Rust Is Gold / Motorcycle Destinations

Motorcycles are definitely one of the most beautiful ways to see the world. Along the way, riders always seem to find the most curvy roads, the best restaurants, the coldest beer, and the most interesting destinations. And I've learned that the best way to find them is to simply ask the rider. That's why I asked over 750,000 of you who follow me on social media to cast your vote on the absolute best. This is Motorcycle Destinations. All right, we have made a stop here at the beautiful Rust and Gold Coffee, and I had a great ride in with my friend CJ from the Law Tigers. I'm CJ Rodden from Law Tigers. I represent the state of New Mexico. Steve and Tyson run probably the coolest coffee shop I've ever been in. When Adam Sandoval was coming to New Mexico to do some filming for the Motorcycle Destinations, I thought it was a really good fit. And I know that the Motorcycle Destination website is going to have a very broad reach. So if people are traveling through New Mexico, they're looking for a fun stop, they want to grab a cup of coffee on their way, take some time out, check their email, stretch their legs, get off the bike, this is a great stop for it. First walking into the building, I was instantly overwhelmed with the beautiful aroma of coffee. Oh, it smells good in here. And let me introduce you to Adam Sandoval. It wasn't until we got here that I realized I had actually met Steve Mays before because, well, he was doing a movie project where he was making a motorcycle movie, and he asked me if he could use some of my footage. This is just one of my favorite coffee spots, you know. We come here and we partner a lot with the shop. The last Sunday of every month, we do a moto meetup. Vespas to flat trackers to cafe racers to Harleys. I mean, you name it, we get them all. No brand snugs. No, no, everybody loves everything around here. We have a great podcast, Russ's World Racing Podcast. What do you cover on your podcast? We try and do mostly motorcycle stuff, but we end up getting a lot of cool stuff like photographers that do like moto photography, coffee, people that are like into roasting and have coffee shops. And now do you video them and audio or just audio? We do have a YouTube channel also where we kind of just like film the shenanigans, the racing, the build, all the ups and downs. So coffee and racing. It kind of goes hand in hand. They do. I mean, surprisingly. So yeah, yeah. Show me what you got going on. So how old is the machine like this? So this, this actually is about 10 to 15 years old. In comparison to like the modern espresso machines that you probably see today that are all digital. They're like fully programmed. They do all the things for you. So they're like steaming and pouring your shots. This is more of like traditional coffee shop style though. And this is basically like if you're looking at this machine, it's almost like a carbureted motorcycle. It's like a fuel injector. You pull your own shot, you steam your own milk. Kind of like you would have expected back in the day. Can you show us how this machine works? Yeah, totally. While looking at the tour of the kitchen where they're making all the coffee and all the drinks, you realize that coffee is really a science. The first time I had a Cubano, I was like blown away. It was New York and in this Cuban restaurant. I was like, this is, this is different. It's not like your grandpa's coffee. And what we're going to do is like half a shot. And this is what you would call like a traditional espresso drink. And you're going to fill it up with a little bit of brown sugar halfway through. So what it's going to do is it's going to take the bitterness out of this coffee shot. What you want to do is fill the rest of it up. You're layering it in the middle. Exactly. And this is our own special espresso called Fifth Gear. Can I buy them online? You absolutely can. Where do I get those? Rustisgoldcoffee.com. If you want to try our coffee, we have it online. You can order espresso, our own roasted coffee because we roast our own coffee. We've got shirts and mugs and gloves and beanies and hats and all kinds of cool stuff that are branded either Rustisgold Racing or Rustisgold Coffee. So you can check out the site. So the next thing you want to do is you want to put your shot in the espresso machine itself. And what you're looking for when you're pouring your shot is you want that nice kind of crema look. See how it's got like that caramel with darkness with a light. And basically just tap it out. We're going to steam our milk and we're going to use a little bit of half and half. And what you want to do is get that nice swirl. Can you show me exactly what this is? It's pushing steam. Just hot air. It's pushing hot steam through this. Wow. And what that's doing is that's and I'm basically going to pour it in like so. Oh, that looks delicious. So this should not be bitter. It shouldn't be bitter. Which is what I'm used to in espresso. So it should be a little bit of a bitter but mostly the sweet. That's really good. This is something I will order over and over again. This is not what I thought a cubano coffee was. Yeah. The trick is making sure they know how to make it. Yeah, maybe I just was getting well paid. Not everyone knows how to make a traditional cubano. That's phenomenal. I absolutely love the cubano coffee. It was so good. It was like thick and frothy. Delicious. It didn't have that bitter bite. It's truly a unique coffee that now I'm going to be hunting all over the country. This is Merle. Not quite as handsome or pretty as Pearl. But it works just as well. I disagree. I think I like Merle better. Yeah, he's got some character to him, you know. If I was a coffee machine, I would be more like Merle. A little rough around the edges. Yeah, for sure. Very cool. All right, so show us around your facility. Sure. So this is kind of like our coffee garage. This is our workspace. Oh, we have a lot of matos around here. This one is like one of our most important that our customer is going to pick out of. My kind of joint. Yeah, that's an important one. It is an important one. We've got Kenny Roberts in the house. So we always have a bunch of like mugs and we roast our own coffee and bag our own coffee. Steve, our graphic designer, works pretty hard at all of our logos. So we have all of our merch. We collect a lot of old school like Americana stuff too. Gas pumps, oil cans. We're also selling like vintage vinyl these days, which is kind of cool. Some Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix. 60s and 70s fans. Some stray cats. Willie Nelson. He's like Willie. John Cash, my favorite. Buck Owens. You know, this is more like the traditional like Rockabilly style. Wait, you got like a movie screen up there, I noticed. Yeah, so we show MotoGP, which we're in the middle of the season right now. Saturday nights we show motocross. We're also motocross fans. We're big fans of Jason Anderson. He's a local kind of hometown hero and he's racing professional motocross. We like to watch his races here. So I love this. So you're not the coffee shop where you go and you bury yourself in your phone and answer emails. This is a coffee shop where you go and you share the love of motorcycles with other people. This is more like we have a motto, basically three pillars, right? I was in the Marine Corps and we have like... You're a Marine? Former, yeah. Thank you for my freedom, brother. Yeah, you're welcome. So, you know, in the Marine Corps we have three pillars. Honor, courage, commitment. Here at the coffee shop we have coffee, motorcycles, and community. So, you know, you got to live by something. Code, more or less. And those are, that's our code. Community. So we do a lot of fundraisers here. So the barista picks out a benefit of their choice. And then every three months they donate the proceeds from that to a donor. Being kind of a DIY shop, one of the other things that Steve and I like to do is build out a bike, raffle it off, and then again, part of the portions of that proceeds will go to another charity. And this is what you're building on now? This is what we're working on now. What are we looking at here? We're looking at a Royal Enfield. This is called the Bullet. It's about $490. You know, just a real basic kind of bike. Single cylinder, kick starter. What year? This is, I believe, a 97, 98. Oh, wow. It looks older than that. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of got the hardtail look and everything. We're just going through everything and going to get this kind of road worthy, paint it up, make it look real pretty. And then again, we're going to raffle this bike off and give the money to a charity we found. I love this nacelle. Yeah. Are these the blinkers in the front of the nacelle? That's factory? Yeah, yeah. In the 90s? Yeah, yeah. Wow. The Royal Enfield brand is just a really traditional brand. They are vintage. There's nothing crazy about them. I mean, I think just recently in the last two years, they've grown a bunch. We can take a look back here at the garage if you guys want. The coffee's great. The atmosphere is great. But one of the things that stood out to me most about this coffee shop is when they brought me back into the garage. I mean, how often do you walk into a coffee shop and have wrenches and tools? I mean, what do we got here? We got flat discs hanging on the wall of a coffee shop? These are definitely my kind of people. So this is our kind of ever-changing garage. And the reason I say that is there's not many bikes in here right now. You know, we usually have about two to three race bikes. Yeah. I got to ask you, were you part of making this movie, Caffeine and Gasoline? Yeah, I mean, uh... Just your partner or both of you? Yeah, you'll meet my business partner, Steve, here in a second. My name's Steve Mays. M-A-E-S is my last name. We've been doing this now for about three years. Yeah, Tyson had this great idea of starting a motorcycle-themed coffee shop. How could I say no? He was the brains behind the documentary process, and he wanted to kind of film Caffeine Racers, you know, the history of it and the lineage. You know, the movie came about six years ago, we started. And through that process, I know Tyson had been to a couple of cool coffee shops on the West Coast and on the East Coast, one that we bought. There's nothing like that around here in the Southwest, especially in New Mexico. So Tyson was like, you know, let's look into it. Let's see what it takes. Hey, you know, it makes perfect sense to come over here, you know, take a little bit of time, explore the coffee shop, kind of see what these guys are doing and, you know, see how they're giving back to the community and see how they're such an integral part of our community. All in all, I'm glad to have such a great relationship with a company like Law Tigers because they have men and women just like CJ in over 30 states across America. And these guys, they do nothing but support the local motorcycle community just like we're doing right here today at this coffee shop. Rust is Gold Coffee Shop, New Mexico. If you're riding across the state, take some time, come over here, meet some interesting people and drink some delicious coffee. And I'm going to see if I get them to make me one more of these before we go. If you want to find more unique places you should be riding your motorcycle, go over to MotorcycleDestinations.com.