Proverbially, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But a journey of a mere sixty kilometres starts with a double espresso. It’s important to set a baseline for quality when embarking on a research project as rigorous as the 2024 Coffeeneuring Challenge, and Five Points is always my point of departure.
My lab assistant for the first ride was Rider’s Bloc. In recent years the block has become systemic, and he gets out on the bike only marginally more often than he posts on his blog, so we took it pretty easy on the way out to Blessington. Befitting two men in their middle years, 90% of the conversation went along these lines:
— do you know so-and-so?
— I don’t think so
— right. Well, she has cancer
and so on in a dreadful litany of terminal diagnoses, and distant acquaintances who woke up one morning dead as a doornail. “Sniper alley,” he commented sagely, “that’s where we are.” Only the offer of some cholesterol- and carcinogen-laden cake could prise him away from the subject of mortality and our precarious purchase on life.
We pulled into an unprepossessing driveway, signposted Brew 21. I was half-expecting yet another coffee truck, but no, past some picnic tables arrayed on an astroturf lawn I found the entrance to a sizeable cafe. The bar is straight out of the 3FE playbook: Victoria Arduino espresso machine, Puq Press automatic tamper etc. Decent espresso, but one star deducted for serving it in a paper cup. And the astroturf. We returned to the city warmed by the rare October sun.
I was solo on the second ride this week, a return visit to Roundwood Stores. Again the sun was out, but in the two days intervening the temperature had dropped by ten degrees and it was barely above freezing when I left Harold’s Cross. The reason for this became apparent when I left the warmth and bourgeois comfort of the cafe to head home, and spent the next two hours battling into a biting northerly. The brisk pace I set on the way to Roundwood should have tipped me off, but the delusional part of your brain always wants to think it’s that you have good legs, that you’re in great shape. Never that the wind might be behind you, waiting to sandbag you as soon as you change direction.
In the year since I first went there, Roundwood Stores has come to exercise a magnetic pull, dragging me in any time I pass within five kilometers of it. The coffee can be hit-or-miss, but the soups are invariably excellent, and the only thing that puts me off the rest of the menu is the massive portions…the drags over Ballinastoe and Djouce are all the more grinding after eating a slab of focaccia the size of your head.