Getting a good cup of coffee can be a struggle. They all taste the same after a while, you say, and they cost a fortune. Then you buy a big bag of dark, oily beans and start making pots of muddy coffee at home, leading to headaches and weird random results ranging from great to dreadful.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can buy a few kitchen essentials to get coffee that tastes just as good – or better – than cafe coffee, while saving a ton of money each month. Four Irish coffee veterans explain how to get started, the techniques they consider the most important, and what to buy.
Alan Andrews, Old Barracks and Guji Coffee Bar owner
Alan Andrews simply heads to one of his own shops for morning coffee. There are Old Barracks coffee stockists all over Ireland, Guji Bars in Cork and Limerick and an Old Barracks cafe in Tipperary. Before selling his roasted coffee around the country, though, Andrews made morning coffee at home like the rest of us. He recommends a Sage machine.
There are entry level brewers, like the espresso machine Bambino. He recommends getting roasted beans at local roasters and throwing it into Sage’s Barista Touch Impress. It runs at about €1200, but it tells you how much coffee to put in the basket, if the grind size or amount of coffee inputted is incorrect, and even steams the milk with a sensor gauging texture and temperature. In just a few minutes, this smart technology makes pretty foolproof and tasty coffee. “It’s brilliant,” Andrews says. “It’s the money you’d spend on coffee in a year, and better than the €300 or €400 you’d spend on a throwaway machine in a year.”
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Andrews is a tech optimist, but he also focuses on something off most people’s radars: good water. He advises buying filtered water from your local supermarket or grocery store to brew in order to avoid lime of any kind. Dishwashers and kettles build up calcium over time, for instance. Calcium, lime or any other metals that appear in normal tap water can ruin your machine, not to mention compromise the flavour.
On the sourcing side, Andrews recommends beginners start with Brazilian coffee. It’s the world’s most popular brew, with Brazil ranking as the top global producer of coffee; those high prices from the end of the year – that have carried into early 2025 – come from bad weather both in Brazil and the world’s second-largest grower, Vietnam. When a lot of people think of coffee tastes, they are describing the majority of what comes out of Brazil. Unlike those bigger conglomerate roasts, though, a well-sourced Brazilian coffee skips the bitterness without adding fruity or acidic flavours common in some shops. “You’re going to get generally round flavours of chocolate and nuts,” Andrews says. “Buy a natural Brazil, or even a Nicaraguan or Colombian.”
Susie Kealy, Irish coffee professional
Susie Kealy likes to start the day with filter coffee using Origami dripper pour-overs. Sometimes she’ll grind by hand with a Comandante grinder, though this year she upgraded to an Acaia Orbit, a nearly €2000 flat Burr grinder – it has grinding technology that gives precise, incredible doses of coffee. She weighs it out on a Pearl S scale from Acaia, too.
These purchases aren’t really for beginners. Kealy was a barista for seven years, cutting her teeth at Irish mini-chain 3FE and Dublin cafe Industry. Now, she works in digital marketing for coffee goods company Acaia, the sleek and design-driven business behind that grinder. She says there are two simple ways to start: go to your local coffee shop and watch how they make coffee, and buy an Aeropress. It’s a plastic espresso-like apparatus that’s super easy to use.
She also recommends simply shopping locally, just like one might for produce and dairy. This is just as important for coffee. Of course, the beans come from around the world. It’s more expensive than ever to get coffee – the commodity market reached a 48-year high at the end of 2024. But local roasters and shops are key parts of the supply chain. Shopping at those businesses, rather than multinational conglomerates like Starbucks, makes for a better cup at home too. April Coffee Roasters is one she enjoys. It’s not Irish, instead coming from Copenhagen. Her local shop, Proper Order in Dublin, carries these beans.
Kealy also recommends an Etkin brewer. It’s a €45 flatbed ceramic brewer made in Turkey. The flatbed brewing devices, including that Origami dripper, are rated by at-home and cafe pros alike for consistent and even extractions in comparison to, say, French presses. All that technical understanding comes with time – it’s best to just start with the basics. “It’s a bit like baking,” Kealy says. “You can learn a lot from videos on the internet, local shops, just observing.”
Niall Wynn, Proper Order co-owner
Expert baker Niall Wynn, enjoys batch brew. He runs Proper Order in Dublin, the cafe that plays host to Irish Barista champions, Brewers Cup champions, and is the sister outfit to primo bakery No Messin’. At home, he has a Moccamaster that produces about 750 millilitres of coffee for him and his wife in the mornings. He recommends a good grinder to start, too. His Fellow Ode grinder costs about €300. “If you know your set-up well, I’d say it’s the most achievable way to get good coffee at home,” Wynn says.
When it comes to the beans, Wynn says it’s all about experimentation. Buying freshly roasted coffee – ideally roasted about two weeks before purchasing – is important for whatever kind of coffee you end up preferring. He prefers Colombian and Costa Rican roasts. Both origins are well-loved for consistent, clean cups of coffee. These two countries tend to produce chocolatey, transparent flavours that are uncomplicated and enjoyed by many.
At Proper Order, Wynn is known to brew coffees from Norwegian roasters including Dak Coffee Roasters. Weighing coffee and water, he says, can be just as important as those fancy coffee machines. That way you can learn if say 30g of coffee and 450g of water make a cup that you like; if the next day it’s 40g of coffee and 500g of water and tastes bad, you’re learning what not to do. He says a lot of people overlook weighing and tend to create inconsistent home brews. “It all starts with knowing what you’re buying,” Wynn says. “Then taking care each step of the way.”
Arvin and Renata Khedun, Brew Lab Dublin co-owners
This duo is one of the most acclaimed husband-and-wife coffee teams in Ireland. Arvin has won the Irish Brewing Championship multiple years over, while Renata has taken gold in the latte art competition five times.
They run Brew Lab in Dublin, very much the kind of cafe that matches their level of expertise. For them it’s filter coffee on the weekend. They prefer the V60, Origami or Kalita drippers – they have them all, and say these devices can be quite inexpensive. The V60 for instance is common and can be made in ceramic, metal, or plastic, not requiring much skill to use either.
The Kheduns do stress the importance of a good grinder in the home set up. A hand grinder and an automatic both serve their purposes. Gooseneck kettles, they say, are key – this delicate pouring style allows for coffee to bloom without getting pounded by the water. These are non-specific implements that can be quite cheap. “This is some of the most important gear to get started,” Renata says.
When it comes to beans, they recommend just asking baristas at a nearby cafe what they like drinking. Some people prefer the chocolatey notes Andrews advises. Others want to skew into the future with brighter, funkier tastes. But they won’t know until they get a little bit of intel from someone who has been trying what’s out there. “It’s like red wine,” Arvin says. “You want something dry, something fruity. You have to ask the people there.”
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Their most important tip, though, is to treat making coffee like cooking with a recipe. If there is no recipe, there’s no way of knowing if it’s successful or not in execution. Like the other experts, they also say most people just boil a random amount of water, add a few random spoonful’s of coffee, mix it all together, and steep. It’s inconsistent.
