Welcome to Students Incorporated, a podcast where we dive into relevant topics and issues
related to the world of business, technology, education and design.
I'm your host, Mr. Jason.
Episodes include student conversations, interviews with thought leaders, and inspirational stories
with an international flavor.
This podcast is created and produced with the help of students from the International
Community School of Bangkok.
In today's episode, we explore the beloved topic of coffee.
I'm joined by our co-host, Lion Antasia.
We also welcome our special guest, Mr. Gary Ford II.
Thank you for joining us.
First, let's hear the quote of the day and get some headline news.
Thank you, Mr. Jason.
The quote of the day is by the famous Burt Lancaster, an American actor who played tough
guys with tender hearts, kinda like me.
His quote is saying, I judge a restaurant by the bread and by the coffee.
And I know that Mr. Jason judges a coffee shop by its espresso and pour-over.
Another fun fact for y'all, Burt Lancaster's final appearance in a movie was in the film
Field of Dreams, which is filmed in Iowa, Mr. Jason's home state in the U.S. of A.
Recently, residents of a town in Riyang noticed that the beach water had a strange color and
smell.
Researchers think that it could be a plankton normally found at this time of the year.
It's harmless and won't hurt the water.
In regional news, with the recent tragedy in Indonesia at a large soccer game, officials
are seeking answers as to why the stadium was so full and why fans got out of hand towards
the end of the game.
Sports have a way of bringing out sharp emotions and reactions.
In international news, Germany and Denmark are currently building the longest-immersed
tunnel between the two countries.
The tunnel will be up to 40 meters under the Baltic Sea and will be 18 kilometers long.
Thank you for that quote of the day and the news headlines.
I'm really excited about this episode's topic.
For obvious reasons, it's all about coffee.
So let's dive in.
Pun intended.
Wait, how is that a pun intended though?
Like, what's the pun there?
Let's dive in.
Dive into coffee.
Dive into coffee, but diving...
Don't dive into the coffee.
Don't dive into my coffee.
Okay, okay, okay.
Pun intended.
Okay, Mr. Gheria, thank you so much for joining us today.
Our topic and focus for this episode is coffee, as you can tell, right?
But let's start by hearing a little bit about your cafe and the delicious menu, which I
personally know that nachos are amazing.
You guys have to check it out.
What inspired it and what are some of your customers' favorite dishes?
Yeah, yeah.
So thanks for having me.
It's really good to be here with you guys at ICS.
And yeah, my name's Gary.
I own and run La Mesa Coffee alongside my wife.
And La Mesa, as a coffee shop, we do kind of American-focused fusion Mexican food.
So in the US, I'm from New Mexico.
If you guys know of the great state of New Mexico.
My dad's from New Mexico.
Cool, cool.
What part?
Albuquerque.
Yes!
5,000 gold stars for you.
So yeah, so I, too, am from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
So we do American-style fusion Mexican food, a little bit, or primarily a specialty coffee
shop.
So full espresso bar and like a drip bar.
We do really fun coffee alternatives for those that don't drink coffee at all.
And then we do American-style pastries.
My wife's the head baker.
So yeah, really great things like our American-style New York cheesecake, flourless chocolate cake.
We have like really great cookies.
Oh man, it's getting me hungry just thinking about that.
And then, yeah, we do like all-day brunch.
Yeah, a lot of things like our burritos and stuff.
So we have a good profile, kind of something for everyone.
But I think especially our Americans and kind of local ties, they really just like that
Mexican kind of flavors because kind of unique to find that here.
And then we do a unique take on it since it's New Mexican-style Mexican food.
So shifting to more of a business and marketing type question, how have you been able to maintain
individuality with your cafe in a very saturated sort of coffee industry and market, especially
in Bangkok?
Yeah.
So yeah, it's very heavily saturated.
There's not a lack of cafes, that's for sure, I guess.
But for us, yeah, as we kind of open our business, we, good business always fulfills a need.
And I believe that good products sell themselves.
So Russ at LMA, so we really strive to just be unique.
We really try to just do excellence in all of our products.
So we kind of have a saying, if it's okay, we don't want it.
Like we don't believe in like things that just taste okay or that look okay.
We only want awesome.
It doesn't like make us go like, wow, oh, that's really great.
Then just like we throw it out.
We don't want to be a part of it.
So we do have like traditional kind of items, but we really want them at a high standard.
So to an extent, the products, I believe when done well, they'll sell themselves to an extent.
And there's that organic word of mouth from that.
But for La Mesa, we also really want it to create just like a sense of community, a sense
of fun, a cafe.
One of the purposes that it fulfills is just like a place to be, a place to connect with
others, a place to work, a place to escape.
So our cafe is kind of like interior, it's really bright, it's really inviting.
It's a place that you feel like you want to hang out in for quite a while.
We have like a unique design intake.
So it's inspired by my home state of New Mexico.
So it's really like photogenic, it's really Instagramable is what people might say.
So that attracts people on its own.
People want to come initially maybe some people want to come initially for that.
But creating a positive experience is going to get those returning customers.
And I think that that's been just a key to its growth and success.
What advice would you give other food and beverage type businesses if the market seems
sort of like saturated?
Yeah, you know, sometimes well just asking yourself, yeah, is your business, is your
product needed?
If it is over saturated, if there's not a need, then that's definitely a problem.
But looking for the area of service.
So there are, Bangkok as a whole has a lot of cafes.
We're kind of in a unique area in Bang Na, definitely open four years ago.
We are quite rare, especially the size of our cafe.
There weren't really things in our end of Sukhumvit and in lower Bang Na.
So I think that if you see something, you feel like it's a little oversaturated, you
know, you might look for an area that isn't offering these services yet.
Now, Mr. Gary, we understand you were just in a local coffee making competition.
Is that correct?
Can you describe what type of competition it was and what it was like competing in this
type of environment?
Yeah, yeah.
So in the world, we do what we call like specialty coffee.
So for those of you in like Thailand, you think of like, what is it, like the Nescafé
packets, or like for me, I'm a little old.
But like in America, we have Folgers coffee.
This is what we call like first wave coffee, or like coffee is mainly seen as a drug, wasn't
it tastes good.
And then there was like a second wave of coffee where people started to take about taste a
little more.
Starbucks is kind of like the big go ahead from this.
But a lot of flavor things are artificial and not a lot of repeatable approaches to
the coffee.
But now, especially coffee, we call this like the third wave of coffee, where every aspect
from the seed all the way to the customer's cup, we approach it as a fine art and science.
So we can use repeatable measurable results.
So like we know we're getting what we want.
So like now, like the day and age, like if you know someone that's like, I'm really
into specialty coffee, they're a nerd, just so you know.
This is like, this is like, they're a nerd.
They love like science, chemistry numbers, they're like geeking out.
So all that could say this that like in the specialty coffee realm, there's basically
like coffee Olympics is like an easy way to explain it where there's all these categories
that you can compete in locally in your country to go on to worlds.
So I recently competed in the air press competition.
And it's this specific brewing device, where people from all over the world will compete
locally to use this one device and are given like a secret coffee, they have to create
a recipe for and then go to compete with others.
So here in Thailand, we had I was one of 99 contestants and I had to come up with like
a special brew recipe.
You also work a bit with like the chemical makeup of your water for that, like the temperature,
all these little variables to make your cup unique and special.
So the day of the competition, I made pretty far I went to like the semi finals.
And the arrow press is really cool because it blends several kind of coffee brewing techniques
together into one.
So it's by nature really fun and creative.
It's an American invention, like guy that created the like Whammo frisbee invented this.
Yeah, so it's like a fun invention.
So for my competition, I had like a bit of performance is common for people to like dress
up in a costume in the past, like people gone is like Pokemon or unicorns or something.
So my team, we kind of like we went kind of like borrowed out a little bit all together.
And then in my recipe, I have like a routine about coffee meditation and true flavor room
of beginning with us.
So you need like a meditative time to prepare for a coffee.
And then yeah, I did like a one handed push up press in it.
So yeah, maybe I can show you guys a little later what we did there.
But it was a lot of fun and different things.
But the taste in the cup was what matters the most and having fun.
So I did really well.
I didn't win.
But it was a really great experience.
Okay, Mr. Gary, while you were at this coffee Olympics, nervous like at all?
You know, it's just the first experience for me.
So later on, I'd love to see this more my team kind of compete in some more environments.
So for me as I'm American, Thai is not my first language.
So I was a little little nervous a bit just about like, Oh, yeah, am I going to not hear
something that was said this kind of things is a big environment, but overall, not that
not that nervous, I guess, you know, I was practice I was prepared.
It was overall just like really fun, a little bit of anxiety just that it all is in my second
language.
But I felt comfortable with that.
And yeah, I hope to do something like it again.
You said you were you went all the way through the semifinals, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Were you happy with the outcome?
Yeah, yeah, it was really, really great experience.
It's the way that I the recipe that I came up with for the competition, just kind of
like I said, my cafe, I want to do something that most people didn't do.
So there's past world championships, you know, you're able to I did a lot of like I said,
basically, I'm a geek, I'm a nerd, I really nerded out on my training for it and kind
of a prep.
But I wanted to create something that was a different recipe than what's one worlds
in the past.
So in this case, that didn't work out for me, apparently, the guy that won the Thailand
competition, his recipe was more kind of what you've seen in the past is like a champion
winning cup.
So yeah, I mean, I can show you guys some of that later on different variables of like,
yeah, how many filters are you using the grind size of brew time, there's like how much agitation,
how much pressure stress are you putting the coffee through.
So my brew method, it looked very intense.
Like I said, I do a one handed push up, but it's actually very gentle.
So my process, I did as little agitation to the brewing process as possible.
And I really was striving to bring out kind of like light notes from the coffee had like
really natural linchy and like light great notes.
And I want to bring those out and like a soft smooth but yet like bold way.
And that's a little different than what like people probably also did.
So it did well in like early rounds, maybe because it was different.
That was kind of my hope was that the judges are kind of subjective in this competition,
you know, given points that it's kind of like point like we like this one.
So so early on, it just has to kind of stand out a bit.
And I think that it did that.
But then yeah, maybe later on, you know, the best cup wins.
So I'll have to just try again next time.
Really judging on the flavor or are they really judging on how you made it?
Yeah, they're judging on the flavor.
So and it's a the judges are like they're certified judges.
So these are people that are like certified coffee judges and they do a blind tasting.
So my routine was quite intense and really like people went crazy.
Like when I did it, you know, no one knew that I basically like stood up on the table.
It's like we were kind of here right now.
I'm like going to make coffee.
But I just like hop on the table and do one handed push up using a chair.
So like what is happening?
The first time they had no idea what was going on, so the crowd kind of like went wild in
a way that I wasn't expecting.
I just like didn't think about the reaction, what I was about to do.
But so for the judges, they couldn't look that they were blind.
They're kind of like facing the other direction, but they could hear all this having behind
them.
They're like, what is Gary up to?
What's going on there?
Building excitement.
Yeah, you don't get any like bonus points and other other barista competitions.
You're given points off of your presentation, different things, but like, and this doesn't
matter at all.
Out of curiosity, you said there was a team that dressed up like Pokemon, right?
In the past, I think people have gone as like Pokemon.
Do you remember what coffee they made?
Well, it's the competition coffee.
Everyone has to use the same one.
Are you interested in doing that?
Perhaps.
Everyone is like a different Pokemon.
That'd be really cool.
So moving on from that, we've seen you have connected with some coffee farmers and producers
here in Thailand.
What kind of projects or connections have you been able to make with the growers?
One of the things that I just love about specialty coffee in Thailand is that it's a really close
knit community.
So Thailand is really unique since it has a consumer culture.
Like we drink a lot of coffee in Thailand, but then also we're a country that produces
coffee.
And to be honest, this is rare in the world, especially to our scale.
So my wife and I, we got into coffee because of connections with rural villages up north.
Originally doing like medical missions and medical projects in Hill tribes is how we
first learned about coffee on the ag side.
So it's been a big kind of passion of ours for a long time.
And as a specialty coffee shop, you always have a very close relationship to the farm
and to the producer.
So yeah, since COVID is kind of ending now, we're looking at re-engaging into just like
some farming communities again and directly working alongside of them to help them be
able to improve the quality of their coffee and really bring out some like unique flavors
and profiles.
I brought some coffees from the same region today that use two different we call like
processes.
One's just like a wash process, which is like the typical way that you would process coffee.
So we did a project to help them build some drying beds where you like dry out the coffee
so that they can helpfully be able to produce more unique processes.
And from that, they can sell them for at like a higher price.
So yeah, it's really exciting to just see these things happening in Thailand.
It happens and just like a really close knit way because yeah, we're only about two hours
in theory from a farm.
You know, it takes me an hour to fly up north, right?
And then some cases an hour drive of a mountain, boom, we could be at a coffee farm, right?
So there's a sort of green coffee bean harvest.
How could people like improve their quality of that harvest?
Yeah, so there's so many, you know, coffee is a fruit and it is a grown product.
So there's just a lot of unseen factors and what can happen to coffee.
So what we did in our project was the coffee as fruit has like an outer pulp and then the
inside that we eat as coffee is we call it like the cherry or it's the pit.
If you think of it compared to like another fruit, it would be like the pit, like a mangosteen
or a balanchy, something like this.
So and then that's set out to dry and after that's dry, it's roasted.
So during that time, there's just a lot of things that can go wrong.
There's a lot of things you can control to get kind of unique flavors.
There's to control fermentation and all of that.
If you're keeping it free from pests, you know, outside forces, there's a lot of ways
to bring out really unique flavors and tastes.
The approaches that we use in the coffee industry, they're very similar to what will be used
like the wine industry, right?
Because grapes are also like a organic product that you're using and you're finding factors
to manipulate it, to control, yeah, to get the results that you want.
So yeah, really cool time.
And yeah, you can check out on our page.
We're sharing a bit this week.
Coming up is International Coffee Day, actually October 1st International Coffee Day.
And a lot of it is focused on the like circular economy of coffee, of yeah, how we're all
connected from that, even as a customer supporting local coffee shops.
You're always going to be giving back more to the local economy and that increases exponentially
for the village as well.
Wait, you said coffee was a fruit?
I thought it was a bean.
Well, yeah, it's a fruit.
Yeah.
So looking at coffee kind of raw on a tree, it'll look like a cranberry maybe to you.
So it's a fruit.
Yeah, yeah.
And once they're ripe, they turn kind of bright red.
Looks like, yeah, very, yeah, very kind of Christmassy.
So it'll be like bright red on like a dark green leaves.
And then once the coffee's dried out completely, we call those, like you said, the green coffee.
And the green coffee is what's then sent to roasters to roast.
And it's only after coffee is roasted that it turns brown.
Mr. Gary, we all know that every industry will face some changes sooner or later, right?
Right, right.
Now, so if you're looking into the near future, what changes or challenges would you envision
in the coffee industry will have like, OK, let's break it down to three areas, right?
The producer level, the roaster level and the retail level.
Like, what kind of changes or challenges do you expect?
Oh, man.
Well, that's a very big question.
So one thing that is just like a big challenge in the world, you know, is climate change.
Climate change has a major effect on the coffee industry.
So one of the things that one reason why we have such a strong emphasis on helping villages
is because there's estimated like a global coffee shortage.
I remember the number in my head, but there's like a coffee crisis at hand.
Technically.
Do you know about you know the time frame by any chance?
No, I don't.
But that's something 12 years.
Yeah, something like in I forget what 15 years there's no more coffee, something like this.
So yeah, there's a lot of crisis.
The alarmist out there.
Right, right.
So this is based off of major producing countries.
So a lot of countries that are right.
Yeah, like Brazil, these places where they're producing coffee at a really high scale.
The villages that we work with, we call them micro coffee producers, micro coffee farmers,
but from pesticides, different things, you know, climate change.
Last year, the coffee crop in Thailand was really affected from all this rain that we're
having.
So all of this, yeah, is just makes things very challenging.
I think across the board, one thing that we're going to see is just what we've talked about
is the coffee community coming together to help one another all the more.
So I think that for the producer, that's really going to be key for them is having that relationship
where people are already investing, they're getting money up front to be able to help
their community to be able to help their crop for the future.
And then same for us, where we know kind of come up ahead that we have good quality coffee
coming in our way because we've directly been a part of its production.
We've got some good news for the ICS community.
Our first semester break is just over a week ahead.
It'd be a great time to relax and have fun.
Make sure you clear out any leftover homework you may have and stay safe, everybody.
We are back with part two of our coffee talk with Mr. Gary from La Mesa Coffee.
For part two, we will be breaking from our normal format.
We want to provide you with something just a little bit different.
We have a lot of coffee experience sitting in our studio today, so we will be making
coffee for you, our listeners.
Now unfortunately, we cannot push the aroma or the cup of coffee through your speakers.
However, we will be bringing you the next best thing.
So sit back, relax and enjoy the sounds of coffee.
Cheers.
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sounds exciting
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ソリ、ソリ、ソリ。
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Please stay tuned for more episodes about exciting and engaging topics.
As always, this podcast would not be possible without the hard work and support of our International
Student Production Team.
All music and sound effects are courtesy of Pixabay.com, a vibrant community of creatives
sharing copyright-free images, videos, and music.
And we're signing off until next time.
We're Students Incorporated because your voice matters.