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/95647
Origin travel for Chawla includes visiting both the fields and the factories—here he focuses on the latter as he reviews the baking process of Milan Xiang, or honey orchid phoenix oolong. how do you procure it consistently year after year or season after season? That's the challenge of a tea merchant. If you were just out to procure Darjeeling, that's very easy to do. To procure good Darjeeling is the challenge. That holds true for every area. My company's inspiration for some time has been to work with small farmers and to be a stakeholder at that level. Recently I bought a small piece of land in the Nilgiri mountains in Southern India. The area has a systemic issue in which you have a lot of small stakeholders who grow tea but don't process it. They sell the leaves to a local factory that processes them and then sells the tea for a much higher price. These small farmers go through the same thing each harvest, and they don't have any sense of empowerment. So on this property in the Nilgiris, I want to build a tea studio out of clay that has no machines and showcases how to make tea old style—by hand, using simple methods and without consuming energy. If you're a small farmer, we'll show you how to make tea. You can bring your crop in, process it and take it with you, with the intent that you can sell it at a much higher value than you do right now. That would empower this entire segment of the population. I want to start that movement. Q: You have a unique connection to the source; do you think U.S. tea companies are communicating that origin concept to consumers? A: I think some of the big tea companies are making the job harder for us because of some of the stuff they're selling as tea. If you're going to call chamomile or hibiscus "tea," and you're continued on page 42 Fresh Cup Magazine 41