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A LIFE IN TEA continued from page 39 Chawla tasting tea while visiting the oldest tea garden in Darjeeling, near the Nepalese border. India to visit my family, and we all wondered why people didn't drink tea in America the same way they drank coffee. People who come from tea cultures definitely drink tea. I told them people in America drank a lot of tea, but mostly iced tea. You didn't see many teahouses, and you didn't see cafés embracing tea in the same manner that Starbucks was putting coffee into everybody's faces. So my initial plan called for opening 100 teahouses. Q:A: You never opened 100 shops though—what happened? My business objectives evolved as I got into it. To open a chain of 100 stores, you need a product port- folio that's very strong by having your supply chain intact. That supply chain didn't exist for me. You could have easily bought ginger peach tea and mango tea in the U.S. in those days, but you couldn't have easily bought fine oolongs, whites, greens or pu-erhs. My vision was to bring the culture of tea to the U.S. So I started opening stores, but then my objective became to build a supply chain. To build that, it required that I start traveling again, but this time I was traveling on my own agenda. And so I started traveling to build my relationships with farmers and small tea gardens. Q: A: 40 Tea Almanac 2013 What's your philosophy at origin? When you source tea, it's a very large field. Let's take Darjeeling as an example: There are 80-plus gardens, and each one has its own profile. So it takes a while to figure out where the cream of the crop is. Once you figure that out, then