A coffee revolution has been in full swing right across Ireland for a few years now.

Not only are Irish coffee connoisseurs keenly aware of where they can get their favourite coffee, they’re also curious how it’s brewed and who's brewing it.

Now, wait for it, one of Dublin’s coffee hotspots has a “water tasting menu” on offer.

For €3.50, water tasters can have four shots of water.

Colin Harmon, from 3fe, insists that the new offering is aimed solely at getting coffee lovers to think about how water quality affects their coffee brew.

“If you’ve a cup of coffee in most places around the city, what you’re drinking is 85pc water. And water has a huge impact on how coffee is extracted, and how it tastes.”

“When you grind coffee and mix it with water, lots of different things in the water – calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate – have a huge influence on how the coffee is extracted.”

“Sometimes people will buy a bag of coffee from us to make at home and they’ll come back and say it brews really, really badly, and they might blame us. But they might not realise it’s the water.”

“Water in different parts of the country tastes completely different.”

“We thought, how are we going to find a way to get people thinking about water, and we came up with an idea of water tasting.”

“Its four glasses of water, and 90pc of people will see that the four glasses actually taste completely different.”

The majority of last week's water tastings were given to customers for free, Colin says, and the cafe already offers free filtered water to customers.

“We just put it on the menu in line with the cheapest thing on it. To me, if people see water tasting on the menu, and they ask ‘what’s that?’ and they still don’t order it, then it’s done its job. It's got people thinking.”

“We spend thousands of euro every year making sure our water is good quality to make our coffee.”

“We give out free filtered water in the shop by the bottle, it’s not like we’re into ripping people off. We did about 30 of these tastings last week, and 25 of those we gave for free.”

Online Editors