11 Questions & A Cup of Coffee: Air Force TACP and BRCC Co-Founder Jarred Taylor 

Jarred “JT” Taylor is known for his creative endeavors — whether it be music, clothing, or even movies, like 2016’s Range 15 — and his larger-than-life personality. 

“Everything is devoted to creation,” Taylor said in an earlier interview with Coffee or Die, describing his overall philosophy. “So every piece of time, it might seem like I’m having fun, but everything is devoted to creating stuff for the audience base, on my part.” 

After graduating high school in the Pacific Northwest, Taylor enlisted in the US Air Force to become a Munitions Systems Apprentice but later switched to Tactical Air Control Party Specialist (TACP). Taylor met his business partner Mat Best while still in the service, and after 11 years of active duty, he left the military to focus all of his energy on pursuing other ventures. Since then he has been involved in Article 15 Clothing, Leadslingers Spirits, and Black Rifle Coffee Company.

We caught up with JT at BRCC headquarters in San Antonio for our latest installment of 11 Questions & A Cup of Coffee.

COD: How do you take your coffee?

JT: Black. I take it like I take my men, my man. 

COD: How do you make your coffee?

JT: I generally do a French press — or a France press, which is custom to me. I don’t measure anything. I don’t measure water temperature or anything. I just, I make a mess and then kinda sip what’s leftover after the mess is done being made.

COD: What’s the most bizarre or extreme place you’ve ever had or made a cup of coffee?

JT: I would say in the jungles of Costa Rica. I was up there scouting locations for a Rambo film that I wanted to do. It was pretty much remaking Rambo I with an iPhone. I got Rudy Reyes attached to it, but it just kind of never saw fruition. There was budgeting issues, the state of Oregan was kind of angry with me.

COD: What was the coffee like up there?

JT: It was fresh because, you know, me and my man Logan, we watched them little coffee berries get picked by tiny Nicaraguans — like, they were of age, but they were smaller. I think there was a leak of radiation or something somewhere in Nicaragua that made everyone kind of smaller. But, yes, tiny Nicaraguans. They threw the berries into the truck, and they would get a little token, almost like a Vegas, what do you call those things, chips, and they get these tokens for every bag that they pick, so it’s incentivized. Like, if you wanna pick all day, you can get as many chips as you need. 

And then we put it through the coffee deflower magic thing. Coffee comes in berries, it looks like a pomegranate, you gotta shake it up, put it through some water, rake it around. We did all that, and then we roasted it over an open flame with a 50-gallon drum. It was very primitive. There was no electricity or nothing there in the middle of the rainforest. And then we brewed it with spring water coming down from a waterfall. 

COD: What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?

JT: A pullup. At this weight.

COD: What motivates you to do what you do?

JT: Creating, I like to create. Half of it’s shit, but I still like to throw it out there and see what’s up. Sometimes it does well, sometimes it’s shit. 

COD: What do you think is the most misunderstood thing about you or the work you do?

JT: Misunderstood. Did you ask everyone that question? That’s weird.

COD: It just seems especially pertinent to you.

JT: It does. Mat Best’s friend. No, I don’t think anybody knows what we do. There’s a lot of us. I don’t think people even know that Mat edits his own videos. They just see something, “Oh man, this is really nicely done, you guys must pay a lot of people.” No, he did it himself. The same thing, create everything from start to finish. From an idea that I have on a couch, I can take that into PhotoShop or Illustrator and then pull it into After Effects, make it 3D, animate it, and then put it into Premiere and make a movie out of it. Sometimes. Other times I drink, you know, a lot.

COD: How do you define success?

JT: You know, when you can throw it in somebody’s face. <laughter> Just a tangible item that you can be like, “Yeah, look. This is funny.”

COD: So that’s the motivation behind, like, “I want to win an Oscar”?

JT: I would say the most dangerous thing to do to me is to tell me no because I’ll find a loophole. And I definitely do — all the time. I was once told I had too many drinks on a flight and immediately fired back to the kind stewardess of Delta Air Lines with, “Oh, I live in the Swiss Alps at 14,000 feet, alcohol doesn’t affect me the same.” She accepted that answer as perfectly fine. She was like, “Oh, oh man, I’m sorry. Yeah, I’ll get you another one.” Like, people just want answers, they don’t have to be real.

COD: Mountain view or ocean view?

JT: Well, I mean, if we were in Thailand, you could get both. They have those crazy fuckin’ mountains that come out of the ocean. You ever seen those things? They float. I heard that a congressman in Georgia thinks that Guam is gonna tip over, so I might wanna look into that.

COD: If you could have any superpower what would it be?

JT: Morphing — like, morph, you know, because then you could have all of them. Because then I could morph into Cyclops, and now I’ve got fucking eye lasers. If I get bored with that, I could morph into Beast and be ugly.

COD: I’d like to think that if you did morph into Cyclops, instead of having the eyewear that he had, you would find those type of racing glasses that could hold in the laser.

JT: These are fine hater blockers. Like, you need the full wrap-around so that hate doesn’t leak in from the sides.

COD: What are your hobbies outside of what you’re known for?

JT: Christ, well, I’m known for all my hobbies, really. I could tell you that I play the piano, but that’s one of the things that I put content out with, music. 

I obsess with building bases in the cheat mode of 7 Days to Die. That’s a lot of time spent just building blocks.

COD: I don’t even know what that is.

JT: Yeah, sorry. You wanted the question.

COD: On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that you could survive a post-apocalyptic world — 1 being that you are dead on day one, 10 being that you are the ruler of the new world order?

JT: I mean, technically, I’m one of the only people that has experience with a post-apocalyptic world. I was in a movie about zombies, so I’ve already been in that situation. I’d be fine. Oh, definitely a 10. You would come into my province. That’s how that would go.