Your guarantee of amazing coffee
Life is too short for mediocre coffee
Everything we do at Dreambeans is aimed at getting a superlative cup of coffee into your hand. We roast to order in small quantities. We roast first and then blend, not like most coffee companies who blend first and then roast. It’s easier to do what everyone else does, but it’s not the Dreambeans way. Every bean, every varietal needs to be roasted slightly differently to get the very best from the bean. We take the time to do this. It takes longer but its well worth it.


Why is our coffee so much better?
It’s simple. We buy the best beans!
Dreambeans Coffee is never going to be a big business; it’s too niche. There aren’t enough customers who will take the trouble to seek out the best coffee, who are discerning enough to realise that what most of the world considers good coffee is really second grade mediocrity. Similarly, there aren’t enough roasters, who know enough about blending coffee, about hitting the right notes of emphasis with the right beans until you achieve results that are superlative. This is all the better for us. We need such small quantities that we can buy from specialist growers who supplement the main crop coffees that they sell to the big guys with “specials” that they keep for aficionados.
Coffee chosen by roasters, not accountants.
When you’re buying in small quantities, price isn’t the deciding factor on a purchase. A hundred dollars in the difference for a tonne of coffee isn’t going to break the bank for us if the coffee is worth paying it. It’s only an extra ten cent a kilo, after all. Happily, we haven’t got a whole floor of accountants looking over our shoulder so we can buy whatever coffee we want to buy. We always buy on quality. Life is too short for mediocre coffee.
From our Blog
Catch up on the latest news from Dreambeans and from the coffee world.
Click and Collect Coffee Dundalk
Click & Collect Coffee Dundalk. Read More [...]
Espresso prices heading for €2 in Italian cities.
Is the €1 Espresso Al Banco Gone Forever? Read More [...]
Making coffee during a power cut
Making coffee without electricity. Coffee Read More [...]
Click and Collect Coffee Dundalk
Click & Collect Coffee Dundalk. Read More [...]
Espresso prices heading for €2 in Italian cities.
Is the €1 Espresso Al Banco Gone Forever? Read More [...]
Coffee FAQ
The key difference between a cortado and a macchiato is that there is a little more milk in a cortado and the milk isn’t textured, whereas it is always foamed in a true Italian macchiato, no matter how small the serving of milk might be. Macchiato means “marked” in Italian so it’s basically an espresso marked with a little hot foam whereas a cortado has coffee and milk on a 1:1 ratio. The milk tends not to be as hot in the cortado, just gently steamed to heat it up and it’s usually served in a small heavy glass instead of an espresso cup.
Australian coffee aficionados have embraced the idea of the cortado too, although they call it the piccolo there, or the latte piccolo (literally, small latte), or a low-tide latte. Again, these are served in a glass, like the cortado.
What is a cortado coffee?
There’s a definite trend in coffee consumption towards stronger drinks with more coffee and less milk. As coffee gets better generally, our taste is for more flavour in our cup and less dilution, thus, the latte is giving way to the flat white, the cafe au lait is yielding to the macchiato and we are looking for new alternatives, as we seek to make our caffeine fix smoother and stronger.
The most recent player in this trend is the cortado, which emanates from the Basque Country in Northern Spain, where cortado (past participle of cortar, meaning cut) or café cortado describes a strong coffee drink which is half espresso and half heated milk. The milk “cuts” through the acidity of the coffee leaving enough bite to make the coffee interesting and satisfying, but steering away from bitterness and allowing the milk fats to coat and round out some of the carbon notes in the (often over-roasted coffee) served in the region. The term is widely used in Spain, Portugal and Cuba and in the past year or two it has spread through the hippest coffee spots of Europe and the USA.
Long-shot espresso, or lungo, is created by adding twice as much water to a typical espresso. As a result, it has a less robust coffee flavor but a more complex flavor profile with bitterer overtones. An Americano, which is an espresso topped with hot water, should not be mistaken with a lungo.
The Lungo, like many of the most well-known espresso beverages, has Italian roots. The word “lungo” (which means “long” in Italian) denotes the beverage’s larger volume than a typical espresso.
A ristretto coffee is a type of espresso that is made with half the amount of water, resulting in a more concentrated and intense flavor.
A flat white is a type of coffee drink made with espresso and steamed milk. It is similar to a latte, but with less foam and a stronger espresso flavor.