Interviews

Names: Jack Ryan
Degree: B.A. (2002)
About: Jack Ryan is the founder of Muttley & Jack’s, a prize winning micro-roastery delivering hand-roasted speciality grade coffee to homes and cafes based throughout Europe. The Stockholm-based organisation was set up in 2017 after Jack spent 15 years working with humanitarian and environmental not-for profit organisations.

What are your strongest memories of Trinity?
I spent my Senior Freshman year living on campus and had great craic living in the Trinity bubble for nine months. The rooms weren't quite as nice as they are nowadays, but it was brilliant to have central Dublin as a playground and the whole campus as a front garden for that year. Attending Trinity Ball without a ticket was particularly good fun!

What did you do after graduating?
I moved to New Zealand without any real firm plan. I started working with Greenpeace there and stayed for almost two years. I stayed with Greenpeace for a long time and worked in the US, Germany and finally in Sweden. While in Sweden I also spent a year working with the UN Refugee Council.

What was the motivation behind setting up Muttley & Jack’s?
There were actually a few different motives that all came together in 2016. I'd been working for a long time in the non-profit sector and had the urge to try my hand in the business world. However, I wanted to hang onto the same values (environmental and humanitarian) that drove me throughout my career. Speciality coffee ticked those boxes for me. I had a bit too much computer time over the years and wanted to do something with my hands, to learn a craft and master it. I'd been slowly falling in love with speciality coffee over the years and everything converged in 2016 when I decided to start Muttley & Jack's Coffee Roasters. I wanted to find and roast coffees of truly exceptionally quality and to make sure that each person involved in the chain from seed to cup shares in the value they create.

What is your proudest achievement to date?
Entering (and almost winning!) the Swedish Coffee Roasting Championships. I hadn't been roasting for that long when I impulsively entered myself into the Swedish Coffee Roasting Championships in 2017. It was slightly terrifying as Sweden has some really excellent roasters but I figured I needed a bit of an external push to accelerate my learning. I made sure to find some excellent teachers in the months leading up to the contest and applied myself to improving my skills. My only real ambition was to learn from the experience and not to embarrass myself too much in the process. Shockingly, I ended up coming in second place (less than one point behind the winner). And, just to prove it wasn't a fluke, I entered and took home silver again in 2018.  Maybe I’ll take home the gold in 2019...

What ambitions do you still have?
To keep on learning and improving my craft. I'm happy with the quality of the coffees we produce but there is so much more to learn. Longer term I'd love to run a small coffee farm, maybe in Colombia or Nicaragua.