She brought some great chocolate with her. They are single-origin chocolates made by Soma Chocolate’s in Toronto.  They have a great site, and some of their truffles are really unbelievable.  They source the cocoa beans themselves. Carol Ann is a wulong lover and the Guild is doing a tasting where they are pairing chocolate with some of our teas. More information can be found here. If you are lucky enough to live in Toronto, don’t miss it. We had a preview today, and our taste buds were certainly enjoying themselves.

Austin.

Update: I made a mistake in giving the Tea Guild of Canada all of the credit in certifying 40 tea sommeliers. The credit also goes to The Tea Association of Canada. Still it is great to know that there are people learning about tea in Toronto, and I hope to here that they can find jobs in the beter restaurants and tea shops  of Canada.

Two hours of sleep last night. The weather was bad in Beijing, so three people in the group missed their connection. I’ve got jet lag so it really doesn’t matter, the whole sleep thing. I’m trying to keep my caffeine levels high with Bi Luo Chun and Liu An Gua Pian. I feel sorry for Xiao Zhu because he needs to go where I go, and doesn’t benefit from either old age or massive jet lag. We have chores to do then back to the airport. Its going to be a good day.
Austin

Take a short trip to Old South Pearl Street across from the Denver Folklore Center and you will find a bit of peace amidst the bustle of your urban environs. Located at 1882 S. Pearl, Seven Cups is the first and only Chinese-style tea house in Denver. With its tasteful and understated décor, it offers the kind of elegance that directly translates into serenity.

Greg Fellman, owner and operator of the Seven Cups tea house, explains as he pours steaming oolong into my cup, “We spend three months each year in China, searching for the right teas, based on bush type, when and how they’re harvested, how they’re grown. And we cultivate personal relationships with the farmers to make sure they don’t feel any pressure to compromise their future for a profitable present. If you know your source, you know your quality.”

[From Asian Avenue magazine » Seven Cups Fine Chinese Tea]

Austin

Dear Seven Cups Tea Club Members,

I hope you all have had a good month. I’m back from China and things have been crazy busy since I got back, except the nine hours I spent in the San Francisco airport. We have more 2006 teas available, and they are arriving here almost weekly, so check back with us from time to time. I took a couple of thousand photo’s and filmed numerous interviews with tea masters that we hope to have on line in the next couple of months. (It may take that long just for me to organize them, so please be patient with me.) We are redesigning our website and hope to have that completed before the end of June. For those of you that live close by we will being presenting some lectures on tea and Chinese culture, along with some classical Chinese music at our tea house this summer.

We are proud to be the first company to have imported An Ji Bai Cha. This is the most sought after rare green tea in China. Please read more about it online. It is really special. We have our ‘drink everyday’ green tea on sale this month. Our 2006 Silver Needle white tea is here. (Sorry we didn’t have any extra to put on sale.) Our white tea producer has been certified organic. When we started in the tea business there were only five producers in China that had organic certification, now there are hundreds. It’s nice to see this trend, although I still feel it is important to visit the producers and deal directly with them and not tea traders to insure that the tea is what it is supposed to be.

Thanks for all the support that you have given us over the month. We really appreciate it and love to hear from you. Please don’t feel shy about asking us questions.

Best wishes from all of us at Sevencups/Green Dragon Enterprises, Zhuping, Keiko, Josh & Julian (our kids), Ellen, Bob, Tim, and Christine (in America) and Lina and Leo (in China).

- Austin

I am writing from Kunming in Yunnan. I am just finishing up my trip which has been pretty spectacular in regards to tea, people, scenery, and culture. As always, I learn a tremendous amount, and am always humbled and thrilled by the experience. The harvest has been very good in most parts of China. Yunnan has not had as much rain as is usual so that has made the spring tea less and more expensive. It has been raining here for the last few days so that has been a big help. I’ve traveled to some new places, and not made to some that I had wanted to visit. We have been very busy everyday, from early in the morning until late in the evening, and we are pretty worn out but happy. Will will be adding some teas to our list, some of which are extremely rare and have never been exported before, as well as some more puer’s. I have taken more than a thousand photo’s of gardens and production techniques and have quite a few interviews that we will have on line as quickly as possible. (You know how that goes.) I am finally going to be able to do something on the website that I have been planning for for a long time, and no other tea company has done before, which is to reveal the people that are my suppliers. Tea companies keep that a big secret and I have never liked that much. I think you should know the people that put so much into producing the tea that you buy from us. We have always wanted to bring the producers and the consumers closer together. It is not easy to find these kind of producers. They are dedicated to tea culture and craft, and buyers that do manage to find them, want to keep a completive advantage buy keeping their sources secret. We want to give these folks the credit they deserve, so look for our site to change it’s format over the next coming months, and if you decide to every pay them a visit, let me know. I encourage to go and see for yourself why this tea has been so valuable for so many years, and why people dedicate their lives to the culture of tea.

Coming to China is always a very inspiring experience for me, but I will be glad to be home again with my family and friends. A month is a long time to be away. Zhuping and Keiko have prepared a good special for May, lightly oxidized oolong and loose leaf puer. If you haven’t tried these teas, check them out in May.

Best wishes from all of us at Sevencups/Green Dragon Enterprises, Zhuping, Keiko, Josh & Julian (our kids), Ellen, Bob, Tim, and Christine (in America) and Lina and Leo (in China).

- Austin (in China for a few more days)

I am just a few days from leaving for China. It looks like it is going to be a very good harvest this year. The MengDingShan teas are great this year from Sichuan. They are the first in the country to be harvested. On my trip I will be starting off in the East, in Zhejiang, and visiting 8 other provinces, covering about three thousand miles. I’m pretty excited. I will end up in Yunnan for the Puer Festival. We are figuring out how to do video cast on the Internet, and I hope to return with a lot of interviews with producers and tea masters. I am going to Hunan in search of yellow tea. I’ve never been there before and have been exchanging emails for about six months now. I’ll be seeing my old friends in WuYiShan and Tong Mu Village. I’m going to climb high into HuangShan, to see the famous MaoFeng harvest, with a side trip to Qimen to check out this years Keemun. Wow, just writing this is getting me pretty jazzed.

The most interesting thing I ran into about tea in the news had to do with Fair Trade Certification entitled Fair Prices for Farmers: Simple Idea, Complex Reality, from the New York times Business Section. Even though looking for the Fair Trade Logo, and being a socially aware consumer, we need to go a lot further to make sure that the people that are producing products like tea are being treated fairly. Please read this article if you have time. Seven Cups will continue to hand pick producers.

As I was saying, we have new MengDingShan tea. We have a new jasmine tea also. It is an Imperial grade YinHao. It is very rich in buds. I hope you enjoy it. I hope to get these teas online before I go. I am really the bottleneck for getting things done. We are having a Black and White Tea Sale in April. Whenever we get new tea, the stock for last year will go on sale. Don’t worry about the freshness. Even green tea has a shelf life of about 18 months if it is kept dry, out of the sunshine, and away from other smells. We ship our premium tea from China by air, and we turn over our inventory very regularly. If the producer does not package it up to our standards, we repackage it in China before we ship it here.

Please keep your eyes open for more video casts. You can subscribe via iTunes.

Best wishes from all of us at Sevencups/Green Dragon Enterprises, Zhuping, Keiko, Josh & Julian (our kids), Ellen,  Bob, Tim, and Christine (in America) and Lina and Leo (in China).

- Austin

Dear Seven Cups Tea Club Members,

Spring has arrived in Tucson and Southern China

Here in Tucson the weather is stunning. We get asked a lot why we would choose Tucson as a place to have a tea business. Southern Arizona seems counter-intuitive as a choice. The community is so great here and we get so much support from our customers. We are so lucky and grateful even if our business is small. If we are ever feeling down, hanging out in the tea house for a couple of hours and talking to people coming and going makes it impossible to stay that way. Tucson has an easy lifestyle and a slow pace that fits well with tea drinking. We also appreciate all of the emails that we get from our internet customers from all over the world. It is such a thrill for us when one of you shows up here in Tucson.

I’m gearing up for a trip to China and am starting to get pretty excited about it. The harvest has already started in Sichuan and should be in full swing all over the country by the time I get there. My trips are always a lot to survive because I go to so many places and I am overwhelmed by the experience right from the beginning. I am either spending time running up and down some mountain, or sitting around a table with group of tea producers and government diners, or trying to get some sleep in a very wide range of accommodations, or stuffed in a small car with a bunch of folks, or a much bigger bus with a lot more folks. What could be more fun, from one side of China to the other?

I know a lot of you took advantage last month of our sale on WuYiShan Rock Oolong. I was sad to hear that Master Yao Yue Ming passed away a few weeks ago. He was the person most responsible for us having those teas. I will deeply miss seeing him this year. There was an interesting but slanted article this month in a Japanese business publication about a Japanese company improving the production in WuYiShan. I think it was greatly exaggerated.

There was also a report from the University of Toronto about the dangers of mice consuming green tea supplements. I will just keep brewing mine in the traditional way.

Zhuping and I did our first video pod cast in February. You can watch it by finding it on our blog by clicking here and scrolling down to the blog entry. You can also subscribe through iTunes. We hope to do a lot more and I am planning to do some while I am in China.

We hope spring will be coming to you soon!

Best wishes from all of us at Sevencups/Green Dragon Enterprises, Zhuping, Keiko, Josh & Julian (our kids), Ellen,  Bob, Tim, (in America) and Lina and Leo (in China).

- Austin

Wow, what happened to January?

That was really a fast month! We hope you all enjoyed Chinese New Year, we certainly did. Zhuping’s mom and dad are here from Chongqing, so we had lots of spicy food. In China, new year is the biggest holiday of the year and goes on for a couple of weeks. Leo and Lina are out on holiday now and won’t be back for a week.

In January the big news internationally was the price of Chinese tea on the high end. Harrod’s in London started selling some kind of TieGuanYin for about $15 per cup, $3000 a kilo! Ouch! Here is an article from the Mirror in the UK. Surprise! The English are discovering they have been drinking poor quality tea, but they are sure paying a lot for good tea. The other story that caught my eye was an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper strong in business reporting, about the puer trade within China and young Chinese investors. I think all of this means that more and more people, including the new consumers in China, are beginning to discover good quality tea.

This month we have added more puer cakes on line and we renewed some of tea that was out of stock. We are putting all of our WuYi Mountain rock oolong on sale this month. The WuYi mountains are the origin of all oolong and black tea’s, and even the origin of the tea which is being grown in Darjeeling now. The fragrance, taste, and healing qualities of this area has been famous for more than a thousand years.

Best wishes from all of us at Sevencups/Green Dragon Enterprises, Zhuping, Keiko, Josh & Julian (our kids), Ellen,  Bob, Tim, (in America) and Lina and Leo (in China).

- Austin

Happy New Year

We hope that this year will be a great year for you and your families. This year we wanted to extend a tradition that we have at the tea house to our internet customers. During the month of January we have decided to put ALL of our tea on sale to celebrate Chinese New Year, which is January 29th this year.  The Chinese New Year celebration in China is a little bit like our Christmas celebration. It is a time when family gets together and old friends come by to visit. This coming year is the Year of the Dog. The dog year is also characterized by strong ties with friends and family. We want to send our best wishes to you and the important people in your life. We hope that you will have the time to sit and have a cup of tea with them many times during the Year of the Dog.

We are really looking forward to 2006  and the Year of the Dog. We had a good holiday season here and hope that was true for you too. The weather has been especially nice here in Tucson this year, and the winter has been milder in China than last year.  Last winter was brutal for tea in the Eastern tea provinces. The cold winter not only caused the harvest to be late, it also affected the character of some teas. Tastes of some teas were a little less robust, colors were not as alive, and some smells were a little less dramatic, not that there weren’t some really exceptional teas, there just seemed to be some noticeable differences from other years. The teas that seemed to have been most affected were teas from the higher altitudes, like the Lapsang teas grown in the WuYi mountains in Fujian province. The harvest was diminished in quantity as well which raised the price.  This was especially true with LongJing. Demand for LongJing increased last year because it is has more name recognition than other Chinese tea. The harvest was very late in Zhejiang province.I think that our LongJing this year was especially good even still.

In the past month the health news has focused on ovarian cancer and leukemia. The overian cancer research is coming from Sweden. Dailymail Article. 60000 women were studied and the risk of ovarian cancer was reduced by the amount of tea consumed. The leukemia research is coming from the Mayo Clinic. They tested an extract of a tea polyphenal, EGCG. Reuters Article.  This research however used just a small sample, but the Mayo Clinic has done some other studies as well relating to leukemia and green tea that have been promising. I’m sure that those of you that track the research being done with tea will not be surprised by these kinds of research results. What is interesting to me, is that the FDA recently refused a request to issue a “Qualified health claim†to label packages of green tea as saying that green tea can help to prevent certain cancers. LA Times Article. So why is the FDA seeming to be out of step with all of the research that we keep seeing. ‘Inside the FDA’s brain—FDA attacks efficacy of green tea’ talks about the FDA’s process. Rock River Times Article.

This month please check out a couple of new teas we have on line now. We have added an Imperial grade Keemun to our selection of black teas, And an exceptional Shou Mei to our white tea selection. We will be adding a few poor puer cakes as the month progresses. We hope that you will take avantage of our Chinese New Year Sale to try them.

Best wishes from all of us at Sevencups/Green Dragon Enterprises, Zhuping, Keiko, Josh & Julian(our kids), Ellen,  Bob, Tim, (in America) and Lina and Leo (in China)

- Austin

Hi Everyone,

As we roll towards the end of the year, We want to thank you all for your business this year. It has been a good year for us, and we hope that it has been for you as well. We made three trips to China this year, and were able to open an office in China, a real milestone for us. We are a very small company with two goals that shape everything that we do. We want to find the best tea available and provide the best information about tea and tea culture that we can find. I many ways we are a company focused on research.

We are learning all the time. We are sorry that there is a such a lag time between when we find a piece of information and when we can get it on-line. We have learned how to update content directly ourselves on-line this year. There are also teas that we are still looking for for our selection that we don’t already carry. There are over 50,000 producers in China, but with the help of other Chinese tea masters that are friends, we are navigating through the labyrinth, and we are also working on translations that we think will be interesting to you. Just for your information, when we buy tea we buy the best grade of tea available on two levels. The very best of the very best, and the very best grade of ‘drink everyday tea’. Of course there are other grades that are lower, many of which we could make a better margin on, and a lot of people would not be able to tell much of a difference. But we want to be in business for a long time and great tea is always be hard to get. Being devoted to quality is the only thing that we believe secures us a place in the exploding tea market. There seems to be hundreds of new tea business’ opening every month. We are also very aware how sophisticated our customers are, and we very much appreciate your experience with tea and all of the support we receive from you. We have received lots of email and have talked with a lot of you on the phone, or seen you at tea shows, or in the intimacy of our tea house. What a joy it is to get to know you better. It completes the circle for us, and we always carry your feedback to China with us. It is also a thrill for the people that produce the tea to hear that foreigners love their tea, and a pleasant surprise to most.

All of us at Sevencups/Green Dragon Enterprises, Zhuping, Keiko, Josh, Julian, Ellen, Angel Bob, Tim, (in America) and Lina and Leo in China, wish you and your families the very best in this family season.

- Austin