Arcade Coffee Roasters

The reason for building any of this was being tired of people outside Riverside having what the founders wanted, and not waiting for someone else to build it, which is a sturdier motive than a love of coffee. The Q-grader half of the partnership came to roasting on a broken HotTop rebuilt with his father, whose one condition was that he not burn the house down.

The roasting happens on this floor, for the group's own bars and for the wholesale shops it supplies across Southern California, under head roaster Westin Mills and lead roaster Gabe Beltran. The standing list is an espresso blend, a filter blend split evenly between Palmera in Colombia and Cajamarca in Peru, a decaf and four rotating single origins, while the retail shelf runs $22.75 to $28.00 with region, varietal, process and altitude printed down to a washed Bourbon at 2,000 meters in Kayanza, Burundi.

The roastery kept the sign of the video store it took over and never quite finished changing it, which is the kind of detail a shop either fixes in week one or keeps for good. The address is a production room with a bar attached, where the roast runs Monday through Wednesday in front of anyone who cares to stand and watch, and it is built for the person who comes for the coffee and nothing else.