Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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n recent years, when tea entrepreneur Naomi Rosen thought about the quality-leaf scene in her hometown of Las Vegas, something seemed missing: true connection between tea-drinking consumers and companies selling the product. "I felt like we needed some organization," says Rosen, who owns Web-based tea shop Joy's Teaspoon. "We've got a decent number of tea drinkers and a decent number of tea companies, but none of them seem to know one another." Rosen's response to the issue was one that tea pros in a num- ber of other U.S. cities have come up with recently: launch a consumer-focused tea festival. The idea of bringing together a number of tea companies in one region for a day (or days) of intense consumer interaction this year seemed to reach a certain tipping point. The last 12 months saw first-ever fests in Portland, San Francisco and Las Vegas. More established gatherings in Los Angeles, Seattle and other areas, meanwhile, continued their evolution into edu- cational and cultural smorgasbords that have drawn strong crowds. And planning is under way to launch a Twin Cities-based Midwest Tea & Herb Festival in the next 18 months. So why is such a festival spike happening now? Festival orga- marketing platforms that allow tea companies direct and per- sonal access to the tea consumer," says Kulov, the single-named founder and organizer of the seven-year-old Tea Lovers Festival in Los Angeles. "Would a tea festival have been well-attended in 1998 or 2001? Definitely. But the industry wouldn't have sup- ported it, as it wouldn't have had the need for such a marketing platform at that time." Rosen's Las Vegas event, held on a November Saturday in a Though most regional festivals are geared toward consumers, the events are helping tea professionals boost their own knowledge. downtown events space called the Arts Factory, demonstrated the needs and direction of modern tea businesses. Fourteen differ- ent tea-related vendors were set up, and the group included four online tea retailers (compared with just one brick-and-mortar tea seller). The daylong event featured educational sessions on different teas from around the world, tea-and-food pair- ings, a Wu-Wo tea ceremony, and a partnership with a near- by gourmet restaurant that was offering unique lunch and dinner options that incorporated tea as an ingredient. Rosen says more than 300 people took part in the festivities. Portland's first formal festival, on the other hand, held events nizers say an ever-strengthening desire among many consumers to shop, eat and celebrate local certainly plays a role. But per- haps a bigger factor has been e-commerce. With more tea compa- nies operating as Internet entities and more consumers buying leaf online, a sense of physical interaction and demonstration has been lost. Festivals fill that void. "Tea festivals are ultimately 18 Tea Almanac 2013 throughout an entire month, October. The topic list was rich in variation: One session looked at Asian teaware from an artistic perspective, while others were billed as "focused tastings" of different tea types. And unlike the events in Las Vegas and San Francisco, Tea Festival Portland was spread across a number of retail shops in the city, including The Tao of Tea, The Jasmine Pearl Tea Merchants and The TeaZone & Camellia Lounge. That notion of spreading out a festival—both in terms of COURTESY OF KULOV TEA LOVERS FESTIVAL