peregrine coffee plans

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!!!

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.

PHILADELPHIA, PA  February 2, 2009 – All of a sudden, people are talking coffee.  Superb small-batch roasters are spreading out across the country.  Coffee “cupping” is the new wine tasting.  Food and coffee pairings are the current curiosity on boutique menus.  In Philadelphia, Peregrine Coffee (http://www.peregrinecoffee.com) is adding something new to the brew with its full bespoke coffee service.

“Bespoke coffee means coffee sourced, stored, and roasted to order to suit your particular palate,” explains Peregrine Owner/Roaster Kevin Lawrence.  “If people care enough to grind and brew their own coffee at home, they should be drinking something they really love, something chosen and roasted just for them and supplied whenever they want it – that’s what we do here at Peregrine.  Just think of me as a coffee sommelier.”

Lawrence began roasting coffee six years ago when his coffee maker broke and he started to research what it would take to brew a better cup.  He soon discovered that the magic of great coffee lay in the fresh roasted beans, and began to experiment at home, moving to progressively more sophisticated roasters as his skill grew.  By June 2008, he was ready to launch Peregrine Coffee.

When Lawrence started roasting his own beans he was amazed by what really fresh coffee tastes like.  “There is no bitterness, no sourness, and the range of flavors in beans from different parts of the world is astounding – who knew coffee could taste like blueberries?  I wanted to share my discoveries with everyone who loves coffee as much as I do.”

Peregrine Coffee is the way he does that, by showcasing a carefully chosen selection of single-origin and single-estate coffees, roasted to order through the online store, and by providing his unique bespoke service.

This is how the bespoke service works: The first step is a tasting, which can be booked through the free “bespoke coffee for the curious palate” option in Peregrine online store.  In the Philadelphia area, customers can come to Lawrence’s roast shop in Northeast Philadelphia, or he will bring coffee samples to homes or workplaces.  In addition to tasting coffee, Lawrence discusses other sorts of flavor preferences with prospective clients – when ordering dessert, do you always go for chocolate or lean toward the berry option?  Do you prefer white wine or red?   Do you drink coffee first thing in the morning, with meals or only after dinner?

The client’s responses help build their personal coffee flavor profile, which Lawrence uses to source the perfect beans for that particular customer’s palate.  After the tasting, Lawrence prepares a proposal outlining several different selections he thinks the customer will enjoy.  He then purchases the green beans, stores them for the customer’s use alone, and roasts them to their specifications on demand.  Bespoke orders are priced according to the individual coffees chosen and the amount desired (once-a-week for six months, a year’s worth, etc.) with minimum purchases beginning at $45.

Customers outside of the Philly area can purchase a Peregrine Pack ($9.25), which provides whole bean samples of three distinct Peregrine coffees.  From there Lawrence follows up by phone or email to discuss the flavors sampled and hone in more precisely on the customer’s taste preferences.  Peregrine Coffee can be shipped anywhere in the U.S. and abroad.  The company also custom-roasts coffee to complement the specific flavors of a wedding cake, or to go with any specialized menu.

“People are staying home more, cooking at home more,” points out Lawrence.  “You may not be able to afford the vintage Bordeaux this year, but you can treat yourself and your guests to your own custom coffee for a fraction of that price.  It’s an affordable luxury for coffee drinkers who want to explore just how good their own coffee can be.”

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CONTACT: Luise Z. Moskowitz
luise@peregrinecoffee.com
(215) 240-4474

This coffee starts out with sweet and savory smells.  Evokes a cold winter’s day late afternoon lunch of beef barley soup and cherry jam on pumpernickel toast.  There are waves of flavor, including fruit and dark, bittersweet tones, with a slight black peppery edge. Reads like a Rhône. Very nice mouthfeel, almost velvety, and the finish introduces burnt raisin, with slight nuttiness, and a hint of currants.  There is acidity present, but not center stage – quite dry on the finish.  A superb coffee.

These are gorgeous beans, so large, even, and smooth, you could make jewelry from them. The coffee smells like dulce de leche, caramel with sweet nuts (marzipan and hazelnuts), mixed with sweet pipe tobacco and a slight saffron dustiness. The cup starts out with a satiny mouthfeel with great body. It is very balanced and elegant with a slight bright-lime acidity.  There is a subtle, consistent, fast fading, clean, smooth finish.  All the right things one expects from a great cup of coffee with no single dominant note.

Obama Java

From T-shirts to rap songs to sold-out Washington hotels, there’s enough commercial activity surrounding Barack Obama’s inaugural to resuscitate the economy (if it lasted more than a week).

The Peregrine Coffee Co., based in Tacony, has its own entry – a $17 Presidential Pack featuring two bags of custom-roasted coffee beans, one from an estate in Kenya, the birthplace of Obama’s father, the other from a farm in Hawaii, where Obama was born and spent most of his childhood.

The company’s owner and chief roaster is Kevin Lawrence, 40, a former marketing specialist with American Express and the Franklin Institute, who was drawn into the business after his coffee-maker died six years ago.

“First I was trying to find the best coffee pot, then I hooked up with a Web site for coffee geeks, next I found a subset of folks converting popcorn poppers into coffee roasters in their backyards,” Lawrence said. “The Internet is a dangerous thing.”

He opened Peregrine last June in a converted garage on Friendship Street, with a view of I-95. Lawrence imports raw beans from single-origin coffee farms around the world, roasts them to order for specific customers and delivers by priority mail in small batches, about half a pound, enough to sustain an average household for a week or 10 days. Any longer, he says, the coffee beans can’t be considered fresh.

“If you toast and brew it properly, it’s a totally different beverage,” said Lawrence, who compares his job to that of a wine steward, helping “clients” identify their tastes and match them to specific beans and roasts.

His analysis of the Presidential Package? The Hawaiian beans have a “chocolatey, nutty taste,” Lawrence said, while the Kenyan beans hint of grapefruit and black currants, sort of “fruity.” He denies that Republican spinmeisters have any influence on his descriptions. “Peregrine tries not to take a political stance,” he said.

Staff writers Bob Warner and Michael Hinkelman contributed to this report.

Have a news tip? Gossip? Suggestion? Contact Bob Warner at warnerb@phillynews.com, call 215-854-5885, or fax 215-854-5910.

Call central casting ask for a picture perfect coffee bean and this is what you get.  These are beautiful beans! The smells are sweet and spicy with buttery chocolate, cinnamon and cardamom.  Once you take a sip of this, you know that it is a special coffee –  it is very balanced, rich and smooth with milk chocolate, a touch of malty-musty-almonds and a citrusy-floral note.  What stands out is the magical mango-juice finish: just as the slightly dry acidity passes, out jumps the mango from side-stage, joined by sweet floral tones reminding one of lavender combined with the soapy sweetness of artichoke’s aftertaste.  Not just a looker, this coffee is a talented star with real depth and complexity: a rarity indeed.

Thanks to our good friend at The Social Grace for thinking of us during her spot on Good Day Philadelphia.

The aroma from the cup is a mix of lemon and traditional coffee tones, with a sweet, funky-meaty-gauva tropical note.  What jumps to mind on first taste is honey-lemon tea, and that is the theme for this exceptional coffee.  The complex citrus blend of bright, fresh lemons and bitter Seville oranges are intertwined in a duet of floral chords and exotic, fragrant honey.  The citric acid bitterness carries through to the finish and surprisingly delivers a very deep smokiness, continuing with florals and fruit.  This acts much more like an assertive tea than a coffee and will reward one with a little sugar, but no milk.

Vote for us and spread the word!

Peregrine Coffee has been nominated in Daily Candy’s 2008 Sweetest Things competition!

Each year, Daily Candy nominates a handful of favorite businesses that have been covered over the course of the year, in the categories of Style, Bite, Nest, Pamper, and Advice.

All the nominees are featured on a Sweetest Things website which collects votes now through January 16th.

Peregrine Coffee has been nominated in the “Nest” category and our entry can be found here:

http://www.dailycandy.com/sweetest_things/2008/philadelphia/nest.jsp

Just click on Peregrine’s write-up to cast a vote for our bespoke coffee service (and forward this link to as many friends as you like…) to help make Peregrine Coffee one of Philadelphia’s newest Sweetest Things!

Thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm throughout the year and as always, Happy Drinking!

Wishing you a Peaceful & Prosperous New Year,

Kevin J. Lawrence
Owner/Roaster

The intense aroma is clearly fruit with sweet florals that run rich and deep, like a stroll through an orchard in bloom. The initial taste of passion fruit and other tropical fruits is what is immediately prominent, with a load of tart acidity. What follows is a wildly complex combination of peach-apricot nectar, honeysuckle and jasmine, with a sweet, grapy-violet note (like what one thinks of when one visualizes Choward’s Violet Candy). Then, there is the forever long, strong finish where the Seville oranges emerge.  This is a rare, unusual and impressive coffee that has a lot in common with a silver-tip Jasmine tea and one will be rewarded by treating it like that in the cup: no milk, maybe a little sugar.

Recommended Brewing Instructions
14g of coffee to 8oz of water
Medium-to-slightly-coarse grid
Single cup drip
200-205 degree water

The smells from the grind to the cup are perfumy-florals that evoke dandelions, a brown sugar sweetness, cocoa-chocolate and a mix of spices: savory and sweet, including a “red-hots” candy artificial cinnamon tone.  The taste is high and bright, with a dominant citrus acidity similar to a tart plum.  Although the scale is definitely tipped toward the bright, this coffee is actually quite balanced between acidic and silky, although it happens in sequence rather than simultaneously.  The combination dusty cocoa and silky chocolate flavors follow quickly as the cup moves into a subtle, long finish.  This is an exceptionally smooth cup.

On grinding and brewing, the aromatics are floral and of baking spices.  In the cup, this is a big coffee with a lot of flavor.  The complex, winey acidity is perfectly balanced with exceptional structure and body.  The thick and creamy mouthfeel carries the berry/fruit acidity straight through the cup.  And as it cools, subtle hints of tart raspberries or pomegranate are drawn out. This is a supremely elegant and sophisticated combination of flavors with a nice dark tone running through the middle. The finish is like a slow trip down a long, winding road.  Fabulous.

If you want to introduce someone to Peregrine, but don’t know if they might prefer a fruity light roasted Kenyan or a chocolatey decaf, a Peregrine gift certificate is the perfect choice.

Peregrine Coffee has two batches available of what is considered by many to be the finest coffee in the world — Esmeralda Special Geisha Lot Number 2, the coffee that commanded the highest price at any auction last year.