BeanThere

BeanThere

Coffee is rarely just about the coffee.

BeanThere is my personal coffee journal: a simple place to record the independent cafés and roasteries I visit, what I thought of them, and the small moments that happened along the way.

It started because, quite simply, I love coffee.

I love cafés. I love talking to baristas and owners. I love discovering somewhere new. And one day, I'd love to have a coffee place of my own.

BeanThere gives me an excuse to explore that world a little more deliberately.

Coffee and connection

Years ago, while driving for Uber, I picked up a man who ran his own custom coffee roastery.

We ended up having a beautiful conversation about coffee and why people care about it so much.

His perspective was simple: coffee is really about moments between people.

It's catching up with somebody you haven't seen in months. Sitting across from your partner. Meeting someone for business. Talking to the person behind the counter. Taking twenty minutes alone to sit and think.

The coffee is what brings you to the table.

That idea stuck with me.

There are a lot of cafés

I'd already visited plenty of coffee shops around Dublin when I started BeanThere, but I gradually realized just how many I'd never been to.

And I'm not particularly interested in cataloguing every Starbucks, Costa or other major chain.

BeanThere is about the independent places.

The local café. The small roastery. The person who's opened one shop and cares deeply about what comes across the counter. Somewhere you can sit for an hour, or somewhere with no seats at all where you pop in, have a conversation, leave with a flat white and continue with your day slightly more caffeinated.

I wanted a reason to discover more of those places.

So I built one.

More than five stars

Google Maps is brilliant for finding cafés, but a single five-star rating doesn't necessarily tell me what I actually want to know.

Is the coffee good?

But also:

Is it somewhere I'd happily sit by myself and get some work done?

Would I bring a friend here for a long catch-up?

Is it suitable for a business conversation?

What's the atmosphere like?

How were the people?

Is it somewhere to stay for an hour, or somewhere to grab a great coffee and keep moving?

People use cafés for very different reasons. BeanThere lets me separate those things rather than compressing an entire experience into one number.

A personal tool, publicly useful

At its core, BeanThere is for me.

I can see where I've been, where I haven't, add photographs, make notes and gradually build a record of the coffee places I've experienced.

The dataset currently focuses mainly on Dublin, but it can grow naturally as I travel and discover new places.

The public side is deliberately straightforward.

Reviews and a map.

The map shows the places I've visited and reviewed alongside other cafés I've collected but haven't made it to yet. Individual reviews provide the additional context I'd want when deciding where to go.

There's no reason for it to become much more complicated than that.

If the notes I'm already making for myself can also help somebody discover a great independent café, that's a nice by-product.

Paying attention

Building BeanThere also changed something I hadn't really intended it to.

It made me more present.

Normally, I could walk into a café, order something, drink it and leave without thinking much about the experience afterward.

BeanThere asks me to stop for a second.

Take a photograph. Pay attention to the coffee. Look around. Talk to somebody. Write a few thoughts down.

It's a tiny ritual, but it turns an otherwise forgettable stop into something I consciously experienced.

There's a little gratitude in that.

Not every coffee needs to be profound. Sometimes I just want a flat white.

But keeping a record has made me appreciate the places, people and moments surrounding it more.

Where it is now

BeanThere is still very young.

There aren't hundreds of reviews or years of history behind the map yet—and that's partly what I like about it.

I don't particularly want to manufacture a database just to make the project look complete.

I want to fill it by actually going places.

Over the coming years, I'd like to watch the map gradually become denser: more cafés, more photographs, more conversations, more good coffee, and probably some questionable coffee too.

Eventually, it should become both a useful guide to independent coffee and a record of a small part of my own life.

One cup at a time.

The idea in one sentence

BeanThere is a personal coffee journal for discovering and remembering independent cafés—turning a quick cup of coffee into a small moment worth paying attention to.