Local businessman aims to make Tipperary the coffee capital of Ireland

A local businessman is hoping to make a small Tipperary village the coffee capital of Ireland.

Alan Andrews owns and runs the Old Barracks Coffee Roastery in Birdhill, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.

Last year, the company started their own coffee festival, the Birdhill Coffee Festival, to bring businesses and coffee lovers together to learn all there is to know about coffee.

The festival returns this year, and speaking to the Tipperary Star, Mr Andrews said that the idea for the festival came from seeing people getting more and more interested in coffee.

“We just found that over the years that people have consistently become more and more interested in coffee and what we do, and coffees that come from different parts of the world, and why they taste different to other coffees, and it’s been a really good story for us, it’s given us a great launchpad to do loads of other things with our business,” he explained.

The Birdhill Coffee Festival brings together industry experts, with demonstrations on how to use coffee machines, how to fix and maintain them, as well as other health and wellness partners.

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“The focus is that we help to bring people who make coffee at home closer to better coffee.

“There’s loads of people who buy machines every year, they buy some great coffees from all over the country from different roasters, and may not necessarily understand how to brew them to their best, so the idea of the coffee festival is to bring people to an open source, knowledge bank for coffee,” Mr Andrews said.

“There might be different coffee roasters that we’ve invited down from around Ireland or from other countries, and just to chat with these people try and learn something new about how coffee’s roasted, where it comes from, or why it’s roasted a particular way, how you could brew it a particular way, look at the demonstrations that are going on on the different machines … over the two days, the Saturday and Sunday it’s just a floorfull of education,” Alan added.

“Our vision here is always to make coffee understandable, to give people a deeper knowledge of coffee and trying to take the complexity out of it”.

“We're trying to make coffee more accessible, but to do that, you have to give choice ... when people come here, it's like going that next level down and making people feel comfortable and they can sit at the bar literally and ask the questions like ‘why does this coffee taste like this?’ so that's the important part, trying to bring them on this journey in a safe, comfortable environment,” Alan said.

As well as machine demos taking place during the coffee festival, there is also coffee tastings, roasting demos, and presentations from roasters explaining about different types of coffee, as well as demonstrations on how to steam and texture milk to make the perfect accompaniment to the coffee.

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As well as running the annual Birdhill Coffee Festival, Mr Andrews has ambitions to make Birdhill the coffee capital of Ireland.

“It’s just about creating this destination that people don’t feel intimidated by coffee and coming here to get that education, and obviously we want people to come and enjoy the experience of being in Birdhill, like Birdhill is an amazing location, it’s really central to lots of things.

“You’re an hour and a half from Cork, 30 minutes from Limerick, 15 minutes from Nenagh, two hours from Dublin, maybe an hour and a half from the Red Cow, you’re an hour and a half from Galway, so two hours from Birdhill you can be in an awful lot of places,” Alan said.

The Old Barracks Coffee Roastery and the Birdhill Coffee Festival are also helping to bring people from all over the world to see Birdhill, opening the small Tipperary village up to a worldwide audience.

“Last year for the coffee festival we had people over from Poland, Berlin, from the UK and we had farmers that came in to present at the festival from Bolivia,” Mr Andrews said.

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More than just a coffee shop in a scenic location, the Old Barracks roast their own coffee on site, as well as teaching coffee education classes upstairs in the building, while also running coffee shops in Limerick and Cork.

Not only focused on coffee, the Old Barracks also sell wine and offer classes on wine education.

“We sell wine and we do lots of wine education evenings and they’re great for people who are trying to differentiate flavours, identity blackberries, blackcurrents, raspberries, strawberries, wines are great for that, and we find that a lot of the time, the customer base is the same person, they’re drinking coffee in the morning usually, and wine in the evening,” Alan said.

Coffee shops, like other businesses, are facing increases, with the cost of coffee beans rising.

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“The cost of the raw coffee has gone up about 250%, nearly 300%.”

“All the coffees we buy are called speciality coffees, and those coffees haven't gone up in the same rate, because they were always expensive, but their price has gone up probably 50% or 70%,” Alan added.

The Birdhill Coffee Festival takes place from June 27 to June 29.