Dublin Live spoke to one of the foremost voices on great coffee in Ireland, four times Irish barista champion Colin Harmon.
He told us how he quit a big paying job in high finance in the IFSC to become a barista - because he'd got a bigger buzz from selling burgers at McDonald's than he was getting from wheeling and dealing on the international banking markets.
Dubliner Colin has since set up a veritable empire of independent coffee roasting and retailing in Ireland.
He has five booming cafes in Dublin city and a thriving wholesale business that supplies coffee to shops, cafes and restaurants all across Ireland.
The empresario had humble beginnings, however - in the early days, 3fe was just a stall based in the cloakroom of the nightclub Twisted Pepper. And hardly anyone turned up to buy his speciality coffees.
But he stuck with it in a bid to follow his dreams, promising his parents he would give the barista life a year to take off or he would return to the riches offered by a financier's career.
Thankfully, for the city of Dublin, and for coffee lovers across the nation, Colin never looked back...
In his own words
"My first job was in McDonald's. So when I was 15 years old, I got a job working in McDonald's and from the first day I just loved it. As a kid, I was like a bit awkward, like most teenagers are and I was like a smart kid, but it wasn't doing well in school.
"And as soon as I started working, I was like, the buzz of it was amazing. I worked in hospitality all the way - like restaurants bars, cafes - all the way through school and all the way through university. And I did that to kind of, you know, fund my way to my education.
"And then I studied business and law in UCD and when I graduated, then I got the job which is kind of what I thought I should do which was like, working as a trustee for professional investment funds. It. And once I got the job, I was in it a couple of years and I was just like 'I preferred what I was doing before'.
"And the thing that had been facilitating me getting to that point, actually turned out to be the thing I wanted to do. And don't get me wrong. There were quite people and there was a really great place to work but it just didn't suit me.
"So I quit my job. And I remember sitting down with parents, because I knew they'd be worried, and saying like 'I'm gonna go back and work in hospitality, I'm going to do my own thing. And I'm going to set myself a year as a target and if after year I haven't, you know, made serious gains then I'll go back to do what I was doing before'.
"So about two months later, the world economy collapsed, and then that route back to what I was doing before before completely closed over so then I was like, you have to make this work, you know.
"But it wasn't daunting to me my first day working as a barista I just knew this is what I want to do.'
Colin tells the rest of his inspirational success story in our video interview above, from winning the Irish barista championships 'by accident' in 2009 and going on to finish fourth in the world championships exactly ne year to the day after he started making coffee.
Despite the meteoric rise to success and winning the Irish barista championships on three further occasions, his retail business had humble beginnings that initially saw Colin selling coffee from a nightclub cloakroom - with only 16 cups sold on day one - because he had no money and it was rent-free.
He eventually opened his first cafe proper on Grand Canal Street.
"It was a bit of a dead zone at the time. Most people didn't know where the street was, or how to get there; nobody ever went down that way, which is hard to believe now. But in truth the reason we went there was because it was the only place I could afford and it was the only place that would give me a lease.
"So we open there in 2011 and it was very quite for a very, very long time and but it built up over time and like today like it's it's like on the busiest cafes in the city. You've got Google, Facebook, Stripe, Twitter, all within a stone's throw from where we are. And I suppose it's the mothership of what we do/
"It is a feels like we're very lucky to have gotten it now. So Grand Canal Street was the original one and then shortly, before we open the roastery we closed Twisted Pepper so Grand Canal Street was our only shop for a while.
"Then the roastery came on board and after the roastery we opened Sussex Terrace in 2016, I believe, and then later that year it was Five Points [in Harold's Cross] came along. And then after Five Points, it was Gertrude [Pearse Street]. And then it was a Triangle in Ranelagh. And then the most recent one was the IFSC."
Irish coffee scene
Colin believes that Ireland has one of the best coffee scenes in Europe and says people may not realise just how good it compares to other countries.
"Dublin as a coffee city is exceptional. And Belfast as well, the quality of the coffee is exceptional and it's a lot smaller than Dublin is as well.
"I don't think people here realise that. The quality of the milk we have here is exceptional, the quality of the water tends to be very good as well, which is incredibly important for brewing coffee.
"But also we're a very social country and I think that's a large part of the reason why coffee shops have taken off."
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