San Diego's Coffee Roaster for Bright, Ethical, Single Origin Beans

Torque is the only San Diego coffee roaster built around Proportional Pricing — our industry-first model where farmers receive 20% of every retail dollar you spend on their coffee, pre-paid. Combined with our women-led roasting team, our 1930s Art Deco roastery in City Heights, and our obsession with light roast and single origin coffees, there's no other roaster quite like us.

For us, ethically sourced coffee means full supply chain transparency and direct, proportional payments to producers — not just a "fair trade" certification or a floor price. Every producer we work with is named, every origin is disclosed, and every price reflects what they were paid.

Light roast coffees actually contain slightly more caffeine than dark roasts — the roasting process breaks down caffeine over time. What light roast doesn't have is the bitter, charred flavor of over-roasted beans. Instead, you get the natural fruit, floral, and sweet flavors the producer worked hard to grow.

Single origin coffees come from one specific farm, cooperative, or processing station — meaning the flavor in your cup is traceable to one place and one group of people. We focus on single origin coffees because they let the producer's skill and the terroir shine.

Yes. We roast in our San Diego roastery and ship fresh-roasted coffee nationwide. Subscription orders ship free. We roast to order so your coffee arrives at peak freshness — usually within days of the roast date.

Our bright and fruity coffees typically show notes like stone fruit (peach, apricot), citrus (bergamot, lemon zest), and florals (jasmine, rose). These flavors are naturally present in high-quality single origin coffees — especially from Ethiopia, Colombia, and Costa Rica — and our light roast approach preserves them.