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Specialty Coffee Archives - Page 21 of 40 - The Curb Kaimuki

In Cyclist Mecca Girona, La Fábrica Is A Bike Cafe For Everyone

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La Fábrica Girona Spain

La Fábrica Girona Spain

The commingling of coffee and cycling has been documented assiduously here, there, and everywhere. For the pros, caffeine is a legal, globally accessible performance booster. For those of a more athleisurist bent, cafes and bicycles offer a gentle, seated opportunity to take in the world while still getting a dose of vim and vigor.

These circumstances were surely relevant to the founding of La Fábrica Girona. It helped, too, that the business filled a major market gap in Girona, a city in Catalonia, some 60 miles north of Barcelona. Having little to no specialty coffee or breakfast and brunch culture is not unusual for smaller-town Spain, but it must have disappointed Girona’s growing international crowd. That includes professional cyclists—many of whom have, like Lance Armstrong, been sojourners, taking advantage of the dry weather, tranquil roads, and varied terrain—along with culinary travelers building trips around a precious reservation at the tri-Michelin-starred El Celler De Can Roca, and more recently, fans of Game (and Gay) of Thrones, the sixth season of which was filmed at spots across Girona.

La Fábrica Girona Spain

And yet, a more personal matter urged the March 2015 opening of the pioneering specialty coffee enterprise. It was the commingling of its owners. When Christian and Amber Meier arrived in 2008 from their native Canada, he was on a professional cycling contract. After the couple married in 2010, they decided to settle in Girona permanently. The years went by, Christian Meier did a Tour de France in 2014, among other races with impressive results, and Amber grew tired of playing expat housewife.

She recalls her frustration, saying to him: “I don’t want to have to resent you for living your passion, so I’ll go back to Canada and we’ll do long-distance.”

Christian demurred and proposed the idea of establishing their very own watering hole. After all, they met at a cafe in Metro Vancouver, where she worked and he was a customer, and they had been pining for comfort foods and drinks.

“There was nothing,” Amber remembers of Girona back then. “We lived here for so long, and maybe two or three times a week, [we’d realize]: ‘Oh, I wish we could go for a coffee. I wish we could go for brunch.’”

But, she stresses: “The reason we opened La Fábrica is because I needed something to do. It was never about the money. It was never about success. It was just: I want something to do a few hours a day while my husband is out cycling.”

La Fábrica Girona Spain

Christian and Amber Meier

Intended or not, their success is surging. Christian, once on the road 170 days a year, has since retired, nowadays channeling the focus of a competitive athlete into roasting for their own label, called Approachable Coffee. Amber, who is approachableness personified, manages much of the daily operations with equal parts meticulousness and merriness.

Open daytime hours from 9am to 3pm, La Fábrica offers dining options in sol y sombra: outside at tables arranged on a landing between steps, visitors can take in sun; inside, the converted carpenter’s workshop provides a cool, stone-walled sanctuary. With a tire pump at the door and a basket of borrowable cable locks, the peloton is welcome, though, the Meiers emphasize, non-cyclists are, too.

Toasties and artisanal pastries are par for the course, but so are bagels and breakfast bowls. The kaleidoscopic spread of tropical fruits surrounding violet sugar-topped yoghurt must be the most edigrammable breakfast on the Iberian Peninsula.

La Fábrica Girona Spain

The espresso machine is a two-group Rocket R8. While the brand is less common in commercial settings, it is no coincidence that the company’s founder, Andrew Meo, is a former pro cyclist and someone the Meiers call a friend. The Compak grinder holds one Approachable Coffee roast at a time—a “people-pleaser,” according to Amber, that works well alone or with dairy. Ask for a café con leche, a cappuccino, or a flat white, and you get the same double-shot of espresso with foamed fresh milk. Order a café amb gel—espresso poured over ice as Catalonians traditionally do it—and you get instead a cold brew because Christian hates the thought of his flavor profiles being shocked on the rocks.

Remarks Amber: “In the nicest way possible, we’ve wrecked coffee for a lot of people because now they can’t drink it anywhere other than here or Espresso Mafia.”

La Fábrica Girona Spain

La Fábrica Girona Spain
Her reference is to the Meiers’ second cafe, which opened in March 2017. For all of La Fábrica’s Middle-earth coziness, Espresso Mafia, which is a two-minute walk away, sparkles in a Pearly Gates palette. Its whiteness with metallic accents simultaneously index the place’s designation as, in Amber’s words, “the experimental laboratory.” Of its branding, “we could’ve done a little bit more research into the sensitivity of the word ‘mafia,’” she admits. “A couple people don’t like the name, but you learn and you move forward.”

Here a custom two-group Sanremo Cafe Racer and two Victoria Arduino Mythos One grinders facilitate the serving of up to five different coffees. Menu highlights are a tasting flight, cascara, and summertime nitro. Open til 7 PM most weeknights and an hour later Fridays and Saturdays, it attracts aficionados as well as the spandex set.

La Fábrica Girona Spain

La Fábrica Girona Spain

When not kitted and cleated himself, Christian is regularly found next door, where he roasts green beans from Falcon Coffees and Mare Terra on a 15-kilo Joper. Approachable Coffee’s wholesale business is expanding, notably in Barcelona. The most like-spirited venue so far seems to be specialty coffee-serving bike rental shop On Y Va, whose French name means, most aptly, “Let’s go!”

La Fábrica is located at Carrer de la Llebre 3, Girona. Visit their official website and follow them on Instagram.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge.

The post In Cyclist Mecca Girona, La Fábrica Is A Bike Cafe For Everyone appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Wize Monkey Is Coffee Tea, But Not THAT Coffee Tea

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As Tea Week comes to a close here on Sprudge, we’re going ease ourselves back into robust coffee coverage (don’t want to pull a hammy, y’know), and there is no greater middle ground than coffee tea.

Coffee tea is nothing new to the specialty coffee world. Normally, its comes in the form of cascara, made by steeping dried coffee cherries—a byproduct of coffee production—to create a sweet, pipe-tobacco-like flavored tisane. But there’s a new product entering the market offering a new take on coffee tea. Made from the leaves of the coffee tree, Wize Monkey is rethinking coffee tea and hoping to provide a windfall for producers and pickers during the non-harvesting season.

For their lightly caffeinated product, the Vancouver-based Wize Monkey is working with Finca La Aurora, a coffee farm in Matagalpa, Nicaragua run by the Ferrufino family—the son, Enrique Ferrufino, is one of the co-founders of Wize Monkey along with Arnaud Petitvallet and Max Rivest—who have been producing specialty-grade coffee for three generations. After the three-month coffee harvest ending in March, Finca La Aurora lets the trees rest through the remainder of spring in order to regenerate for the next season. Then starting in June and lasting through fall, leaves are harvested from tree trimmings already being done to maximize the coffee harvest, ensuring the new product doesn’t disrupt the health of the primary income.

The leaves are then processed on-site in a method Petitvallet describes as similar to that of oolong, containing “notes of honey, hazelnut, some earthy layers, and happens to blend very well with all sorts of flavors without overpowering them.” Having sampled a few of their offerings, Wize Monkey’s coffee leaf tea is indeed a very mild beverage with a light, honey-like sweetness. It lends itself especially well to their Earl Grey, where the tea has a chocolatiness that lets the bergamot take center stage.

More than just an added revenue stream for the farm owners—which coffee leaf tea most certainly is—Wize Monkey is wanting to create a positive effect for the coffee pickers as well. Many of the people doing the actual coffee picking are migrant workers, traveling from farm to farm during the different harvesting seasons in order to make enough money to survive. This nomadic lifestyle can be especially hard on the children, who travel with the parents, rendering them unable to stay in one place long enough to attend school. According to Wize Monkey, by extending the work season from three months to something closer to nine, families are more able to establish roots. Petitvallet tells Sprudge that Wize Monkey current employs 100 people to harvest coffee leaves.

Looking forward, Petitvallet, Rivest, and Ferrufino are eyeing different processing methods—currently a “green” and a “black” tea are in the works—to be used both in limited quantity micro-lots and in their blends.

Wize Monkey coffee leaf tea currently has eight flavor options—original, earl grey, mango party, sunset chai, ginger lemon, strawberry hibiscus, minty marvel, and jasmine—that are available both in bags and as loose leaf. Their products can be found in grocers like Gelson’s, Sprouts, Mother’s Market, and Whole Foods as well as online via Amazon and their webstore.

For more information on Wize Monkey coffee leaf tea, visit their official website.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top image via Wize Monkey

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Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Wize Monkey Is Coffee Tea, But Not THAT Coffee Tea appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

The Tea Room’s Important Role In Turn Of The Century Feminism

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Coffee houses have a long and noted history for being hot beds for new and radical ideas. The home of the intellectual and the revolutionary alike, the coffee house was home to the free exchange of ideas amongst the people (much to the chagrin of those in power). But it’s Tea Week on Sprudge, and so we must ask: what of the tea room? According to an article in JStor Daily, the tea room was no less revolutionary and in many ways were hotbeds of late-19th/early-20th century radical feminism.

At the turn of the century, women in America and parts of Europe weren’t allowed to dine out unaccompanied by a man, if they were even allowed into the establishment at all. Without gathering places to go and socialize, women of the time often found themselves relegated to sit at home alone. But they came up with an ingenious solution: turn sections of their houses into tea rooms, creating places for women to dine out.

It wasn’t just room in their homes, though. According to the article, women “rented or borrowed barns, old houses, and grist mills to serve as makeshift tea rooms.” In them, proprietors would serve tea (most of the time) and a variety of light fare, a contrast from the heavy, meat-and-potatoes dominated menus of the male-catering establishments. Things like fruit and vegetable salads, finger sandwiches, waffles, and toasts were common on the hand-written menus. (So basically a menu that would not be out of place in today’s Instagram cafes.)

Tea rooms were more than just places for socializing, though. They also served as a means for women to earn an income. Per the article, “unlike many occupations, feeding people and presiding as hostesses were accepted ways for women to enter the workforce, since these tasks felt a lot like what they’d been doing all along, without pay.”

Tea rooms soon became a symbol of independent women. From the article’s author Cara Strickland:

As a young girl, I read books like the Nancy Drew mysteries—the characters were always popping into tea rooms for lunch. To a modern reader, tea rooms conjured visions of crumpets and china, but when the books were published (the first in 1930), mentioning a tea room was meant to communicate to the reader that Nancy and her friends were independent women who could eat out without a man to escort them. While most women think nothing of dining out without a man now, tea rooms played a major role in bringing about this phenomenon.

The effects of the tea room are still felt in the modern dining scene, where common table items like flowers and candles all trace their roots back the “home idea” trend popular in tea rooms. While coffee houses may be better known as the birthplaces of radical ideas, tea houses were literal homes of revolution.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top image via JStor Daily

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Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post The Tea Room’s Important Role In Turn Of The Century Feminism appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Limited Edition Sprudge Tea Week Merch

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Welcome to Sprudge Shop Spotlights, a new weekend series in which we highlight our very favorite items currently available in the ever-changing, fast-moving, utterly bespoke Sprudge Shop. Now shipping worldwide, featuring unique artist and brand collaborations from around the planet. Enjoy!

It’s Tea Week presented by Breville USA, huzzah! A whole week of content dedicated to the wide wonderful world of Camelia sinensis (and yes, also a few lovely tisanes). What good is a themed week of content without some fun merch to back it up? For a limited time we are carrying special Tea Week merch over at the Sprudge Shop! Get your hands on pin-packs and tees and save 15% off your whole order using promo code TEAWEEK.

Pin Packs

Just in time for spring, these delicious looking pastel pins tell the world how you really feel. “Actually, It’s A Tisane,” “Tea Drunk,” and “Tea Is Good” will tell the world hey, I like tea, alright?

T-Shirts

This charming “Tea Is Good” tee comes in sizes small, medium, large, and extra large in a fashionable vintage kelly green. Quantities are stupid limited, so don’t stall on ordering—this is a highly allocated limited edition Tea Week shirt drop the likes of which you’ve never seen.

Head over to the Sprudge Shop immediately! Enjoy $5 flat-rate shipping for US domestic orders so order a ton of stuff! It’s only five bucks! And remember to use promo code TEAWEEK to save 15% off your whole order.

Happy steeping friends!

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Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Limited Edition Sprudge Tea Week Merch appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

For A Long Heathy Life, Tea Is Key

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It’s Tea Week here on Sprudge, which means we’re turning our attention to the wide world of Camellia sinensis and beyond for a weeklong deep-steep of coffee’s leafy counterpart. This includes News Wire, Sprudge’s daily hard-hitting coverage of coffee news from around the world, which will spending the next five days scouring the internet for the best tea stories going.

But we’re going to ease into Tea Week here on Wire, with a story oh so familiar to coffee news readers, but with some of the names changed.

TEA! It’s the key to long life! Specifically green tea. In a recent article in the New York Post, red wine, salty snacks, and none other than green tea are espoused by The Longevity Solution authors Dr. Jason Fung and James DiNicolantonio as a recipe for living to an advanced age.

To reach these conclusions, Fung—a nephrologist—and DiNicolantonio—a doctor of pharmacology—look to blue zones, “areas of the world with the longest living populations,” for clues, one of them being Okinawa, Japan. Their research yielded some fairly standard “longevity cures:” don’t eat a lot of meat, animal products like eggs and cheese, or processed foods; eat vegetables and whole grains; and get your protein from plant-based options like nuts and legumes. But they also had a few suggestions that amount to more than simply, “eat right, dummy.”

One such suggestion was green tea, which Fung says “suppresses the appetite and boosts the metabolism a bit.” The article also notes that “some research suggests that the drink can help ward off cancer,” and the positive health benefits of caffeine have been widely reported here on Sprudge. Fung goes on to suggest drinking it without cream and sugar, because no duh. If your goal is to be healthy, adding milk fat and sweet, sweet empty calories ain’t it. Instead, opt for—and this is Sprudge speaking here, not Fung—any of these lovely green teas from Japan sourced by Kettl of Brooklyn (we especially like the Ogura Gyokuro) or this beautiful White Dragonwell from San Francisco’s Song Tea. Head on over to Sprudge’s tea buying guide for more tips and suggestions.

The doctors also suggest one to two glasses a wine a day (we have a website for that too!) as well as salty foods for added longevity, and a generally happy life anyway. Because what’s the point of living a long time if you’re eating flavorless food?

As you’ll probably see suggested across Sprudge this week, maybe consider adding a little tea to your daily drinking ritual. Not only is it a whole world of flavor worth exploring with the same passion and rigor as you would coffee, it may also help you live longer. And the longer you live, the more coffee you can drink. Think about it. It’s simple math.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

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Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post For A Long Heathy Life, Tea Is Key appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Welcome To Tea Week—Presented By Breville USA

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Hello and welcome! We are Sprudge, the world’s most popular coffee publication, and for the last decade, we have published stories all about the world of coffee every single week, sometimes two or three or more a day. But this week, if you will so kindly permit us, we’d like to try something a little different.

This week we’re going to run around a dozen or stories about tea. This is Tea Week on Sprudge presented by Breville USA.

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Yes, tea! We really, really love the stuff. But moreover, tea is enjoying a particularly interesting cultural moment right now, as access to better and better quality small lots grows worldwide, and the ancient culture around tea enjoys new interpretations and points of influence. As a beverage and medicinal practice, it is thousands of years old, with roots in mainland China and a cultural footprint across nearly every nation in Asia; and at the same time, it is blowing up right now amongst young people in the all around the world, across social media and Instagram, and at high-end tea shops and coffee bars from Taipei to London to New York.

It has never been easier to have access to great tea, and yet this access is threatened by political forces. Mankind’s fundamental urge to trade openly with other peoples and cultures around the world is under attack by an ugly, virulent resurgence of isolationism and racism. Tea stands against all that—it is both old and new, local and global, a personal practice and yet inherently political—and that’s why we love it so much.

Across these pages, you’ll find stories about tea shops and tea influencers, traders and purveyors, ceramicists and design artists around the world. We’ll explore how tea interacts with graphic design (“Tea Cakes are the New Sneaker Drop“), and travel to Taiwan with one of America’s foremost young tea buyers (“For Song Tea, Sourcing Matters—But It Isn’t Everything“). We offer a series of guides on where to buy delicious tea and how to get started with the stuff you need to make it, from ceramics to home brewers like those offered by our sponsors at Breville USA. We talk to tea shop owners like Elena Liao of New York City’s Té Company and Lina Medvedeva of Floating Mountain, both of whom escaped the corporate world to follow their passions into tea entrepreneurship.

We’re also looking forward to serving you tea in person this week! On Thursday, March 7th and Friday, March 8th we’re throwing the doors open to our HQ in Portland for an open tea service, featuring complimentary teas from around the world (featured in our guides) served in artisan ceramics, along with a hands-on chance to explore Breville USA’s range of tea brewers, kettles and steepers featured in these articles, including the Tea Maker, Tea Maker Compact, Smart Tea Infuser, and IQ Kettle Pure. There will also be yummy tea snacks. Check our Instagram for full details! 

This is our first real crack at writing about tea on Sprudge, and we won’t nearly come close to telling every meaningful story from this deep and fascinating world. We hope to continue writing and reporting on tea in the months and years to come, bringing in more viewpoints and perspectives on the topic along the way. And don’t worry, we still love coffee! Coffee and the global industry around it will always be our main focus here at Sprudge, and we assure you, a great many gallons of coffee were brewed and consumed over the course of writing and researching these stories.

But for this week let’s cast our eyes together on the world of progressive tea in 2019. There’s fascinating stuff happening here, both from a culinary and cultural perspective. Today tea offers a fascinating global culture mash-up for modern drinkers, and there’s never been a better time to fall in love with it.

Happy steeping!

—The Sprudge Team

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Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Welcome To Tea Week—Presented By Breville USA appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Tea Cakes Are The New Sneaker Drops

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The tea cake is nothing new. Compressed tea bricks date back to before the Ming Dynasty, where they were traded along the ancient Tea Horse Road across Tibet, Sichuan, and Yunnan. In modern times tea cakes (called bǐngchá) are most commonly used for Pu’erh teas hailing from Yunnan, though other kinds of tea cakes and tea bricks are produced throughout mainland China.

For more on the history and culture around tea farming and tea cakes in Yunnan, we strongly recommend reading Lisa See’s seminal historic fiction novel “The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane.”

For our purposes today, we want to cast our design eye towards how the tea cake form is being reinterpreted here in 2019. Sprudge has a long tradition of covering innovative packaging and branding, and we’ve been really blown away across the last few months of research by all the cool design work happening across the world of tea. This, too, is of course nothing new—tea cakes have long been a platform for beautiful art and calligraphy. But in 2019 the artistic milieu, as interpreted by a new generation of tea lovers, draws from a global field of influence and inspiration, interpolating the form in wild and vivid colorways. The end result looks every bit as much like something you might find in a hypebeast sneaker shop as you would in a tea bar.

This is just a snippet, a soupçon really, of some of our favorite contemporary tea packaging design work. Gaze upon it and feel covetous urges, yes, but too assured that within such neat design wrappings there be flavors and textures to match the trappings.

Kilogram Tea

Nothing else looks quite like Kilogram Tea of Chicago, whose technicolor art mural boxes stand out at home or on a shelf at a coffee bar. For tea design with the coffee drinker in mind, this is some of our very favorite work.

Kuura

Melbourne tea purveyors Kuura brand themselves as “tea from the future” and from a design and packaging perspective, that about nails it. These are the tea cakes that have most drawn oohs and ahs from office visitors over the last few months, but it’s also worth noting that there’s some quality sourcing work being done here, especially with offerings like their “Ghost” white tea (pictured below). For pure aesthetic joy it’s tough to beat Kuura’s “Prescription Only” raw pu’erh, but be forewarned—this tea is not for the faint of heart or meek of stomach.

Kuura “Prescription Only.”

White2Tea

Inarguably some of the coolest design work in the biz and a staff favorite here at Sprudge, White2Tea sources, prints, and ships out of Yunnan. With vivid colors, punk text, and a design scheme drawing from equal parts pop-art and streetwear, if BAPE and Supreme had a tea-stoned cousin, this would be it.

Crimson Lotus

Crimson Lotus of Seattle walk a fine line, pushing both quality and design aesthetics with feet planted in both the West Coast of the United States and the hills and mountains of Yunnan. Owner duo Glen Bowers and Dawa Lamu source exquisite raw and ripe teas from across the region, focusing only the many teas of Yunnan known colloquially as “pu’erh” (named for a village in the region, kind of like how Chardonnay is named for a village in Burgundy).

Crimson Lotus are big on artist collaborations, which is how you get works like Honeymoon, a Spring 2018 cake designed in collaboration with The Oolong Drunk and artist Stephanie Osborne, or the sci-fi influenced Forgotten Nebula, designed by Jones Pitsker.

Liquid Proust

Vintage and rare tea import savant Andrew Richardson manages Liquid Proust out of his home in Columbus, Ohio—we visit him there elsewhere in our Tea Week coverage. This stunningly minimalist design for his 2018 “Almost” white tea cake release is something we’ve returned to again and again—a subtle white gauze offset by simple block text. Sadly this cake is sold out, but watch Liquid Proust on Instagram for upcoming new releases and limited edition drops.

Bitterleaf Teas

Another collaborative piece, this tea cake wrap from artist Jason Wasserman gives us serious back of the notebook bored in class vibes. We love its evocation of the tea itself—Bitterleaf’s Spring 2018 Limited Yiwu—a raw, powerful tea with many years ahead of it and big-time Year of the Dog cosmic vibes.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.

Photos by Zachary Carlsen and Anthony Jordan III for Sprudge Media Network.


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Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Tea Cakes Are The New Sneaker Drops appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

6 Remarkable Destinations For Tea In New York City

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tea house guide new york city

tea house guide new york city

New York City is often seen as a vanguard of trends, of things to come. It is said, “If you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere.” For a town that is remarkably one dominated by (sometimes excellent) coffee, by an unwavering need for speed, and for a mentality that “time is money,” tea seems to be a beverage that would not survive. But despite all that, within the last 10 years a new generation of teahouses has emerged, bucking these trends and indicating that, amidst all the urban clamor and rat race, there is not only a place but a need for spaces where people can slow down and focus on the meditative act of making tea.

To be clear: I am not talking about the onslaught of now-ubiquitous, trendy, and Instagrammable to-go matcha lattes. These new teahouses purvey directly-sourced, single-farm, hard-to-come-by teas from the far off tea-producing mountains of East Asia. Brewed mindfully and traditionally (whether whisked or steeped), these new teahouses are in themselves a reflection of a growing appreciation in America for a standard of tea that is more commonly found in Kyōto, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, or the mountains of Yunnan or Northern India.

Best of all, while some teas can range in price up to hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars per cup, these shops in New York instead curate focused menus of excellent teas that encourage price-savvy exploration before breaking one’s budget. And with their founders dedicated to educating their clientele, these listed teahouses are the perfect places to navigate the vast world of tea in NYC.

tea house guide new york city

Kettl

Kettl is a tiny jewel box of Japanese tea and teaware in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Located above the locally-renowned Japanese breakfast and ramen joint Okonomi/Yuji Ramen, a journey up a flight of stairs reveals a sparsely-furnished space filled with a wide variety of high-quality loose leaf teas from all corners of Japan. Inspired by travels throughout the Japanese archipelago, owner Zach Mangan imports teas that aren’t often available outside of the regions in which they are produced. This approach to showcasing “local varieties” means that in addition to stocking some of the best sencha, gyokuro, and matcha available in the United States, Kettl also contains exquisite examples of teas even highly versed tea drinkers might never have enjoyed, including single-varietal tamaryokucha (pan-fried, coiled tea produced in Kyūshū), kyo iribancha (late-harvest, deeply-roasted full-leaf tea with notes of pine resin and tobacco), and rare Japanese black teas from Ureshino and Yame (which often exhibit flavors of apricot, grape skin, and osmanthus).

tea house guide new york city

tea house guide new york city

Kettl, while mostly operating as a farm-direct online purveyor of fine Japanese teas, keeps its retail space in Williamsburg open for in-store sales, education, and sampling of any of their more than 30 distinct teas that regularly shift with the seasons. All teas here are refrigerated to ensure their freshness, and Kettl’s selection of teawares, from tea bowls for Japanese tea ceremonies to teacups and teapots for daily use, are all of excellent quality, produced both in Japan and by local New York ceramicists.

What to drink: Ayame Kabuse 10-day shaded sencha from Fukuoka, Japan

Kettl Tea is located at 150 Ainslie St., 2nd Floor, Brooklyn. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

tea house guide new york city

Floating Mountain Tea House

Opened in 2017, Floating Mountain Tea House is one of New York City’s most recent additions to a growing constellation of excellent tea spaces. Taking cues from classic East Asian teahouse design (with a dose of Manhattan gallery minimalism), the space is clean, meditative, and intimate. Featuring over 90 different whole leaf, single-origin teas from China’s famous tea producing regions, Floating Mountain is not only a great place to taste the depth and breadth of tea styles, but is also one of the best locations in the United States to learn about the subtle differences between different regional varieties. Here you can explore rare varietals of hong cha (“red tea”) produced in the eastern province of Fujian to new, aged pu’erh tea grown in China’s southwestern region of Yunnan, green teas from Sichuan, and single grove “Phoenix” oolong teas grown in the mountainous region of Chaozhou in China’s southern Guangdong province. Paired with Chinese porcelain and clay ceramics, guests are guided on how to brew tea by owner and founder Elina Medvedeva in the traditional gong fu cha style, where each tea is skillfully brewed to express optimal flavors.

tea house guide new york city

In addition to directly sourcing all of her teas from small, single-plot farms in China, Medvedeva organizes tea educational events, private tea tastings, meditations set to tea, and even chi gong courses. Floating Mountain is typically most busy on weeknights and on the weekends, with early afternoons being the best time to grab one of the four low tables or a place at the tea bar. Floating Mountain is located just minutes away from Central Park and Lincoln Center in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, making it ideal for those seeking to fully enjoy the city—and then escape from it.

What to drink: A pot of Lao You Hua Xiang (“Old Tree Pomelo Flower Fragrance) Phoenix oolong from Chaozhou, China

Floating Mountain Tea House is located at 239 W 72nd St., 2nd Floor, New York. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

tea house guide new york city

29b Teahouse

29b Teahouse is equal parts upscale Japanese-inspired restaurant, East Village bohemian drinking den, and full service gong fu cha tea bar, mixing an elegant straightforward presentation of whole leaf traditional teas from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and India with innovative pairings of wine, beer, soju, and sake. What first began as a private tea sourcing venture and pop-up shop begun by founder Stefen Ramirez in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood has taken full flight in lower Manhattan, as 29b is now one of the largest tea spaces in the United States. The layout incorporates a central bar where tea and tea-infused drinks are masterfully prepared, alongside ample table seating for both tea drinking and relaxed dining. While featuring stellar teas from all across East Asia, 29b features some of the nation’s best (and hardest to find) Korean green teas and tisanes, as well as thoughtful tea-infused alcoholic drinks, including a must-have matcha and rice beer, as well as a rotating menu of soju and sake-infused cocktails.

tea house guide new york city

tea house guide new york city

29b currently features one of New York City’s most diverse menus of teas, tisanes, and tea-infused beverages. They feature a regular calendar of tea tasting events and classes, and offer a wide selection of privately-commissioned teawares from master ceramicists. This place is heaven for late-night tea lovers, folks looking for a great date spot with plenty of non-alcoholic options, and fans of considered bar design.

What to drink: 29b’s signature matcha beer or a pot of organic Woojeon (“pre-rain”) Korean green tea from the Jiri Mountains, South Korea

29b Teahouse is located at 29 Avenue B, New York. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

tea house guide new york city

Puerh Brooklyn

Named for a distinctive style of fermented tea that comes from the mountains of Yunnan province in southwest China, Puerh Brooklyn carries well over 20 different types of puerh, as well as a diverse array of other teas, from red, black, oolong, white, yellow, and green from China, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, and Nepal. Located in an airy two-floored teashop in the heart of Williamsburg, co-owner and founder Gabriel Grippo has built a shop where the community comes to enjoy tea in a relaxed and casual style. Originally begun by Grippo in 2001, the current space was purpose-built to include tea alongside with his two other passions: clothing design and art. (The space includes an active clothing design atelier and gallery.)

tea house guide new york city

Entering through the street-level upstairs, guests are met with rows of shining canisters full of loose leaf tea, large ceramic jars filled with stacks of aging puerh cakes, and teapots made by renowned local and international potters. Descending to the open, gallery-like lower level, stark cement walls are juxtaposed by the organic lines of wooden tea tables, carpets, and teaware set for both casual tea brewing and the occasional meditation meet-up. Set below the clamor of Williamsburg, Puerh Brooklyn’s tea space is a hidden gem and welcome respite in busy Brooklyn, a great place to find peace and explore the vast world of tea at a natural pace.

What to drink: 2015 Lao Ban Zhang Old Trees sheng puerh (“raw puerh”)

Puerh Brooklyn is located at 174 Grand St, Brooklyn. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

tea house guide new york city

T Shop

Tucked down a long corridor off of SoHo’s quiet Elizabeth Street, T Shop is one of those perfect New York “hidden gem” spots. In a relaxing, no-frills environment of small tea tables and a long tea bar, T Shop delivers what is easily some of the best Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean tea New York City has to offer. The space encourages brewing at your own pace, with simple gong fu cha set up and the option to brew one’s own teapot or gaiwan (a traditional Chinese tea brewing cup). With a strong, die-hard community of regulars but a welcoming and accessible vibe, T Shop is a great place to first enter New York City’s tea world.

tea house guide new york city

Teas here are sourced by Theresa Wong and Hyun Lee, who regularly travel to Asia visiting tea farms and tea collectors to bring back teas that are of exceptional quality. While the regular menu features a highly-curated selection of teas, private tea tastings often include many rarer “off menu” teas that Wong and Hyun have procured in limited quantity. As such, a single visit will never fully reveal the depth of what T Shop has to offer. Better to go once, then again, and before you know it you may find yourself fitting in alongside the regulars.

What to drink: Old Bush Dan Cong Mi Lan Xiang Phoenix oolong from Chaozhou, China

T Shop is located at 247 Elizabeth St, New York. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

tea house guide new york city

Té Company

Taiwan has what many tea aficionados consider to be some of the world’s best teas. Best known for their intensely floral and complex-tasting high mountain oolong (which are grown at altitudes higher than 1,000 meters) and “bug-bitten” teas that bear poetic names such as “Oriental Beauty,” it is easy to get lost amidst the many levels and layers of tea this island nation presents. Luckily for New Yorkers, Té Company in Manhattan’s West Village is entirely devoted to the teas of Taiwan, from inside an elegantly appointed salon-style space in a converted historic brownstone.

tea house guide new york city

At the helm of Té Company are the husband and wife team, Elena Liao and Frederico Ribeiro, with Liao sourcing the teas she grew up with while living in Taiwan and Ribeiro using his culinary acumen acquired working in such famed kitchens as Per Se to create an inspired menu of tea snacks both savory and sweet. The two bring a balance to a space that at times can feel frenetic when weekend brunch-goers pack the tiny teahouse. In addition to their regular menu of tea and food, Té Company offers table-side tea tasting flights, as well as the option to book tea tastings to learn all about Taiwanese tea. Rightly revered for its tea service, Te Company also has a dedicated following for Ribeiro’s pastry program, particularly his take on pineapple Linzer cookies, which have become something of a matter of obsession for in-the-know New Yorkers from near and far.

What to drink: A pot of “Frozen Summit” ’11 Vintage aged oolong, from Nantou County, Taiwan

Té Company is located at 163 W 10th St, New York. Visit their official website an follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

tea house guide new york city

Setsugekka

Nestled amidst the brownstone facades of the East Village, Setsugekka, with its tiny storefront and shoji-latticed windows, hides one of New York City’s best kept secrets: the best bowl of matcha. Stepping inside, the space is a mixture of traditional Japanese teahouse architecture, complete with a four-mat tatami platform, and old-school New York charm. Hosts and owners Souheki and Junya Mori opened the doors to Setsugekka in 2017 (profiled shortly thereafter on Sprudge). Souheki, a master in the Dai Nihon Chadō Gakkai school of Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu), expertly prepares every bowl of matcha by hand, infusing with it the warmth and intention that can only be achieved by years of practice and dedication.

tea house guide new york city

With an incredibly-focused menu of matcha grown in the famed tea-producing regions of Japan on farms tended by the same families for hundreds of years, the quality of Setsugekka’s tea is second to none. To take things a step further, the Moris have installed their own traditional tea-grinding mill, with which they grind their own matcha weekly. Matcha is served either traditionally hot in a ceramic tea bowl (of which is often handcrafted by a notable Japanese ceramicist), or chilled over ice or ice cream as a twist on the affogato. In addition to tea served, Souheki regularly teaches a growing number of students the art of tea ceremony, making Setsugekka not only a place to enjoy tea but to learn the “way” of tea.

What to drink: A bowl of freshly-ground koicha (“thick tea”) prepared by Souheki Mori, with tea sourced from Uji, Japan

Setsugekka is located at 74 E 7th St., New York. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Scott Norton is a freelance journalist based in New York City. Read more Scott Norton for Sprudge.

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Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong

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It’s true! Everything you know about tea is wrong—or at least, if you’re me. I grew up on tea bags; I can still see them right now, a yellow box of Lipton tea bags, hanging out in the back of the middle shelf of the bank of cupboards in my mother’s kitchen. Maybe this article should have been titled “Everything Jordan Knows About Tea Is Wrong”—I apologize for making assumptions by using the royal you.

Until a very short time ago, tea was this very ancillary, secondary, overlooked thing in my life. I usually drank it (if I drank it at all) served as iced tea, sweetened of course if I was in the American South, or served dry as a bone over great hulking chunks of ice with a lemon wedge on that rare hot day in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I didn’t take tea seriously—I ignored it on coffee shop menus, I didn’t make it for myself at home, I couldn’t really tell you anything about the various styles and varieties. I didn’t own a gaiwan or any tea-making gear, even at the entry level. I was oblivious to its many cultures and subcultures and rich history.

I was fucking up and I didn’t even know it.

And then very suddenly, everything changed. It started, like literally every major event over the last decade in my life, because of coffee. More specifically, because of a story I was assigned to write for Sprudge. We had noticed an uptick in tea quality at high-end cafes, specifically here in Portland, where the San-Francisco-based tea company Song Tea was showing up on the menu at a couple of the good local coffee bars. We started following Song and realized they were being placed in several well-respected cafes around the country. A hypothesis emerged.

In the early days of Sprudge you could tell if a coffee shop was any good just by the gear. If you walked into a coffee bar in 2009 and they had a La Marzocco and a Mahlkönig, you knew they likely gave a shit. Nowadays it’s harder to tell quite so easily, as the third wave coffee movement has exploded and things like gear and interior design have become more copycat. But maybe this tea brand was on to something; maybe Song was sort of like a third-party quality control vetting system, and that by only going into good coffee shops, we could look at them as a kind of hack. “If a cafe serves Song, they must be good.

Photos from our 2016 interview with Peter Luong by Zachary Carlsen.

And so I went to San Francisco and interviewed Peter Luong, Song Tea’s founder, who grew up in his family’s tea shop and has been traveling for tea sourcing since he was a kid. You can read the interview here—it’s an okay interview, I think, and it helped turn more people on to the good work Peter is doing. But the subtext of that interview is what leads us here today. Because throughout it, while I asked Peter rudimentary questions about Song’s approach to tea in a coffee context, he was making tea the entire time. Teas like I had never, ever tried before—wonderful buttercream oolongs and chocolatey roasted tieguanyins, Cypress smoked black tea like a campfire jujube and endlessly complex Sichuan greens, all of it served in a procession of simple, stunning, utterly pleasurable teawares. Peter was serving me his own personal take on gong fu cha as I interviewed him, and honestly, it changed my life.

I left high. Floating. Tea drunk, tea stoned, whatever you want to call it. (Although if we really want to get into what psychotropic most mimicked by a sizable consumption of tea, I think it’s closest to a gentle microdose of psilocybin.) Blowing like a feather in the wind around Pacific Heights, with a laptop full of notes and no particular place to head next, clutching my backpack now full of teas for steeping back home.

And steep back home I did—pot after pot, with a strict 10:00pm cutoff so as not to mess with my sleep schedule, chasing the sensory memory of that incredible experience in San Francisco. I love a rabbit hole, a new world to explore, and tea—like coffee, and like natural wine—offered a vast and never-ending beverage culture to soak up like a sponge.

Tea quickly became a daily part of my creative and personal life. I found myself writing better, or at least writing more voluminously (which I know should not be mistaken for “better” but often feels like it) while consuming an ever-growing raft of teas. I started exploring different brands, seeking out interesting tea accounts on Instagram, pouring through websites big and small, from tea purveyors based in China to tea purveyors based a few blocks from my house. I started collecting teawares, began following talented ceramicists from around the world, and started—slowly at first—to begin making tea for others, as a form of expression for this new passion.

I also began traveling with tea in mind, seeking out tea experiences in different parts of the country and digging out time for tea alongside Sprudge’s busy travel schedule. An hour here, an hour there, ducking out of a festival on my lunch break or landing with an extra day to explore tea shops across a city. Along this path I started talking with the people who run these tea shops and bars, asking them about their own journeys with tea, their own perspectives on the drink and the multitudes it contains.

And through it all, I learned a couple of surprising things.

First, tea people are by and large kind to each other. I learned this first by haunting the Instagrams and Reddit forums for tea drinkers, and by taking on some local tea writing for the alt-weekly here in Portland, which got me into more and more local tea bars, begetting more and more happy, sunshiney, tea-stoned conversations. On the internet, and IRL, tea conversations appear at least to this outsider to be mostly full of positivity and kindness. It’s one of the nicest Reddits, which is really saying something, and on Instagram you have to look hard to find tea people being shitty to each other. I can assure you this is not always the case in coffee, and it is really not the case in wine.

Tea scoop and rest inside Floating Mountain. Photo by the author.

The notion of tea’s inherent kindness landed while I was sitting in a tea bar on New York’s Upper West Side called Floating Mountain, whose owner, Lina Medvedeva, escaped the world of Manhattan finance to open a serene, meditative, beautiful little second floor tea bar and gallery above W 72nd Street. Over a single pot of Phoenix Dan Cong (I can still taste its warm red comforting flavors now, months later writing this) we talked about her past life, her upbringing in Russia’s far east, near Vladivostok (“We grew up drinking tea like water”), and how Floating Mountain came to be. It was once a tailor shop, and today is imbued with the most glorious Manhattan light, streaming in through floor to ceiling windows, like an oasis of energy and calm in the middle of the city, just blocks from The Dakota and Central Park.

Lina’s gong fu cha is minimalist, with everything just so—nothing extravagant, nothing loud. A tea scoop from the Czech Republic, made from vitrified bogwood. A simple porcelain gaiwan. A glass water kettle. An hour became two, and I was then hopelessly late for my next appointment, but I remember asking: “Is it just me, or do tea people seem rather content? Like as a culture, it seems to be a pretty positive place…do you agree?”

“You can never know the inside of another mind,” she replied, “but the tea speaks. There isn’t much left to say.”

The house of Liquid Proust. Photo by the author.

A few weeks and a thousand miles later I sat for another tea experience, where I learned a lesson on tea’s power to transform our very souls. This time it was inside an unassuming house, on a nondescript street amongst a row of clapboard little boxes in suburban Columbus, Ohio. This is the home of Andrew Richardson, who goes by Liquid Proust on Instagram and runs a fast-growing digital tea company of the same name. His focus is on rare and aged teas, typically from Yunnan but also some truly remarkable oolongs from Taiwan and eastern China. His entire business and network of tea community happens online, and walking up to the house, you would never in a million years guess that inside it dwells one of the foremost young American collectors and distributors of vintage single-origin tea.

Nearly every surface inside of Andrew’s house is covered in tea: tuongs, satchels, bags, parcels, caddies, ceramic resting jars, wooden commemorative chests, boxes and boxes and boxes with China Post shipping labels affixed (oh, what the mailman must think!) and enough shipping material to ensure safe passage between here and Mars and back, Express Class. There is more tea in this house than one person could drink in a thousand lifetimes, though I suspect Liquid Proust would die happy trying. In his cluttered office (tea, tea everywhere) across an industrial minimalist metal tea table, Andrew brewed me a procession of increasingly rare and fine teas, and talked to me at length about his growing business.

Liquid Proust began as a side hustle from Andrew’s full-time job, which is as a business advisor and student in a corporate MBA program. He fell down a particular sub-section of the tea rabbit hole, chatting with tea purveyors in China and Taiwan and Malaysia using auto translate programs, assuming financial risk by purchasing lots–large and small–of vintage tea, and documenting all of it on Instagram. Today his website is an ever-changing array of tea offerings, collaborative buys and special lots, handpacked from his home in Ohio.

Tea has been a transformative force in Andrew’s life. “Tea has taught me to be accepting,” he told me. “I grew up in a very conservative religious family, and without tea, I think I be like… somebody totally different. A Christian conservative Trump supporter, most likely.” He grew up drinking Bewley’s tea bags with his family, he tells me sheepishly, and I can relate. As tea gained more and more prominence in his life, the old vestiges and relationships of his past life fell away. He fell into a new world of tea drinkers and tea lovers—diverse, international, accepting, kind. His doors are always open to fellow tea heads on the same journey.

“People come to this house from around the world,” he tells me, as we look over jar after jar, bag after bag, an entire living room given over to boxes to ship, every square inch of kitchen counter overflowing with tea from his remarkable collection. “We just start laughing together, and talking. It’s almost like drinking beer—if you drink enough tea you get silly after a while, and then you get to really hear about people’s lives, their views on religion and love, and who they truly are. I would have never had this conversation before—I would have never known you.”

Too soon I was back outside in the Ohio chill, waiting for a Lyft to take me back into the city, my bag and mind and heart crammed full to bursting with tea. I started crying in the back of the car.

As a Western tea drinker, tea doesn’t need me. Not economically, not culturally, and certainly not spiritually. Indeed, there is something almost comically absurd about obsessing over tea here in America, thousands of miles from where it’s cultivated and revered, separated by a vast ocean both literal and cultural, although I’d like to think it’s kind of modern and cool too—bridging language and culture gaps digitally over a shared love for something truly good. But the economy and language of tea is quite happily percolating along in the countries where tea is produced, a brisk market of sales and consumption and obsession. Tea is not, like coffee, primarily an export crop. It’s more like wine—the cultures that grow it most revere it, and typically keep all the good shit close to home.  Indeed, as I understand it is only relatively recently that truly great teas from China and Taiwan have even been available for mass consumption in the United States. General access to premiere quality tea in America is a fairly new thing informed by the opening up of China’s flexible take on communism vis-a-vis small business growth, the linking of our world through the towering modern marvels of online shopping, international shipping (thanks China Post!) and global free trade.

Tea prices, trade wars, globalism: all of this is made possible by international commerce and the free movement of goods and services and ideas through international markets. Like coffee, tea is an unexpectedly and explicitly political product to consume in the best of times. And today? When these trade freedoms are imperiled by tariffs and racism and shudderingly incompetent political leadership? Drinking good tea in America right now is a profoundly political act, more so than at any time since the American revolution.

Tea doesn’t need the West but I think we need it. I think we could all stand to sit with this stuff as a regular part of our lives; not to replace coffee in the mornings, or instead of wine at night, but as a bridge and a complementary force alongside the other drinks we already love. Tea is a vast, bottomless, endlessly complex world of styles, producers, history, modern expression, accoutrement and idiosyncrasy. It is a lifetime—indeed, many happy lifetimes—of culinary inquiry. Drinking good tea can make your life better. Drinking good tea has definitely made my life better, made me a happier person and a more creative thinker, a better friend and colleague and partner. It has comforted me in times of sadness and tragedy, and I have celebrated good news with it, and it has been there for me as alacrity fuel of the highest order on plain old boring work nights.

I strongly recommend drinking a lot of good tea to anyone who wants to better know their own mind. Bathe your brain in theanine any possible chance you get. Think of it almost as like a performance-enhancing drug for your life.

I will end this essay by telling you a secret. I’m “the guy from Sprudge” which means that every so often at an event (be it family or promotional) someone expects me to make coffee. And I can do it serviceably well enough. I’m okay at it, but I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, or that I approach it with the easy confidence and muscle memory of a champion barista or anything. My coffee brewing prowess is nothing special, and I always kind of dread being asked, because it comes with a lot of expectations that frankly I’ve done nothing to deserve beyond stringing lots of flowery words together.

But I love making tea. Adore it, really. I love making it for myself, for my friends and family, for guests at our Sprudge offices in Portland, at parties or brunches or pretty much wherever. I love (and I mean love) the ceramics; I love the tactile change from dry to porous; I love the flavor variation across a long session; I love the steeping rhythm; I love the intimacy it creates, the way you really get to know someone somewhere between the fourth and seventh cup. Some of the very best conversations of my life have taken place over the last two years, with friends new and old, across a gaiwan.

My dream is that someday I will be able to give my own personal expression of gong fu cha to someone else and change their life, too, by opening their eyes and mind up to what tea can be, just as Peter Luong and Lina Medvedeva and Liquid Proust have done for me.

It’s the least I can do.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

Editor: Liz Clayton. 

All photos by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace) unless otherwise noted. The top image for this feature depicts a ceramic teascoop “chahe” from Russian ceramicist Anton Filonov, distributed in the United States by Liquid Proust

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The post Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

For Song Tea, Sourcing Matters—But It Is Not Everything

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Song Tea’s Peter Luong, photographed in Taiwan.

Song Tea & Ceramics sources and imports Taiwanese and Chinese teas of exceptional quality and character. I spend a month each year at origin sourcing for Song. My trip takes me to both China and Taiwan, visiting as many as five tea producing regions in each country. These trips are essential to build Song’s annual collection of teas. But sourcing—in so far as it involves traveling to origin and visiting producers—is not what distinguishes Song. It is not our differentiator. Most tea companies can source, we do so with a very specific perspective and blueprint. That perspective is what differentiates us.

———-

The groundwork for our sourcing trip is laid months in advance of the trip. As a team, we determine what part of the collection we’d like to work on. In 2018, higher white tea prices affected pricing and availability of both white and green teas, so my priority was visiting both Sichuan, Zhejiang, and Fujian. This meant that the trip had to begin earlier in the Spring harvest season because the Sichuan green tea harvest typically begins in late March. I also was interested in oolongs, so I stayed through early May.

The goal of each sourcing trip is to assemble an annual collection of teas where each individual tea is special and has its unique place relative to other teas in the collection. This sometimes means upwards of 30-40% of the teas from the previous year are swapped out and replaced with new teas that I find. This dynamic menu is unusual for a tea company: many simply refresh rather than replace teas year to year.

To do this successfully requires relationship building, a whole lot of impromptu travel to follow constantly shifting harvest times, and a whole lot of hard work. Although I think the underlying mechanics of sourcing is straightforward, getting the execution right takes coordination and timing.

I used to think that this hard work is what differentiates Song. But over time, I’ve come to realize the process of sourcing is by no means a trade secret. In fact, we are quite open about when, and where we travel, and as many do, we too photograph our sourcing experiences and post updates on Instagram (it’s @hellosongtea, check it out!).

What I think ultimately distinguishes us is the perspective that we bring to our sourcing efforts. With each successive collection I’ve sourced (this upcoming 2019 collection will be our seventh since we launched in 2013), I’ve evolved that perspective.

To build Song’s inaugural collection in 2013, I spent nearly three months visiting tea producing regions in China and Taiwan. I followed what is, in retrospect, a laughably simple guideline: to source the best teas I could find. They had to be very high quality, interesting, complex, and unusually good. And they had to be better than any teas that I had sourced before.

That first collection had quite a few gems, but we were also heavily skewed towards green teas because… well… greens were harvested first and I was impatient. But once all 22 teas that made up the collection was assembled, I knew that the collection as a whole made a lot of sense: they were interesting and complex teas that were also so delicious!

And with each new collection of teas, I honed that perspective. I began looking for more interesting teas. We began working directly with some producers to craft one-of-a-kind teas: whites from cultivars traditionally intended to be made into oolongs. Finessing oxidation rates and roasting to yield sweetness and florality. With each year, Song was developing and refining its flavor profile, and its perspective on what a good tea ought to be. This whole process was ad hoc and very informal, but it became more and more a part of the discussion between myself and the team before each sourcing year.

Then, two years ago, we embarked on an internal project we called “Tea by Character.” The idea was to develop a better way for our customers to navigate the tea collection on songtea.com. To do this, we sat down as a team to develop a taxonomy to categorize the flavor and aromatic profiles of our teas. What we discovered was so much more.

To create the taxonomy, we parsed the individual flavor profiles of each tea, and grouped them into broader categories. After many iterations, we developed seven distinct “characters”: grass, sugar, fruit, floral, wood, earth, and texture. We then ranked the teas in each group by how “grassy” or “sugary” or “fruity” the tea was relative to others in the group. For example, Fragrant Leaf ranks higher under “grass” than Dragonwell. When we summarized our rankings, we discovered that the Song collection of teas skews heavily towards three primary characteristics: sugar, fruit, and floral.

This was the “aha!” moment. We had discovered in a roundabout way the blueprint of our palate, and the character profile of the teas that end up in the Song collection. In other words, we source teas that are sweet, with distinct fruitiness and florality. They also had to be complex, texturally interesting, and delicious.

I realized that everything that I’ve sourced for Song since we launched has been driven by this character profile. It’s the blueprint that I use to make almost all of our tea acquisitions, and some key decisions we’ve made over time.

The Song collection consists of traditional teas, unique teas, and experimental teas. Traditional teas, such as our Dragonwells, are recognizable. Unique teas have unusual flavor profiles, and are less common. Experimental teas are one-of-a-kind teas we are actively involved in commissioning from producers. Regardless of type, all teas we source are done intentionally with a mind towards Song’s character profile.

I will go out of my way, and pay more, for teas that fit the character profile. In Spring of 2018, I acquired 72 catties of an oolong we call “Four Seasons Gold” from a tea maker on Lishan, a lush and beautiful high elevation tea producing region in central Taiwan. About a half day drive from Taipei, Lishan is a range some of the highest elevation tea gardens in the world. Most teas from these high mountain oolongs are light oxidized, capitalizing on a preference for light floral teas. The Four Seasons Gold is entirely different: it’s mid-oxidized, using a cultivar that is unusual at that elevation. The tea is complex, rich, and delicious.

While on Lishan, I also visited a few other producers we do not source from. One told me that the Four Seasons Gold is the type of tea that he drinks, but does not craft. Instead he makes the type of light oxidized oolongs that have wider market appeal.

One last interaction with that producer cemented my own resolve: he said that someone from Michigan had stopped in the week before and mentioned Song. My only thought when I drove away was that if a tea company from Michigan could be there talking to this guy (no disrespect to Michigan, hey Madcap Coffee!), that I best find producers that are a little more out of the way, who could produce teas that better mesh with our character profile.

Every tea company ought to develop its own character profile.

Peter Luong is the founder of Song Tea, a purveyor of fine teas from China and Taiwan. He lives in San Francisco. This is Peter Luong’s first feature for Sprudge. 

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Sprudge Tea Week is Presented By Breville USA.

The post For Song Tea, Sourcing Matters—But It Is Not Everything appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News