easy enough to start when roasting.
Bella Barista supplied a great little guide to roasting which they wrote themselves, I studied this and decided on a profile that I was going to use. I cleared the kitchen, covered the fire alarm, found my old roasting log, weighed the coffee and most importantly sent my wife and child out; nothing more certain than burning down your house if you don’t pay attention during roasting. I was prepared!
The most nostalgic trigger for me is smell, the right aroma can bring me back to any point in my life. As I fired up my new roaster, the grassy aroma of coffee beginning to roast, started to fill the air and it brought me right back to my little shed (man cave if I’m honest) and I quickly began to remember the little roasting skills I had, great!
My first roast was terrible, which was fine and expected, my second roast was better but still a long way off what I want. This is the beginning of a long journey, I’ll keep you posted!
AEROPRESS, FEELING THE LOVE AND THE GUILT. 
Guilt is an amazing emotion, it can hit you from nowhere over something that seems irrelevant. I recently felt a new kind of guilt, a guilt that I did not know was possible, I felt guilty because of a machine.
Let me explain.
I bought my beloved Rancillio Silvia espresso machine about 8 year ago. I can’t even imagine how many shots I’ve pulled on it, from my morning coffee, my excessive weekend coffee drinking, to my year with a 1kg coffee roaster when, in one day, I could put 20 shots through the machine. I have never really thought about upgrading, well not seriously anyway, I love it. I look after it well, descaling and cleaning on a regular basis, and it looks after me well. Only once, in 8 years, has it let me down; but it was only out of action for a few days and I reckon if I was in anyway mechanically minded I could have fixed it in 2 minutes.
A few months back I was in 3FE, one of Ireland’s best coffee shops for people that don’t know. I’m embarrassed to say it was my first trip there, anyhow that’s a different story. I was really looking forward to tasting their coffee so went for the tasting menu which consisted of 2 different coffees. To my surprise and delight I noticed that it was being made with the AeroPress coffee maker. I had read plenty about the AeroPress but if I’m honest I had disregarded it as a poor cousin to a decent espresso machine, and never had any real desire to buy one. I was presented with my two coffees, one Ethiopian and the other was……something? I was blown away by the taste experience that I was having, two cups of the lightest, smoothest coffee I have tasted, mixed with these delicate but complex flavours. One minute after finishing my coffees I was at the till buying an AeroPress and some coffees to match.
Over the following few days I made some of the best cups of coffee I had ever made. Four things really impressed me about the AeroPress, 1: the simplicity of the product, a simple design and really good value. 2: the smoothness of the coffee, for some reason I can drink a lot more AeroPress than any other kind of brew method. 3: the quality of what was in the cup, some coffees that I would consider undrinkable out of the espresso machine came alive with the AeroPress, and finally point 4, this is the most important one for me, consistency. Every cup I made was great; no over extraction, no under extraction, no dud shots, no real adjusting of the grinder. All the variables are eliminated.
This is where the guilt steps in… About 6 weeks after getting my AeroPress I had a hankering for a latte (I go through phases of drinking these). That’s when I realised I hadn’t even looked at my espresso machine for nearly 2 months. Unloved, unused, it almost looked sad. As with all guilty situations I over compensated and went back to only using the Silvia but over time it’s balanced out. I now use them 50/50, and almost to prove a point as I wrote this I’ve had two coffees; one from the AeroPress and one from my very much loved espresso machine.
S0 go on, get yourself an AeroPress and be prepared to taste some of the best coffee that you’ve ever made.
To finish, and Just to give a little balance on a slight negative note; no matter what people say it does not produce espresso like a proper machine, and I would never use it for a latte….to, of course, the delight of my trusted Silvia.
Craig.
HI THERE... MY NAME IS CRAIG AND i'M A (COFFEE) CUPAHOLIC!!!
Hi there… my name Is Craig and I’m a cupaholic…
Not many people know of my cup fetish as it’s not something a man in his mid-thirties would usually own up to… but I think the time has finally come for me to be honest with you all!
So here goes…It soon started after I had fallen in love with Coffee; one day while drinking from a particularly horrible specimen (you know the kind) I realised that I wasn’t enjoying the coffee I was drinking as much as I should or could! Looking at the ugly, but functional, cup in my hand I recognised that it was the cup that was putting a dampener on this particularly good coffee and somehow I needed to remedy this. So my eternal search for a good coffee cup began… and my cup fetish started.
At the start it was a very basic obsession. I was living at home with my folks and as you can possibly imagine their cup collection was terrible… every time I lovingly made my coffee using my hand grinder and stale Gloria gene beans (ah bless), I had to drink it out of my ‘favourite’ cup otherwise It just would not taste right.
As I progressed with my love of coffee I also progressed with my new obsession of cups! Cups became so important that I would avoid cafes that served coffee in the wrong receptacle (If I’m honest I still do this…) I believe if people can’t put the effort into choosing good cups it probably doesn’t bode well for the coffee quality, completely irrational I know!
After buying my first proper espresso machine I quickly realised I needed proper cups. I scoured the internet and finally decided on the lovely 'Danesi Caffe' cups, 3 different sizes, espresso, americano and cappuccino. I spent days making espresso and cappuccinos just to see what they looked and tasted like in these ‘amazing’ new cups.
My obsession with cups has even led to marriage (lucky girl!). I met my now wife about 6 years ago and it was soon after we met that she headed off to Italy for a few days with work. On this trip she visited the Ferrari car museum and factory where she had an espresso. She tried to buy the cup but they weren’t on sale… there she was sitting there looking at this small little cup and thinking how much her then ‘new’ boyfriend would love it, she even took a photo of it and sent it to me…she mentioned it to a colleague how much she wanted the cup and even though, as I mentioned previously the cups weren’t for sale, she still somehow managed to ‘acquire’ a Ferrari Factory espresso cup (she maintains that her colleague presented it to her later!... I’m not so sure!!!) That cup, one of the first of many that she has since given me, is now one of my favourite cups and it was after this that I knew that she was not only a keeper but also a kleptomaniac….
My latest craze is buying antique cups, I know most were originally tea cups but in my head, once coffee goes into them they become coffee cups. I have managed to get my hands on some beautiful old cups and my most recent purchase turned out to be a little gem. While out in Enniskerry on a recent coffee trip I popped into a local antique shop; from across the shop I spotted a stunning and unusual old cup. I really wanted it… with my best poker face on I casually asked how much, the old man behind the counter said “I’ll take a tenner”, “will you accept €8”, we shook hands, the deal was done.
When I got home I began to look at the markings on the base of the cup and saucer, it’s like a little puzzle waiting to be solved, different letters, shapes, colours tell you different things… so from my research I discovered I had bought a rust colour ’jungle print’ pattern on ‘daisy shape’ cup and saucer from 1890 made by Shelley Folely Wileman, which are selling for between €50 - €60 on Ebay. My coffee cup obsession has now become an investment which is a fantastic justification for buying more cups.
So, does the right cup affect the taste of the coffee? I absolutely believe it does; maybe not for any physical reasons but for me the cup is as important as the beans, the grind, the water temperature, the water quality, the barista, the café … the cup is an essential piece of the jigsaw which creates the perfect coffee experience and for me the final piece in the puzzle.
BY BUYING THIS EXPENSIVE COFFEE EQUIPMENT I'LL SAVE MONEY... OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT!!!
Yes, it’s a phrase we have all uttered to justify some obscure, coffee equipment, purchase. A few years ago I bought a coffee tamp for €70, I justified the purchase as 'value for money' as I’ll use it every day and have it for the rest of my life, this is true... but I will also have the other 3 tamps I bought since for the rest of my life! Now, I just buy what I need (want/afford) and don’t worry about the justification, it’s easier.
This brings me to a point where spending money on lovely, new, coffee equipment saved me money… genuinely.
My work used to be based in the middle of a bustling town that had 10 coffee shops, all serving reasonably good coffee, times were great. We then decided to move to a new premise in a lovely new industrial estate in the middle of nowhere, this turned out to be a coffee disaster. There was a little village beside the industrial estate with 2 coffee shops and a Spar, the Spar was a no go and the other 2 cafes were not much better; weak, burnt tasting coffee will not do.
It turned out the best coffee I could get was a 6/7 minute drive away, this does not seem like much but when you take into consideration the time waiting for a coffee and the return journey it was adding up to 20 minutes missing from the office every time I wanted a coffee (this doesn’t even include the 10 minutes of arguing about who's turn it was to go).
I’d had enough of this, I sat down and worked out that I was buying 3 cups of coffee a day, 5 days a week, 50 odd weeks a year; at €2.20 a coffee that adds up to €1650, this doesn’t even take into account my time/petrol/other people in the office. The decision was made; I was bringing coffee making in-house.
After a bit of research I settled for my home setup, Rancilio Silvia and Rocky grinder, at €600 it was good value. I now have my hobby in the office, great coffee and each cup costs about €0.20c, I went from spending €6.60 a day to €0.60 a day, adding up to a saving of €1500 a year (I also have a new home for one of my spare tamps).
Craig
IT WON'T ALWAYS BE ABOUT CUPS... I PROMISE!
Another story about cups????
A short story, but one worth telling.
About a week ago, my wife (not only a kleptomaniac and pyromaniac but also a shopaholic) arrived home with more lovely vintage cups and a story that made me laugh out loud.
While out walking in Dun Laoghaire she passed by a charity shop which had some nice cups in the window, knowing my cup fetish can never be satisfied, she went in to see what was on offer. After a quick look around, a lovely vintage tea service caught her eye, hidden at the back on a high shelf. It was in good condition, a complete set from the 1950’s but most importantly … good value.
Delighted with her purchase Catherine walked back to her parents’ house to show off her latest buy. With pleasure she un-wrapped the set of cups and showed them to her mum, “Where did you get those?” her mum asked sounding a little bit confused, Catherine went on to describe where she had bought them and how much she paid. After a moments silence Catherine’s mum explained that the week before she had been clearing out some of her own mother’s things (Catherine’s Granny, who she had been very close to, had passed away earlier this year) and had dropped a number of items, that she thought no one would want, into the local charity shop; including that exact tea set. Catherine had just bought her own Granny’s tea service that her mother had just got rid of…excellent.
I’m happy enough though, not a bad set of cups and obviously destined to stay in the family! That night, we drank some tea (not coffee for once), clinked the cups together and remembered Doreen, Catherine’s Granny. It was meant to be.
Craig.