Peregrine Espresso – Eastern Market
660 Pennsylvania Ave SE (between S. 6th St & S. 7th St)
Washington, DC 20003
Phone: (202) 629-4381
The illustrious Peregrine Espresso was my first real impressive specialty coffee experience in the Washington, D.C. area. It was quite a weekend for Cafe Hounding. Upon my first visit to this Eastern Market located shop I was admittedly distracted by catching up with an old friend currently working at Commerce but I was quickly brought back into focus when I entered this fine establishment and saw the fresh roasted bags of coffee sitting at the entrance.
The ambiance is a pretty straight forward hipster look with chopped up doors hung on the wall for decor. The lighting is good and it was packed with people taking up all of the available seating with their laptops (and there is a pretty decent amount of seating too!). Granted, this was a Saturday at Eastern Market in the summer so this is probably about as crowded as it gets.
The menu selection was very limited — a positive for me meaning that they do COFFEE here.
Latte Art at Peregrine Espresso
Let me emphasize the quality of the coffee here. I entered and was able to choose between my very own personally drip brewed coffee from either Papa New Guinea, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya or Honduras. All of these were roasted within the previous few days by Counter Culture down in NC and shipped same day up to DC. I can attest that the quality control in that process seemed superb to me. One, because the Kenya AA that I drank in the store went down pretty good although not as delicious as the Kenya AA that Caribou carries (sorry guys :-/). I’ll make a separate post on my experience with Kenya AA’s since it is probably one of my favorite single origins so I’ve tasted a lot over the years.
I also sampled an espresso to get my palate around their custom blend of espresso. I must say, both the preparation of the espresso and the blend were sort of underwhelming on this visit. I have heard so much good about Peregrine Espresso AND I was very happy that the baristas were both very knowledgeable of the entire industry and of competitive barismo AND unpretentious.
They have free wifi and a decent amount of indoor and outdoor seating. This is a great area of DC and thus, I’m sure they’ll do well for quite some time. It’s a must check out if you’re passing through The District. Thanks to David Flynn for his time and conversation while I picked his brain about specialty coffee. Flynn came in 3rd this past Feb 2009 in the Mid-Atlantic Barista Competition along with other local area talent. Peregine just opened in late 2008 and looks to have a lot of room to grow and prosper in the region.
Overall Rating: 3.4
Coffee Quality: 4.3, Cafe Ambiance: 3.6, Food: 1.8
–Maher Hound
Cafe Hound 