With carefully roasted Single Origin coffee you get taken on a journey through taste to meet the many hard working hands involved in a cup of coffee. One of the most enjoyable parts of our job is continually tasting great coffees from brilliant producers around the world on a daily basis. Every single batch roasted in Roasted Brown is tasted, noted, catalogued and tasted again to make sure we know how our coffee is behaving over time and in the roaster. We communicate the delicacies of each coffee through our coloured labels that mach taste notes on the coffee flavour wheel.

The story of Roasted Brown has been brewing since I was a child. I had fantastic and tremendously irresponsible parents who allowed me to drink tea and coffee as far back as I can remember. Throughout my life—from the years at school, to travelling the world, to later becoming a sound engineer in a recording studio in Dublin—coffee has always been in my hand and in my cup.

That said, it wasn’t until 2006 in Australia, that I had my first "drip" coffee. I began to realise that coffee offered a vast spectrum of flavours impacted by each link in the coffee chain. Eventually, my wife Sarah-Jane and I moved back to Dublin to start our own café with two goals in mind: one, our shop would be a place of artistic community; and two, the coffee would be brilliant.

Up to this point, I hadn't made much coffee myself, so I got a job in my hometown at a café called The Happy Pear. I worked there for four months trying to improve my shots and perfect my presentation. After that, I opened my own cart, selling coffee at train stations and markets. We landed an epic gig at The Point Village Market where I ended up working next to Brock from Badger and Dodo. Even though we were competitors, Brock taught me some of the most valuable things I know about coffee to this day—from the bean to the cup. Brock became my coffee supplier and we earned a pretty good reputation travelling around the country doing events.

Over time, we decided it was time to find a brick and mortar shop of our own. The very day after making this decision, I got a phone call from Colin at 3FE asking if I’d be interested in opening a café in Temple Bar. Four days later we had a deal with the landlord and we started buying our coffee from Colin and Steve at Hasbean. 

It had always been the plan for us to roast our own coffee, so I took a course in London where I made friends with Fabio, co-owner of Notes Coffee. We agreed that whoever got set up first would help the other. He beat me to the post and in November 2013 we began roasting at his place in London to supply our own shop, along with a growing number of wholesale customers around Dublin and Wicklow.

Having learned to roast and build a wholesale business, the time finally arrived for us to set up our very own roastery in Ireland. Since September 2015, Roasted Brown has been roasting locally in Delgany, Co. Wicklow.

Ferg Brown, Founder