Torrefacto Roasts, Part Deux

The Coffee Concierge was strolling the streets of Paris and came across Lapeyronie, a torrefacteur roaster shop near the Centre Geogres Pompidou. Now clearly, this was an opportunity to further explore the issue of torrefacto roasts first raised in an earlier post. Of course there were some issues, like the Coffee Concierge's limited French vocabulary. Fortunately, upon coming back to Singapore I managed to find this post which talks about the coffee and tea scene in Paris in quite some detail, and includes a fairly lengthy write-up on Lapeyronie.

This little shop has a wide range of coffees, bringing in beans from Indonesia, Costa Rica and so on. The green beans are roasted on site in the roaster and then make their way across the shop floor to the counter where they are bagged and sold. The shop has also a little cafe, so the Coffee Concierge took the opportunity to have a cuppa.

The majority of the shop's customers are in the take-away trade so it was really a self-service cafe. The coffee was the daily blend but it was not really a memorable cup - pleasant enough, slightly bitter, but I thought I would have preferred a stronger flavour. The crema dissipated fairly rapidly as well. Maybe it is a question of preferences, as the owner of the shop, Bruno Saguez, notes:

"I believe taste in coffee is a personal matter," says Saguez. "The roaster's art is to coax the different tastes from the green coffees and from the blends. When this is done well, in carefully established shades from light to dark, the consumer has a universe of taste to explore."

The Coffee Concierge has slight regrets about not buying a pack of coffee beans to explore the flavours more. But at the time we were only half-way through our visit to France and I was more concerned about the issue of lugging my bags down four narrow flights of stairs.


Address:
Lapeyronie, 3 rue Brantome, 75003 Paris. Tel: (33)(1) 40 27 97 57.