Tea culture; a blog anniversary retrospective

Originally contributed to the TChing site for publication.

My blog will be four years old in the next week, which is a good excuse for looking back.  I don't really want to talk about me so much, or this blog, more about tea culture, and perhaps a little about how perspective towards the subject changes.

one version of tea culture and community (credit Global Tea Hut organization blog)

How much did tea culture seem to change over those four years?  Given that the subject of tea is thousands of years old not that much, relatively speaking.  Matcha is bigger now, and trends come and go, like people putting different types of cheese on tea, or mixed in with it.  Hybrids styles develop, people trying out new things in existing areas but traditional teas wouldn't change much decade to decade.  I'm in the middle of reviewing an Assam oolong now, and covered a Japanese smoked black tea this year (it was ok, a good bit like a Lapsang Souchong, but different).

Beyond tea itself I am interested in shifts in online tea culture, for example in older style forums moving towards Facebook group activity.  I suppose there wasn't much for Facebook tea groups four years ago compared to now, so things do transition, but the function isn't so different.

It's not as much about evolution but interesting how tea culture means different things to different people, how it fragments.  One meaning is embracing old traditions, ceremonial practices, collecting traditional gear, etc.  One running theme is that given that the experience of tea is either generally positive or somewhat value-neutral the shared interest should help people come together, to share experiences without conflict.  Then divisions and conflict come up, related to commercial interests as much as anything else, but also just to people taking the ideas and practices in different ways.

I had written out a bit about those splits, and transition in how people perceive tea differently over time, about a typical personal experience / learning curve, and how those go in general.  But I'd really like to keep the focus here on how I think tea culture is changing, more than about how it fragments into sections, or about personal experience transitions.

a tea group at my alma-mater, the Penn State Tea Institute (photo credit)

In talking to people in tea groups one main theme is that tea awareness is just now ramping up where the person commenting lives.  I guess in the US in the Northwest or parts of California it may seem like a lot of that really started a decade ago, but in a different sense it's probably true in those places as well, just in a different sense.  Bangkok has went from only having local Chinatown shops and two others in malls, beyond booths and smaller stores, or Tae Tea outlets, to there now being a modest number of other cafes and loose tea outlets.  But beyond matcha and bubble tea, really not the same thing, it's only now getting started.

A friend bought Nepal tea through a source that was hard to access roughly four years ago, and had luck selling or trading some of that, because it was far less accessible then.  I've talked to a good number of people starting tea businesses related to Nepalese tea in the past year or so, enough that it's hard to keep track of how many.  Two used Kickstarter approaches, and one of those talked of opening a physical shop, a couple visited Nepal from the US, and two based their businesses out of Nepal.

Nepal white tea, in a unique style (reference link)

There are less and less unexplored corners of the industry.  I first visited Laos almost 10 years ago now--the time just flies--and later returned and bought tea from a local farmer.  It occurred to me that someone could do a great business by helping those farmers process teas better, and now Kinnari Teas is more or less selling doing exactly that, working with Laos producers to raise standards.

A recent post on more direct tea sourcing options covers a trend that all but didn't exist four years ago.  Others might rattle off counter-examples, of a plantation with a website, or related to one-step-removed sourcing going on a decade or more ago (in some cases a small vendor going on a sourcing trip, buying from a farm there), but now actual producers are setting up sales websites.  It's rare, and in some cases what's being sold is still really being re-sold, but it's starting.

 a small family tea producer's sales page (reference)

New types of tea interest groups are evolving, a subject I've not had space to develop here.  At the level of the individual tea drinker culture change really does reflect one person after another moving through an experience curve.  Every week lots of discussion forums see posts about people just now moving from tea bags into loose tea, asking how they might get started on brewing and sourcing, about types, and all the rest.  It's a slower process but every year people who were only first introduced to loose tea the year before push further towards the middle of the learning curve, switching types and preferences.

The online associations tend to be a bit loose, but those are an expression of tea culture.  It has been nice for me to be a part of that, conversing here and there, researching different themes, and rambling on in posts in TChing and Tea in the Ancient World.