Interview: G&B Coffee co-founder Kyle Glanville

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When you go to a coffeehouse, what are some of the signs that you’re in a good one?

For me at this point it’s what’s in the cup. A lot of baristas are really focused on their art or the really tangible aspects, but don’t really know how to taste. It’s an attitude. If I see someone who’s really focused on latte art but their shots are clearly slow or clearly fast, or something like that, I know that it’s probably a shop that values aesthetics more highly than flavor. I don’t like many shops, so I’m a bad person to ask. In L.A., I still think Intelligentsia Venice is the top. For me, I think it’s the best. It’s the ultimate, like a church.

Even after the inevitable turnover?

Yeah. There are still original employees there. There’s still a slow bar. There’s a better level of excellence there than when we opened it, in my opinion. It’s just a really special place. The Handsome shop in the Arts District has come a long way since they opened. They’re executing really well. I have nice experiences. Of course, it’s hard for me to walk into a coffee bar and get the same experience that a normal person would. I generally don’t, but I do get really great experiences at both of those places.

What will it take for the Los Angeles coffee culture to become great, if it isn’t?

I don’t know that there are any great coffee cultures. L.A. is as far along as anybody. This might sound extremely cynical, but I’ve given up worrying about what the culture is doing, and just worrying about getting my own thing right, because that’s enough. The thing that always leads to positive advancement in any culture is to have something that pulls everybody forward. To think about where L.A. is, versus where it was pre Silver Lake coffee bar, that is a rapid and impressive advance in five years. I think time. I hope that what we do with G&B is something that pushes other people forward, but I’m not going to be making stump speeches to try to convince other operators to do better because if I’m doing the best I can…It’s great if other people are doing great coffee. It gives me more options.

I guess one thing would maybe be less focus on all the trappings of good coffee, and more focus on the earnest, hard actual work that is required to make a program great, to analyze your coffees every day, to test your water to make sure you have a reasonable water system, which is the second most important ingredient. If you’re buying coffee from roasters, make sure you are trained to taste coffee and vet your coffees. Taste them, test them based on quality rather than brand. Simple stuff that any good chef would of course do. That should be happening in coffee.

What’s a typical coffee consumption day for you?

I couldn’t tell you. It’s not measurable in cups because I’m always taking sips. Here, we start out by cupping our whole line-up at six in the morning. I spit all of that out. I taste espresso, and I spit all of that out. Throughout the course of the day, I will check in with everything a few times, probably have a few shots of espresso, probably a grand total of 10 ounces of coffee. Not too huge.

Do you ever make coffee at home?

Yeah, definitely. Not in the last couple of weeks, but otherwise, I do.

What’s your preferred home brewing method?

I have a V60, and I default to that or the Chemex, but I’m pretty down with the Kalita Waves. I like them a lot. That’s what we’re using here for almost everything.

Why that?

We are able, with the Waves – we’re not doing by the cup here – we are doing bigger brews of manual pourover, and the Kalita allows us to brew more, with a really, really good extraction, which other methods don’t.

Can you imagine roasting your own coffee at some point, or are you more comfortable with rotating?

Yeah. I’ll be honest. Our business plan for G&B is to grow organically, and to have locations and to be in many places. Our mission is to put really excellent coffee in many people’s hands. We will have to at least supplement what we’re buying by roasting, but I never want to stop buying coffee from the great roasters…I consider it an advantage to buy coffee from roasters, because there is a really considerable amount of really excellent roasted coffee out there. No single roaster could flesh out our line-up. It’s just not reasonable the way we would want. If they can’t, I can’t imagine that we could. Having the ability to get coffees from lots of different suppliers is financially not advantageous, but from a quality perspective is very good.

If you could pull a guest shift at another coffee bar, is there one you would like to do that at?

Something like Caffe Trieste or the original Starbucks, just for perspective.

Trieste in San Francisco?

Yeah, something super O.G. That would be really fun.

If you could only drink one more shot of espresso, who would you let pull it for you?

My wife [Deanna], but there are a lot of different levels to that. She’s one of the better baristas walking around on the earth these days, and she just spends her time with kids instead.

Address: 720 North Virgil Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029
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Joshua Lurie

Joshua Lurie founded FoodGPS in 2005. Read about him here.

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