“I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to run a shop that was considered a third space,” Skyler Balta says. All her life, the 26-year-old says, she had obsessed over creating an informal social space where people can gather, one separate from the arenas of home or work.
The Pike High School grad wasn’t sure how to make that dream happen until she took a job at Bee Coffee Roasters, a longstanding java spot at 5510 Lafayette Rd. owned by Indy coffee groundbreaker Bj Davis. After two decades running retail shops, Davis was ready to dial her business back to wholesale bean sales, and at the same time, Balta says, “I realized that the back of the whole shop was storage. I started thinking, ‘Maybe we could do something here and make a space that people could come and spend time in.”
By the time Davis was ready to put the business up for sale, Balta says she had understood “how many people came, how long people had been coming, and how much it meant to them. And I realized that if I could just keep it open, I’d be doing something for the community.”
“I knew it was a gamble,” Balta says, “but I knew that if I put my full time and effort into the cafe, then maybe we could make it work.” In 2022, she changed the business name to Gaia Cafe and Botanical and, with wife and coworker Allison Gauck, started to remake the shop to fit her vision.
That means many things, like coffee drinks made with beans prepared in Bee’s 1953-vintage roaster, remain. “I’m so glad we could buy from the original roaster so we could keep the flavor the same,” Balta says. Other things, like a vast selection of house-mixed teas, are new. “I believe in a lot of Eastern and herbal medicine,” Balta says. “So I tried to bring in stuff that I felt like would give health to the community,” such as brews designed to ease digestion.
“If people find a variety that works for them, they can mix and match it, and we’ll make their tea to take home. I want people to benefit from us, not just have something to buy.”
This year, Balta hopes to add gluten-free baked goods to the mix and to take over a nearby space to make a small collective farm. “We have one community-funded garden project out here,” Balta says, “but it’s not for the people.”
“Coffee is just the touchpoint,” Balta says, a spark bringing people together in our divided world. Still, she’s worried about a future in a state headed increasingly to the right—but Gaia might be the way through that, too. “Smaller minded people are always the loudest ones, but the community we’re building here can be loud, too. I like it here. Those people, with their weird or scary opinions, aren’t going to scare us away. Eagle Creek has our backs.”
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