Great coffee makes your day better.

When the great team at Boyne Valley Flavours asked me to write a few words about Dreambeans Coffee and what we were all about, I started thinking about what we’re doing here and what we want to achieve. Obviously, we’re hear to sell coffee and make a modest profit to feed and educate our six kids, but there’s more to it than that. I’m always sceptical of mission statements. They’re like wallpaper for corporate boardroomsand. We’re here to roast outrageously good coffee beans, pay growers fairly and walk as softly as we can on the surface of the earth. But there’s more to it than that too.

Our aim is to make life better!

If we were forced to give a mission statement, I would have to say that Dreambeans Coffee’s mission is to make life a little bit better, one cup of coffee at a time. I really believe that it’s the little things that make life exquisite, little centres of joy and happiness that can stop you in your tracks and brighten up your day.  Great coffee can do that. It does it for me anyway. Really great coffee is enough to make your day better. And that’s a good thing for any business to be able to say: – “we make people’s day better”. I love meeting customers, because they always have a smile on their face when they talk about our coffee. That’s a good thing too.

A simple cup of coffee can become something extraordinary when you find the very best beans and treat them with the care and attention that they deserve in every stage of the roasting, cooling, blending and packaging. We all know that caffeine gives you a kick, but it’s more than that. Much more. Even our decaf is extraordinary.

Roast first, then blend.

We are the only coffee roaster that we know of, who roasts first and then blends. To us, it is blindingly obvious that this is the right thing to do and we can never understand why other coffee roasters blend their beans first and then roast them all together at the same temperature and for the same length of time. Every variety of bean is unique and each one has a different  sweet spot for temperature and duration.

Hand roasting coffee is an art.

Hand roasting is as much an art as it is a science. You use all your senses roasting coffee. Your nose gauges the pivotal change in the air as the temperature rises and the aroma turns from a wheatish, oaty smell to a richer, malty coffee smell, filling your nose with warm loveliness. Your ears listen for the first crack of the beans in the roaster as they absorb the heat and the pressure on the internal gas in the bean makes it expand and crack. We judge the roast level with our eyes, watching for exactly the right colour note for each bean.

The skills of our roasters and our attention is what sets Dreambeans Coffee apart. We never skimp on time, effort or attention. We buy the very best coffee available and treat it like the treasure it is. It’s a simple formula and we can never understand why everyone else doesn’t do the same.

You can buy these beans and have them delivered to your door. If you take advantage of our four for three offer, they cost the same as everyday supermarket coffee like Illy or Lavazza, but believe me, this is a different product entirely.

Ireland’s most distinguished coffee.

Our Torero blend is Ireland’s most distinguished coffee. It is one of only two coffee blends ever to win three stars in the Great Taste Awards, the most prestigious foodie awards. It is the ONLY Irish coffee ever to be nominated for the Great Taste Golden Fork award. Out of 14,500 food products, 33 three star winners were nominated for the Golden Fork award. Torero was one of them. Our Dreambeans All-stars Gift Pack is a great introduction to Dreambeans. It has four of our Great Taste Award winners in a nicely presented gift pack. A good starting point.

Dreambeans Coffee. This is the good stuff.

By Pat McArdle.