Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/71652
THE WHOLE LEAF BY CHRIS RYAN Intelligentsia's tea director talks origin, price and coolness SET TO SIP: Doug Palas (right) tastes tea with Bachan Gyawali and his son Amul. Bachan is the owner of the Jun Chiyabari Tea Estate in Hile, Nepal. hicago-based Intelligentsia has established itself over the last decade as a specialty coffee powerhouse, expanding its reaches to Los Angeles, New York City and Atlanta. Top-notch coffee has been key to the company's growth, as found- er Doug Zell has emphasized quality from the start. Lost in that shuffle, however, is the fact that Intelligentsia is one of the rare specialty coffee roasters that also focuses much of its energy on specialty tea. For nearly a decade Doug Palas has served as the company's director of tea, a role in which he has strived to ensure that Intelligentsia's tea matches the high standards of its coffee. Palas talked to Fresh Cup about why Intelligentsia is the rare roaster that values tea, the state of the U.S. specialty tea industry and more. Q: A: 56 What are your duties as director of tea? My department consists entirely of two people— me and a guy named Joel who does all our tea packaging. We are responsible for a lot of different duties: dis- tributing information about our teas, developing new products, purchasing tea and teawares, and training our educators—each of our stores has an educator. With purchasing, I get samples and Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com taste the teas. I work with a lot of different gardens throughout Asia, and basically we cup the teas. Then we evaluate them and make purchasing decisions. Q: How do you make it work having only two people in the tea department? A: It's tricky sometimes. I think of it this way: Tea is a smaller percentage of sales for a coffee and tea company. And then a pound of tea goes a lot further than a pound of coffee—a pound of tea can be 100 servings of tea. From that aspect, it's kind of scaled down. And then we purchase our teas seasonally. We're not trying to buy hundreds and hundreds of dif- ferent types of tea; we usually have about 30 offerings at a time, and they rotate throughout the year. So I'm not doing quality control for hundreds of items. Q: A: How did you come into this role? I started working for Intelligentsia about 12 years ago, doing production and inventory management at our old roasting facility. I took it upon myself to learn about the business because at the time it was a really, really small TIM BREEN