Meet the Loring Peregrine: The Sustainable Roaster Behind Every Cup We Pour
April is Earth Month, and we think it's the perfect time to tell you about what sustainability means to us here at Brooklyn Roasting.
Coffee is the most democratic beverage on earth. A bodega cup and a pour-over served in a ceramic vessel are both valid ways to wake up. We have believed that since 2009, when we started roasting in a friend's basement in Williamsburg with a secondhand machine and a dream. What has changed since then is the machinery. Our roastery at the Brooklyn Navy Yard now runs on a Loring Peregrine, and the difference it makes goes well beyond the cup.
If you care about where your coffee comes from, how it is roasted, and what that roast does to the air above your neighborhood, the Loring Peregrine roaster is worth knowing about. It is the reason we can say, with a straight face, that a cup of Brooklyn Roasting Company coffee is a cup you can feel good drinking.
What a Loring Peregrine roaster actually does
Most coffee roasters have worked the same way for roughly a century. A rotating drum is heated from below, the beans tumble, and a separate afterburner runs alongside the whole operation to clean up the smoke. Two flames. Twice the gas. A lot of heat going out the roof.
The Loring Peregrine works differently. A single flame heats the air, the air moves through a static drum, and the same flame incinerates the smoke on the way back around. One burner does the job of two. The hot air gets recirculated instead of vented, so the roaster is not constantly working to reheat cold outside air on a February morning in Brooklyn. That is the whole trick. It sounds simple because it is. Good engineering usually is.
What that trick adds up to, in numbers Loring has measured and that independent air quality regulators have verified:
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Up to 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per roast.
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Up to 80% fuel savings compared to a conventional drum roaster.
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No external afterburner, because the machine acts as its own.
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Permitted under the most rigorous air quality standards in the world, including California's.
For a roastery our size, the math gets real fast. The Loring savings calculator estimates that a single high-volume roastery can keep more than 180,000 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere in a year, and save tens of thousands of dollars in fuel while doing it. Multiply that across every Loring running globally and you start to see why this matters.
Why we chose the Loring Peregrine
We looked at a lot of roasters. We did not pick the Loring Peregrine because it was the most expensive, or because another specialty brand had one, or because it makes a better photo. We picked it because of what it does to the coffee and to the planet.
It protects the flavor. Coffee is a tropical fruit. Treated well, it tastes like blueberries, dark chocolate, lemon zest, honey, root beer, pie crust. Treated badly, it tastes like burnt toast. The Loring's convective design wraps every bean in hot, moving air, so a batch roasts evenly from edge to center. There are no hot spots. There is no scorched outside and underdeveloped middle. The cooling tray is fast, which means the beans stop cooking when we want them to stop cooking. Consistency is not an abstract virtue in coffee. It is the reason a twelve ounce bag of Iris tastes like Iris in January and again in July.
It protects the air. We have neighbors. We have coworkers. The Navy Yard has been an industrial site since before the Civil War, and it has a long memory of what bad industry can do to a waterfront community. We wanted a roaster that we could run at full tilt without sending a plume of smoke into the sky over Wallabout Bay. The Loring does that. You can stand next to it during a roast and not smell the fumes you would smell at a conventional drum operation. That is not a marketing line. That is the patented single-flame design doing exactly what it was built to do.
It protects our growers' work. Our partners at Ketiara Cooperative in Sumatra, Las Damas de San Ignacio in Peru, and PRODECOOP in Nicaragua do the hard, honest work of growing and milling coffee that is worth traveling thousands of miles for. If we are going to source fairly, pay fairly, and build partnerships that last a decade or more, the least we can do is roast in a way that does not undo the climate work happening on the farms themselves. A grower fighting rising temperatures in the highlands deserves a roaster on the other end of the chain who is not adding to the problem.
What sustainable coffee roasting actually means
"Sustainable" has become one of the most overused words in the coffee industry, so let us be specific about what it means to us. It means four things, and all four are measurable.
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Less fuel burned per pound of coffee. The Loring's recirculating design cuts natural gas consumption by up to 80% compared to traditional roasters. Less gas, less money, less methane.
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Fewer greenhouse gases per pound of coffee. A built-in afterburner means the same flame that cooks the beans also cleans the emissions. No separate pollution-control equipment running at the same time.
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Cleaner air at the roastery. Air Quality Compliance is not a vibe. The Loring is permitted under some of the toughest clean-air standards on the planet, which means our neighbors, our coworkers, and anyone walking past our Navy Yard bay doors breathes cleaner air than they would otherwise.
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A supply chain that does the same math upstream. Fair Trade Organic coffee from women-owned cooperatives. Direct relationships with farms we have known for years. Transparency about who grew what and where. A roaster that matches that ethic instead of undercutting it.
If any of those four is missing, we do not use the word. We would rather be honest than on-trend.
A cup you can feel good drinking
There is no single right way to drink coffee. Black, oat milk, iced, hot, in a ceramic cup at home, in a paper cup on the subway. We trust our customers to know what they like. What we will not do is ask you to feel bad about a daily ritual that tens of millions of people share. Coffee should be welcoming, not a test.
What we can do, as the roaster on your end of the chain, is take the pieces of the process we control and do them right. We pick growers who get paid fairly. We pick a roaster that uses less fuel and emits less carbon. We communicate honestly about both. Then we put the coffee in a bag, ship it to your kitchen, your cafe, your airline, your bodega, and let the cup speak for itself.
That is what a cup you can feel good drinking actually means. Not a slogan. Not a sticker. A set of decisions, made one at a time, at every point from the farm to the Loring Peregrine to the mug in your hand.
It’s a difference you can taste and one you can be proud to support.