Brew Lab Specialty Coffee
Dublin's Coffeeverse
It’s all in the name: Aungier Street’s Brew Lab is a laboratory for the brewing of coffee.
When these guys get to work, their brewing creates new taste paradigms. They become the Isaac Newtons of the coffee bean, the empiricists of enjoyment.
Maths, physics, chemistry and biology coalesce, and the result is a cup of explosive joy.
Between them, Brew Lab owners Renata and Arvind Khedun have won more barista awards than the rest of us have had espresso martinis, making this couple the true masters of the coffeeverse. Arvind is also a tea masters champion.
It’s important to note that it is talented movers and shakers like Renata and Arvind who have powered the Irish coffee revolution over the last two decades. The willingness of baristas, brewers and roasters to engage in world class competition, to show up with their very best against the very best, is what makes them our Coffee All Stars.They have moved our coffeeverse from commodity coffee to speciality coffee, cup by cup, drip by drip.
Brew Lab has the good coffees to go at the front counter, along with the tasty treats from Medialuna Croissanterie. But it’s when you get to the second counter – the Inner Sanctum, the Lab of Brew Lab – that their depthless expertise is revealed.
Here are the curious kettles, the vice grips, the scales, the phials, the jargon. If the staff wore white coats to suggest their almost-clinical expertise, it wouldn’t be a bit out of place. In fact, they wear milky-coffee-coloured t-shirts with the shop’s logo.
The coffee menus offer pour overs at prices ranging from €8 to €12, and on up to €15 for Paragon pours such as Cloud Picker’s Anaya from Colombia, which promises “Strawberry bonbon, lychee and blueberry lemonade.”
It’s not everyday that you get offered the flavours of blueberry lemonade.
Our barista hailed from Greece and talked and walked us through our pour over of Geisha from Colombia, produced by the Janson family. Firstly he added a mix of Aquacode minerals to purified water which he took from the fridge (you can buy a box of these Aquacode minerals here, along with all the coffee paraphernalia your heart could desire). Then, with the water heated to 94C, he conducted the pour over in three stages: the bloom, the second pour, and then he put a little hat over the filter for the final stage, which served to slow and distribute the water as if it were a rainfall shower.
“Red apple, orange, mango, honey” was what the menu promised, and in truth there were a zillion flavour points in this cup of magic. Coffee beans are hard nuts to crack, requiring patient wooing from baristas. In Brew Lab, they know how to prise open the organoleptic potential of the coffee, they know how to seduce those beans.
They also know how to create perfect drinks with the everyday drinks, so the flat white was an ode to creating sweet lactic tastes and textures from the milk, bringing forth the milky sweetness all the better to ally with the coffee.
At 9.15 am on a Saturday morning, the shop was already jammers, all the seats at the end of the room taken as folk got their weekend off to a perfect early start with some caffeinated perfection. Brew Lab is the science of coffee transformed into the sublime.
