Coffee Events – What’s Coming Next?

Background

Alan Andrews has over two decades of experience in the Irish coffee industry. He is the owner of Coffee Culture; it supplies artisan coffee, trains people to be baristas and offers café consultancy. To date Coffee Culture has completed over 300 fit out café projects nationwide. Alan also runs courses throughout the country offering guidance around how to set-up your own café. We caught up with him at the Dublin Coffee and Tea Festival to learn about Ireland’s history with coffee and where it’s future is going.

Pubs V Coffee shops

As of 2014 pubs are currently at 25% of the food service market, coffee shops took 5.6% by comparison, it’s growing fast though. The industry has grown from 6 billion in 2013 to 6.13 billion in 2015 and is projected to grow to 6.5 billion in 2016.

People’s diets have changed too which has swayed people to be more health conscious.  Ireland has a big meet up scene and nowadays it’s much easier to meet for coffee instead of pints, no one likes a hangover on a workday, neither you or your employer. A friend of mine used to go for pints three nights a week as a means to chat with friends, now he meets them over coffee which makes more sense to him.

Bord Failte’s Support

The trend of speciality coffee happened roughly five years ago, it was a combination of things that all happened at once. You had baristas starting to learn more about the industry and coffee as a crop. Then you had people that had been traveling and learning abroad, they took the coffee knowledge they acquired and started practising it in Ireland.

In 2009 on a local level Bord Failte started to support artisan products. Micro-roasters started making their own coffee and selling it into local cafés and businesses, this exposed people to various tastes and types of coffee. Within this coffee events started to take off from training courses to championship events amongst baristas.

It’s Not Just A Dublin Thing

We’ve  a barista academy in Bird Hill, County Tipperary, so no it’s not just a Dublin thing! Of course the growth started within the cities, as most trends do and then it spread out. Now the appreciation of good coffee and the culture that goes with it has spread nationwide.

Building Your Brand Through Events

There’s absolutely no question events help build your brand. Events instill passion in the industry and they engage people. Attendees can ask questions and learn, that is the key part of coffee based events – education, and of course some great coffee!

Future Events Around Coffee

There is a large movement now towards the coffee complimentary market, which means food. Coffee and food pairings is the next area that will see growth. Great coffee is at the stage now in Ireland that it should be easily accessible to everyone, now it’s about giving people a rounded offering.

You can check out Alan’s upcoming course here…