Specialty Coffee Wiki

PERC Coffee Roasters

Properties3
descriptionThe Savannah, Georgia roaster that built a chain of Atlanta cafés on the back of a wholesale business, and won a Sprudge Design Award for its merchandise — a company known for how it looks rather than for what it has paid at auction.
tagsorganization, roaster, cafe, usa, georgia, savannah, design
aliasesPERC Coffee, PERC, Panther's Eye Roasting Company

8 min read

PERC Coffee Roasters

PERC Coffee Roasters — usually written just PERC Coffee — is an American specialty coffee roaster based in Savannah, Georgia. It roasts in Savannah, sells wholesale to other businesses, and runs its own cafés, nearly all of them four hours up the road in Atlanta.123

Why it is in this wiki: PERC is one of the twenty-four winners of the second Sprudge Design Awards, taking Outstanding Design Achievement: Goods and Garments in the 2024–25 cycle — the category for T-shirts, hats, aprons and other merchandise a coffee company puts its name on.4 That is the one thing about PERC that is documented by an official, published result rather than by a company listing. See Sprudge Design Awards for what that award is and is not.

It is worth saying plainly what this note cannot tell you. Unlike Onyx Coffee Lab or Proud Mary Coffee, PERC has no competition record, no published cupping scores and no traceable auction purchases in any source consulted here. What is documented is a roastery, a café chain and a look.

The company

AttributeDetail
Trading namesPERC Coffee, PERC Coffee Roasters563
Roastery / head office1802 E Broad St, Savannah, GA 31401
BusinessRoasting, wholesale, own cafés, online retail
CafésOne in Savannah, five in the Atlanta area
Websiteperccoffee.com

The Savannah address appears identically on the company’s own Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, which also give +1 (912) 209-0025 and contact@perccoffee.com as public contacts.52

To verify — the founding year, and what "PERC" stands for

A roaster profile published by the coffee subscription service Trade Coffee states that “Panther’s Eye Roasting Company was founded in 2010,” and explains the name PERC as an acronym of Panther’s Eye Roasting Company.1 That is a single source, and a retailer’s own marketing page rather than a company filing or a news report. No second, independent source consulted here gives a founding year or confirms the acronym, and PERC’s own website could not be read while this note was written (it returned HTTP 429, rate-limited, on four attempts). Treat both the 2010 date and the Panther’s Eye derivation as claimed, not established.

To verify — who owns it

Two threads point at the same person without either one closing. PERC’s Facebook page names the entity behind it as “P.Brown Coffee Roasting Co., LLC,” but does not say that this is the legal owner of the PERC Coffee brand.5 A commercial contact database lists an owner for PERC Coffee Roasters whose name is truncated in the listing as “…lip Bro… | Owner,” at a perccoffee.com address — which strongly suggests a Philip Brown, and matches the “P.Brown” entity name.6 Neither source states a full name outright, and a contact-scraping database is the weakest kind of source in this wiki’s hierarchy. No owner is named as fact here.

The cafés

PERC’s retail footprint is the best-documented thing about the business, because a local guide has tracked each Atlanta opening as it happened.7

CaféAreaOpened
SavannahSavannah, GA (at the roastery)—
East LakeAtlanta, GA — Hosea Williams Dr NE2020 (first Atlanta shop)
Virginia HighlandAtlanta, GA — N Highland Ave NE2021
Grant ParkAtlanta, GA — 519 Memorial Dr SEautumn 2023
TuckerTucker, GA — 2316 Main St10 January 2024 (fourth metro-Atlanta shop)
Chastain ParkAtlanta, GA6 June 2024 (fifth Atlanta-area shop)

So the shape of the company is: a roastery in a small coastal city, and a café chain built out in a much bigger one over roughly four years, at about one new shop a year until 2024, when two opened five months apart.7 The Atlanta addresses are listed on PERC’s LinkedIn profile and the opening dates on the local guide; the two agree on every location except one.27

To verify — the Chastain Park address

The Atlanta café guide gives Chastain Park as 4630 Wieuca Road NE, Atlanta, GA 30342;7 PERC’s own LinkedIn profile lists 4635 Roswell Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30342 in the same postcode.2 These may be two frontages of the same retail property, a mailing address versus a shop door, or one of them simply out of date. Nothing in the sources consulted resolves it, so neither is stated as the address above.

Products and projects

PERC sells blends alongside rotating single-origin coffees — the ordinary product split for a roaster of this size, where blends carry the year-round menu and single origins come and go with the harvest.

To verify — the Single Origin Project

A brand news release carried by the trade site Nosh announces new label designs for PERC’s blends and the launch of “September’s Single Origin Project, an ongoing monthly series offering an inside look into single origin coffees and the farms from which they are produced.”3 The release is a company announcement republished by a brand-news aggregator — effectively PERC talking about itself — and carries no year in the text consulted. Whether the series still runs, when it began, and which farms it has covered are all unconfirmed. No farm name, altitude, processing method or price from the series appears in any source read here.

The research behind this note specifically searched for PERC results or purchases in Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, Specialty Coffee Association and Coffee Quality Institute records and found none — no auction lot, no buyer credit, no published score. That is not evidence that PERC never buys competition coffee; it means this wiki has nothing to show for it, and no number here should be inferred. The kind of published, checkable sourcing detail described on Direct trade and Green coffee buying is not available for PERC from the sources consulted.

Design as the thing it is known for

The Sprudge award places PERC in a specific corner of American coffee: companies judged on the parts of the business a customer touches — the bag, the shirt, the cup — rather than on the cup score.4 The category PERC won covers “promotional goods in the coffee industry… T-shirts, hats, pennants, coasters, aprons, socks,” and the winner was chosen by public vote rather than by a jury of graders.4

That distinction matters when reading this note next to the others in this folder. A Cup of Excellence result is a blind score with a price attached. A Sprudge Design Award is a popularity vote run by a trade publication — real recognition, and the reason PERC turns up in this wiki at all, but a measure of visibility rather than of quality in the cup. Coffee packaging covers why the bag carries so much weight for a roaster this size, and Coffee media covers the trade press that hands out awards inside the industry it reports on.

Footnotes

  1. Get to Know PERC Coffee — Trade Coffee — a retailer’s roaster profile; the only source consulted giving a 2010 founding date and the Panther’s Eye Roasting Company derivation of the name ↩ ↩2

  2. PERC COFFEE — LinkedIn company page — the company’s own profile; source of the Savannah head-office address and the Atlanta-area store addresses, including the Roswell Rd listing ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Perc Coffee — Nosh brand page — a brand-news aggregator carrying PERC’s own announcement of new blend labels and the Single Origin Project ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Announcing The Second Annual Sprudge Design Award Winners | Sprudge — read via WebFetch; the official results announcement naming “PERC Coffee Roasters” as winner of Outstanding Design Achievement: Goods and Garments, and the source of the category definition quoted above ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. PERC Coffee | Savannah GA — Facebook — the company’s own page; source of the Savannah address, the phone number and email, the store opening hours and the “P.Brown Coffee Roasting Co., LLC” entity name ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. PERC Coffee Roasters — SalezShark company contacts — a commercial contact database; source of the perccoffee.com website and email format and of the truncated owner listing ↩ ↩2

  7. PERC Coffee — Atlanta Coffee Shops guide — read via WebFetch; source of the Atlanta opening sequence and dates, the “fourth metro-Atlanta shop” and “fifth Atlanta-area coffee shop” wording, the Tucker and Chastain addresses, and the description of PERC as “the Savannah-based coffee roaster” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

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