Meal Ticket: Badger & Dodo, Francis St, Dublin

Francis St is a gem in inner-city Dublin, lined with antique shops, a music school and independent art galleries. The Cross Gallery, a contemporary gallery that shows Irish and international artists, has long been a destination for an excellent cup of coffee. The gallery owner Nicholas Gore-Grimes and his barista Sunsu Lee served up Badger & Dodo coffee alongside Nicholas' homemade flapjacks and cakes from the space up until earlier this year.

Just over two months ago, Badger & Dodo announced their takeover of the Cross Gallery Café, which strikes me as a marvellous partnership for everyone involved. This is the first Dublin location for this Cork roaster who has been at the forefront of specialty coffee over the past decade. The café has a few tables and chairs indoors, and currently the Dublin City Council beta projects have a temporary outdoor seating area in a reclaimed car parking space. You can follow the project under #StreetParkletBeta.

All the coffee beans are roasted in the Badger & DoDo roastery in Fermoy, Co Cork, where Brock Lewin has been roasting beans since July 2008. Lewin, originally from Australia, relocated to Cork with his wife, where he managed to convince his father-in-law, whose nickname is Dodo, to let him build a roaster on his land.

“Broc” is Irish for badger, hence the name Badger & Dodo. His wife designed the company’s leafy-tree logo, so it really is a family business.

Lewin started serving coffee at farmers’ markets around Cork and pretty soon started to supply cafes with Badger & Dodo beans all around Ireland. In less than a decade, he has expanded his business so much that Badger & Dodo supply nearly 200 cafes around the country, and they had to rebuild their roastery in 2013.

After spending time working as a barista in Sydney, Corkman Neil Muscheidt returned to his hometown in early 2014, on the lookout for a company that was doing good work in coffee. Badger & Dodo kept coming up on his radar, so he sent in his CV. When Lewin saw the renowned Australian Toby’s Estate Coffee on Muscheidt’s work experience, he gave him a call immediately. Muscheidt worked with Lewin in opening the first Badger & Dodo café in Galway in late 2014, where he stayed for a year before heading to Dublin for a change of scene, and ended up working with Karl Purdy at coffeeangel for nearly a year.

When Lewin came across the space on Francis St earlier this year, he enlisted Muscheidt as the shop’s manager. It’s Muscheidt who is brewing the filter pour-over and making the sandwiches for the Dublin customers. I grab a turkey and brie sandwich (€5.50), made with excellent ingredients, and a tasty sweet potato vegetarian sandwich (€5.50) to go. There are five sandwiches daily, all made with Bretzel Bakery bread, which also supplies the café with flapjacks, cakes and scones.

I get a v60 cup of Tanzanian peaberry coffee, an oval-shaped coffee bean, and it’s pleasantly acidic yet quite full-bodied. I’ve never knowingly tasted a peaberry roast before (and indeed I had to google “peaberry” after my visit), and it’s these nuggets of new knowledge that makes for a great coffee experience.

It’s clear that Muscheidt is brimming with coffee trivia but, crucially, he imparts it in a warm and accessible way. He’s excited to tell me about the cupping class he’s holding in the Francis St café on Saturday July 23rd, where he’ll be leading a tasting of a 2016 Ethiopian bean.

“Most of the coffee beans in circulation are from 2015 so it’s really rare to get to taste a bean from the current year,” he tells me, eyes gleaming. Amazing. I did not know that. I’m with Muscheidt for a quarter of an hour, and I’ve discovered a totally different coffee bean and learned about bean vintage. Not bad for a little café on Francis St.