Peregrinations: Monthly Coffee Club

February 2010 selection

Single Estate

Costa Rica, Lourdes de Naranjo, Herbazu Farm

This surprising single estate coffee from Costa Rica behaves quite a bit like a top Kenyan!  The cup starts with distinct citrus and mixed fruit aromas with a clear sweetness.  The brightness in the cup is definitely lemon blended with berries following with deeper caramel-sweetness notes – very Kenya!  A great example of a bright, complex Costa Rican.

From the Importer:

“Cafetalera Herbazu is a well-known farm in the West Valley region, the Lourdes de Naranjo area to be exact. It is on of the early pioneers in independent, small mill coffee farms, the work of the Barrantes family. They grow a type of Villa Sarchi cultivar that they have used for so long, it has become their own mutation in a way. It’s quite a short plant (Villa Sarchi is a dwarf mutation of Bourbon, as is Caturra). The mill and drying patios are right in the center of the farm, which ranges from 1550 to 1700 meters. They don’t employ much shade on the farm, and their particular type of Villa Sarchi seems adapted to this exposure. This offering is a wet-process style estate grade, which is a forced demucilage process (as opposed to traditional fermentation wet-process).”

Just got yet another GREAT order from Peregrine – freshly roasted Brazilian Cerrado – and right on time for our Thanksgiving feast.  If you have not had your FREE (seriously – they will come right to your home or office) bespoke coffee tasting yet – you need to check this out. right. now.

Kevin & Louise, the owners are so accomodating and they roast up some of the best KenyaAA, Kona, Guatemalan (DH’s fave) and the aforementioned Brazilian.

I LOVE PEREGRINE!!!

Citysearch Editorial Review

by Tara Nurin at Citysearch

Coffee addicts must, absolutely must, know about this coffee roasting facility, owned by Kevin Lawrence, who is as obsessed with flavor and freshness as the most punctilious java snob. Lawrence literally scours the earth for the most aromatic and sometimes obscure single-source beans, which he then roasts and sells whole to customers who receive regular deliveries of personalized orders. He makes himself available for tastings, by appointment, to any coffee aficionado, with particular emphasis on potential buyers of his bespoke service. Said service involves him matching a desired flavor profile to a rare bean, which he then ships fresh to his warehouse and stores exclusively for said customer, who then receives regularly scheduled deliveries of a roasted bag timed to adhere to his or her rate of consumption.

Please join us on this Saturday, 12/12, from 6-9p at the fabulous Green Aisle Grocery in South Philly for a free coffee tasting!

Bring a friend!  Tell a neighbor!

http://greenaislegrocery.com/

1618 East Passyunk Avenue

Philadelphia PA 19148 215.465.1411

For clients in the Philadelphia area, Peregrine Coffee begins the process with in-person tastings at our roast shop or in a customer’s home.  We are available to travel to conduct tastings farther afield, but for more distant clients we usually begin the process with an email survey about flavor preferences and coffee habits.  We follow that with a conversation to focus in on the client’s tastes, and then we go to market, scouring the world for beans that we think will please our customer’s palate. We send fresh-roasted samples for them to try, then, on approval, import anything from five pounds to an entire year’s worth of green beans to be stored at our shop for the client’s use, roasted to order, hand-labeled, and delivered on demand.

We specialize in roasting our beans to just the point where the true flavors that the farmer intended come through, before the flavor of the roasting process itself overpowers the subtleties of the bean.  It is a process that combines art and science to balance the profile of the bean with the profile of the roast to maximize the terrior.