Ferg Brown

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“I learned from everyone”, says Ferg Brown, as he explains his pathway to the critically acclaimed Roasted Brown coffee house, on Temple Bar's Curved Street. Push him a bit more and he says that “It's kind of fractal: the more you look into it, the bigger it gets”
So. Fractal coffee, with Mr Brown as the Benoit Mandelbrot of the Simonelli machine? That's a nice concept, except that Mr Brown and his generation of coffee heads have shattered the idea that a cup of coffee is a self-repeating thing, requiring only an untrained hand to simply push a button to get another cup of brown liquid.
Instead, Mr Brown and his cohort have shown that each cup of coffee has to be curated, because the Devil is in the detail. You get the temperature wrong, or the length of extraction, or any of the myriad details, and your cup of joe is a cup of rubbish.
Mr Brown's pathway has been exciting. He was out of school by the time he was 15 and, on his travels around the world, he lucked out on that 5am moment in Perth, Western Australia – a long way from his birthplace of Greystones, County Wicklow – when a friend made him his first “drip” coffee. The fractal opened. Mr Brown and his wife, Sarah-Jane, quickly decided that they would open a coffee shop, one day, but that it would be a coffee shop that would be both centrepiece of, and adjunct to, an artistic community.
He lucked out again when, back in Greystones, he got a gig for four months with the dynamic Flynn brothers, Dave and Steve, in their iconic store The Happy Pear. More learning. He moved on quickly to a coffee cart, selling at Farmer's Markets, working side-by-side with serious coffee heads like Brock Lewin of Badger & Dodo – more learning.
But the life of the itinerary coffee vendor and festival regular is a hard one. So, when he got the call from the legendary Colin Harmon of 3FE coffee that there was a space in Temple Bar, he went for the bricks and mortar, and the next step of unifying the coffee shop with the coffee roastery and the artistic vibe of Temple Bar. Roasted Brown opened in the Filmbase building in January 2012 and, for three years now, has made the life of Dubliners and visitors to the city a better life, opening up the fractal of coffee to more and more people every day by roasting, by teaching, by curating every cup.