Loquat Coffee

House-roasted, on two machines

What separates Loquat from its sibling Kumquat is that the coffee is roasted in-house rather than bought from a rotation of roasters. Smaller shop batches run on a Diedrich IR-7 at Cypress Park, larger production on a Loring S15 in Brea, with the Loring expected to take over the Cypress Park work as the program grows.

The bar is equally specific. A custom matte black two-group Victoria Arduino Gravimetric Black Eagle pulls the shots, a Mythos II grinds the Quat house blend, a Weber Workshops EG-1 handles single-origin espresso, and a Mahlkönig EK43S feeds both the Curtis G4 Thermopro batch brewer and the manual pourovers. That is four distinct brew paths out of one small corner unit, which tells you where the attention has gone.

Black and yellow on a Cypress Park corner

The original opened in 2022 in a 1,060-square-foot corner space, and a second branch followed on Sunset Boulevard. Co-founder AJ Kim and co-owner Scott Sohn kept the room minimalist and bumblebee-colored, matte black against vivid yellow. Kim has said they wanted to express the warmth of Los Angeles in the color yellow.

The building keeps its own memory: the vintage sign from the ice cream company that once occupied the site is still on the painted brick outside. The service style draws on South Korea's coffee culture, which fits the precision of the equipment and the curated feel of the menu. Loquat has been named in the Infatuation's coffee guide. The corner unit is small enough that the bar is effectively the room.

Espresso for the choices, cold brew for the beans

There are four espresso choices, which is unusual for a shop this size and the best reason to start there. Among them is a Samboni Gesha blend put through a 72-hour anaerobic, fermented and oxygenated process, which places the bar in experimental territory next to the Quat house blend. The house blend is the baseline against which the rotating options make sense.

Cold brew is the easier starting point and still reads as the roasting program, since the beans are the shop's own and closely curated. For a slower look at a single coffee, take a pourover ground on the EK43S; for something immediate, the batch brew is already made. Any of the three tells you the same thing, which is that the roasting decisions come first here.