Fuzz Coffee

Salton Sea Sound System, the founders' own label, puts out five to ten records a year, and each one arrives with a coffee released to match it, a heavier promise than the turntable most shops park in a corner. Fuzz is blunt about not being a listening bar, whatever San Diego has come to expect from a room with records in it: the racks are there to be bought from.

Roasting happens in house every Monday, and the retail lots are annotated down to the farm: the Nicaragua names La Bastilla Estate in Jinotega, its Caturra and Catuai, an anaerobic yeast fermentation, and 1300 to 1500 meters. A Tanzania off Finagro Estate sits beside it, and with no roast date printed anywhere, that Monday schedule is all the bags say about freshness.

The space is small and industrial, and the reference behind it is Japanese coffee shops, with nobody credited for the design. A room that size leaves a barista nowhere to hide behind the machine.