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
MARKETPLACE company. I worked in a roasting facility of less than 10 people, and we all had to wear a lot of different hats. I learned about a lot of our products, and one of my responsibilities was tea. I was really intrigued and curious about what made all these teas differ- ent. Three or four years after I started, Doug Zell asked if tea was something I wanted to do and I was like, "Sure, this is great." Doug and [coffee buyer] Geoff Watts created a lot of the old tea blends, but they didn't have time to necessarily maintain them, and so this position was created out of necessity. As we grew, we realized we couldn't just maintain—we had to actually push forward and make things better. Q: Geoff is known for his extensive travel to source Intelligentsia's coffee. Why don't you do the same thing on the tea side? A: Coffee's at a different stage in its development than tea is. In my time here at Intelligentsia I've seen coffee culture develop tremendously, whether it be barista competitions or micro-lot coffees or single-origin espressos—all these different ideas about what you can do with coffee. The tea industry is a lot older, and it's not as popular in the United States obviously as it is in some parts of the world. So in places like China or India or Japan, there's a long-standing tradition of tea production, and I feel like a lot of the growers have a vested interest in the quality of their own product because they consume it. They tend to export their worst teas and consume the best, whereas coffee is the opposite. With coffee, most producers don't really consume their own product with the passion that we do in this country. The biggest incentive for coffee growers is monetary. They're not producing quality coffee for themselves in the same way that tea growers are. So I think that it's important to travel to origin and to see these places, but my influence there isn't going to be as great as Geoff Watts'. He can go to a coffee-producing country and tell them what they need to do to increase their quality, and he can incentiv- ize them in ways that I can't do in a tea-producing country. Telling some fifth-generation tea farmer that he's making his tea wrong isn't going to go over well. Q: Coffee prices have been volatile the last couple years. Has that coffee-price shift affected your job as a tea buyer? A: Well, tea prices have fluctuated quite a bit too. Part of the reason coffee prices went up was lower produc- tion in a lot of countries because of global weather patterns. Well, coffee-producing countries aren't the only place that's happening. There is fluctuation with tea, especially in China. I buy a lot of black tea from Yunnan, and a few years ago, pu-erh teas became very, very popular. Prices for Yunnan leaf shot up, which drastically increased the cost of my Yunnan black teas. So there are a lot of dif- ferent fluctuations, I just don't think people notice them as much. I've had cases where I buy a tea one year and the next year it's 120 percent more expensive. It happens. There's actually maybe even less rhyme or reason to it than there is with coffee prices. continued on page 58 freshcup.com July 2012 57