Bean there, still doing that

FUTURE PROOF Greenbean Coffee Roasters:From roasting beans and barista training to merchandising and supplying equipment, Pat Grant has the business of all things coffee cornered

WHEN PAT GRANT started out roasting coffee beans in the 1980s, gourmet coffee shops as we know them didn’t exist. The Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino had not yet been invented and chains such as Starbucks and Costa didn’t adore every street corner.

“I was engaged at the time and my wife to be was selling coffee for a vendor in Northern Ireland. She didn’t like it – coffee at the time was very erratic, so we decided to do our own.

“The first roast we put on was a complete and utter disaster. I cajoled people in the know in London to teach me about coffee and bought lots of books on the subject. It took about two years to really understand what coffee is all about. It’s really an art. It can’t just be learned from books.”

Grant is now one of Ireland’s foremost coffee experts and over the years has been sourcing and buying coffee from countries throughout the world. He is also a master roaster and still roasts every week at the Greenbean headquarters in Dundalk, the company he set up with his wife Deirdre in 1985.

“No one had any money when we set up as the country was in recession, so we had to be really careful who we supplied. We got stung a few times with bounced cheques and not being paid.

“At the beginning we didn’t have a name and were competing with big coffee roasters. We had to be very good at what we did and rely on word of mouth to increase the orders.”

Grant stopped supplying catering companies after a few years and started concentrating on coffee shops.

“Quality didn’t matter to the catering companies. All they cared about was price. We took to supplying coffee shops as they preferred quality. I’ve always felt quality is something important, especially in recessionary times as quality always shines through in the end.”

The business has since evolved greatly, with coffee roasting just one of a host of things now done by Grant and his wife.

“We do barista training and merchandising. We supply coffee and espresso machines to newly-opened shops and we sell them the coffee.

“It’s not like selling a car when you get a once-off customer and don’t see him again for a few years. We are dealing with our customers every week. That’s why it’s important for us to develop a good long-term relationship with them.”

In 2006, the couple decided the best way to show people how to make good coffee was to have a shop themselves, with a barista training school.

“People often compare coffee and wine but they can’t be compared. With wine, all you do is take out the cork and pour it. The greatest sin is possibly not matching it with the correct foods. The taste of coffee, however, can be influenced by loads of things from the distilling, to the grind used, to the temping and pour.”

The couple offer training to staff in cafes, restaurants, hotels and pubs, as well as anyone else interested in learning about coffee, with half-day, full-day and weekly training sessions.

The business now employs 20 people and supplies coffee to 190 shops in Ireland and 11 shops in the southeast of England.

And the future for Greenbean? “We have only one sales rep living and working in London. Our intention would be to get more people and expand our business there as he can’t cover everything.

“Ireland is a very, very expensive country to do business in. Unless you know what you’re doing and watch the bottom line you won’t survive. That said, if you can survive in Ireland, you can survive anywhere.”