• A Medicinal Tea from the Sea


    Tea has an ancient history of medicinal applications, many of which have been validated by scientific research. The same is true of seaweed which contains antioxidants (vitamins A, C, and E) as well as trace minerals and protective pigments. Joining us from Tokyo for this week’s podcast is Hiroshi Takatoh, CEO, founder, and blender at Japan-based Teatis Tea. Takatoh is exploring, with his team of food scientists and doctors, tea formulations to assist diabetics and pre-diabetics control their blood-sugar levels.

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    Teatis Tea Founder and CEO Hiroshi Takatoh explains the health benefits of blending tea with brown seaweed

    Hiroshi Takatoh, CEO Teatis Tea
    Hiroshi Takatoh, CEO Teatis Tea

    Matcha and Powdered Seaweed Tea Aids Diabetics

    After acting as caretaker during his ex-wife’s battle with cancer, tech industry veteran Hiroshi Takatoh recognized the need for easy-to-make, nutritious foods that were suitable for the dietary requirements of medically fragile consumers. He then consulted with a wide array of doctors and food scientists for innovation within the condition-specific food and beverage space and discovered that diabetes was a challenge he could tackle in his latest business venture. The company has received $1 million in seed capital.

    Dan Bolton: Your two new powdered teas “CALM” and “AWAKE” are condition-specific blends formulated for diabetics and pre-diabetics with high blood sugar levels. Why did you focus on diabetes?

    Hiroshi Takatoh: There’s a huge population to diagnose in diabetes, and many who suffer lack the time to manage their diet. So we wanted to provide a fast way for them to control blood sugar levels.

    There are more than 400 million people with diabetes globally with 122 million people in the US diagnosed with diabetes and pre-diabetes. That is a very huge problem. Many lack the time and cooking skills to effectively manage their health. I think consumers with Type 2 Diabetes lose an average of two and a half hours a day. We want to solve this problem by providing the fastest way to manage nutrition without any cooking skills.

    Seaweed is harvested in large quantities in Japan for use in food and for its medicinal properties.

    To further support consumers with diabetes, every Teatis purchase contributes to our “Diabetes Advocate Tax,” which is donated to Insulin for Life USA, a non-profit that provides disease management supplies free of charge to diabetic patients worldwide.

    Dan: The “Calm” blend is a mix of traditional herbals, such as turmeric and ginger. “Awake” contains matcha and powdered peppermint. Tell us a little bit more about the health benefits of brown algae (Eisenia bicyclis) and the interaction of tea and turmeric with the seaweed.

    Hiroshi: Both Teatis powdered teas utilize the power of seaweed extract (Arame) that is proven to suppress the absorption of sugar from the intestinal tract and moderates blood sugar levels. Seaweed polyphenols show clinical evidence of inhibiting digestive enzymes from digesting food into glucose. Through a proprietary manufacturing process, Teatis is able to harness those nutritional benefits of seaweed, without passing along the flavor or aroma, and blend the seaweed seamlessly into matcha and turmeric powders.

    The two flavors are both good either hot or cold in the summertime. I love this kind of taste and definitely recommend it. The best way to use these is to put our tea in some skim or plant-based milk. Use one teaspoon per cup. That is the simple way to use our product. Some customers using our turmeric blend add it to their soup, others use Teatis to make green smoothies. So maybe this way is more fit for the matcha flavor.

    Dan: You’re making the point that its convenience and versatility encourage people to drink these tea blends in soups or smoothies or in a warm plant-milk-based latte.

    Hiroshi: The most important thing is that it is easy to drink. I want customers to enjoy their wonderful tea time and take just a tiny step toward prevention. So please enjoy.

    Many people like to add milk or milk alternatives to create a special at-home latte. Some add the matcha-flavored powder to smoothies and include the ginger-turmeric blend in soups. The powdered teas are accessible to cooks at any skill level and versatile, allowing diabetics and low-sugar dieters to be creative and craft beverages to their preference while managing their health.

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  • Jolene’s Tea House


    The rugged Canadian Rocky Mountains thrust nearly 20,000 feet into the sky, a haven for hikers that inspired a unique style of high-mountain tea houses built to provide warmth and shelter along the trail. In Banff, Alberta, Tea Biz correspondent Jessica Natale Woollard visits Jolene’s Tea House – a refuge for mind and body.

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    Jolene Brewster on the re-launch of her retail brand.

    Jolene Brewster, left, and partner Jess McNally in front of the tea house located in the historic Old Crag Cabin.
    Photo by Gareth Paget, courtesy Jolene’s Tea House

    Customers Enjoy an Educational, Interactive Experience

    Jolene Brewster’s new tea venture is the culmination of years of passion and business experience, along with a healthy dose of contemplation, courtesy of time spent in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. About 15 years ago, the entrepreneur from Banff, Alberta ran a tea café. Then she moved into selling tea exclusively online and at farmer’s markets. Now she’s back with a new business partner, a refined business concept, and a new name — Jolene’s Tea House.

    Jessica Natale Woollard: Jolene, our listeners from around the world may not be familiar with the tradition of taking tea in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Tell us a bit about the history of tea in the Banff region?

    Jolene Brewster: We live in a place where tea houses are unique to Canadian culture. They are a part of history here in Banff. The tea houses that we have were built by Swiss guides to be a refuge for hikers and explorers travelling and enjoying this countryside.

    And with the spirit of that, with the spirit of people having tea, drinking outside, having tea on the trail, over the fire, climbing a peak, and having a rest along the way. We’re still doing the same thing today. We are still a place that people come to enjoy this incredible atmosphere, the mountains, to find what their looking for, to explore, to have their, honestly, to have their minds explode with the beauty around them. And tea is the beverage of choice. That’s what you take in your thermos out in the mountains. And I really believe that whether you’re at home in front of your computer, working all day, we need those moments of pause, of presence, of introspection, of enjoyment, and a good cup of tea can give you all of that.

    To avoid distractions, the shop offers only dry tea. Photo by Gareth Paget, courtesy Jolene’s Tea House

    Jessica: Your original tea retail store closed in around 2010. Eleven years later, what lessons learned have you carried into your new business venture?

    Jolene: One hundred percent, the model of our retail business going forward is so similar to what I’ve done at markets, at farmer’s markets, and I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of local markets around Alberta, British Colombia, and across Canada. I’ve been to huge gift shows like the One-of-a-Kind show in Toronto, which is magnificent. And a lot of work!

    It was successful, and the interaction we had with people, it worked. I love that people can come into our shop; they can sample different teas, they can smell. It’s an educational process. The one thing that surprises people, especially because we’re promoting the culture of tea houses, and we’re making that as much an interactive experience as possible within our own beautiful heritage cabin here in Banff, we don’t serve tea. We don’t do food and beverage. I learned doing the markets that if I want to be able to talk to people and make it more educationally focused, we’re not able to constantly be pouring cups of tea and have that business and distraction. We’re not creating a to-go environment.

    Jessica: How is the business of tea different today than it was your first time around?

    Jolene: I think there’s been some amazing companies, like DAVIDsTEA, who’ve really made tea fun for people. They’ve brought people who normally wouldn’t be interested in tea, they’ve brought teenagers in, they’ve made it a modern exciting environment, and I think that has opened the door for us to go to the next level, to delve even deeper into the organic, the quality, the minute differences.

    Jessica: Paint a picture of the ideal Jolene’s tea drinking ritual.

    Jolene: Outside. if you can take a moment in your backyard, on your balcony, after your morning run. Something with activity outside. I’m an avid horse rider and trail riding in the mountains is one of my passions, and to be able to take a small saddle bag and pull out my thermos and have a drink of tea after my ride is incredible. My partner Jess would most likely run up a mountain and have a cup of yoga chai up at the top.

    To discover how the Canadian Rocky Mountains are infused in Jolene’s business, visit:
    Jolene’s Tea House
    211A Bear Street
    Banff, Alberta
    CANADA
    403-985-5500

    Located in Banff National Park, Lake Louise was named in 1884 after the daughter of Queen Victoria. In 1899 the Canadian Pacific Railway hired mountain guides from Interlaken, Switzerland to lead tourists on excursions into the mountains. It was these guides who built tea houses for refuge on the trails beginning in 1901 with the Lake Agnes refuge and later at Abbot Pass and the Plain of Six Glaciers.

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  • Organic Tea Production at Scale


    Mozambique is the best-kept secret in the tea world, says Mohit Agarwal, Director of the Asian Tea Group, owners of Cha de Magoma, located in Gúruè, in Zambezia province. With 6,325 acres under tea, it is the world’s largest bio-organic tea garden and its Monte Metilile brand is a success story that demonstrates the many advantages of scale in producing great-tasting, high-quality, clean teas.

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    Mohit Agarwal, Managing Director, the Asian Tea Group, discusses the advantages of organic production at scale.

    Mohit Agarwal, managing director, The Asian Tea Group owners of Cha de Goma and Monte Metilile brand
    Mohit Agarwal, Director of the Asian Tea Group, owners of Cha de Magoma and the Monte Metilile brand

    Organic Tea Production at Scale

    Mohit Agarwal, Director of the Asian Tea Group, the company that owns Cha de Magoma and the Monte Metilile brand, is walking the world’s largest certified organic garden as we speak via Zoom. Pointing to the brilliant green tea bushes that stretch as far as the eye can see he explains that during 15 years of civil war from 1977 until 1992 Mozambique’s tea plantations were abandoned, allowing the land to rejuvenate and the bushes to expel plant protection chemicals and fertilizer. As our virtual tour continues, he describes the organic dairy herd, a forest of renewable eucalyptus used for fuel, and the three hydroelectric turbines being installed to provide green power for the plantation’s factories.

    Dan Bolton: Monte Metilile is certified organic by EU-Organic, USDA-NOP, and JAS. Here you specialize in the cultivation of organic whole leaf for orthodox processing as well as commercial grades of CTC. Will you talk about your commitment as stewards of the land and your regard for the ecosystem?

    Mohit Agarwal: The natural ecosystem that we have here is ideally suited to operate any plantation without chemicals or fertilizers. We have a lot of green cover, we have 6,000 hectares of land out of which 2,560 hectares are under tea. Do you see those Eucalyptus forests over there? A lot of this land is under forest cover. A lot of land is under citronella and Guatemala [grass] which stops soil erosion, and gives nitrogen to the soil, and is used to create bio compost.

    There’s a total ban on any chemicals or fertilizer. We do totally sustainable agriculture. Even the food for our people grown in-house is organic. We have our own dairy farm with more than 100 head of cattle which gives us cow dung and cow urine as fertilizers. Butter and milk are used by families to make Ghee.

    The entire ecosystem we built here at Monte Metilile is self-sustaining.

    Dan: This is a large-scale operation with more than 6,300 acres under tea will you explain to listeners the advantages of scaling up if you’re an organic farmer.

    Mohit: The whole idea was to make organic tea affordable and available to the global audience. MRL levels and tolerance in most countries have become stringent. Converting this entire site of 2,560 hectares of tea into organic has taken a lot of hard work. We managed to make the entire 2.2 or 2.5 million kilos of tea we produce available to consumers globally at a very reasonable, affordable price.

    “Farming organic at scale is applying the required size to solve the problem.”

    – Mohit Agarwal, Managing Director, the Asian Tea Group

    Dan: What will consumers discover when buying Mozambique tea?

    Mohit: There is flavor in the tea because of the climate. The temperatures in Mozambique are between 15 to 30 degrees. Because of the lower temperatures, there are inherent flavors. Most of our bushes are Chinery [Camellia sinensis-sinensis] out here, which the Portuguese planted.

    We can produce orthodox black tea and green teas, and, within green, we produce both steamed and roasted, CTC, and Orthodox. We also produce oolong teas and some specialty teas such as white teas. The tasting notes for these are simply magnificent. In the winter months, during what we call the first flush, the teas are light-bodied, muscatel flavored teas. Once the season comes in, we’ll get a little more body in the teas, but still, the brightness and the cups remain mellow.

    Mozambique is the best-kept secret in the tea world. This growing region has been hidden for centuries. Teas from here blend very well with the Sri Lankans or the Indian teas. Consumers have not been exposed to Mozambique as the tea was only being used in blends in conventional teas. Now we are exposing the full bouquet and it’s just delicious as a single-origin tea — fantastic for consumption without milk and sugar.

    Cha de Magoma offers the largest organic selection anybody could find in the world.

    Dan Bolton

    Cha de Magoma

    The Asian Tea Group is a tea producing and trading conglomerate with plantations in Assam and Mozambique and trading offices in Kolkata, Coimbatore, Mombasa, Colombo, and Fuzhou (China). The group handles more than 27 million kilos of teas across all their offices worldwide.

    Cha de Magoma is the largest private-sector employer in Mozambique, a country where labor is readily available as 70% of the workforce is employed in the agriculture sector which accounts for 25% of the economy. In 2020 Mozambique exported 3,203 metric tons of black tea, down from 3,447 MT sold in pre-pandemic 2019. The value of exports rose by 79% between 2017 and 2019, bringing exporters $4.7 million in sales, according to trade statistics compiled by Selina Wamucci. Mozambique ranks 62nd globally for black tea exports.

    The plantation is certified by Fair Trade International as well as Fair Trade USA. Since certification in April 2020, workers have collected substantial fair trade premiums from customers, funds that have been invested in welfare projects. The FT premium committee, for example, purchased an ambulance which is critical to ensure that people get health care when required and improved plumbing to provide clean drinking water. The next big project is the construction of new buildings for a school to ensure access to education for the children, according to Avinash Gupta, Director of Global Sales at the Asian Tea Group.

    Rainforest Alliance, Naturland, Non-GMO, and FSSC22000 certifications are a work in progress and are expected to be in place very soon, according to Gupta.

    Monte Metilile teas are exported to Europe, the UK, the US, China, and Japan, writes Gupta. Our primary trading partner in the US is QTrade Teas & Herbs and in Europe Wollenhaupt Tee GmbH and Ludwig H.O. Schroeder & Rudolph Hamann oHG. Retailers that stock Monte Metilile includes TeaGschwendner (Germany), Nothing But Tea (UK), and Upton Tea (US).

    In addition to tea, Cha de Magoma bottles natural spring water at a water packaging plant on the estate. The mineral water is marketed under the Monte Gúruè brand.

    The estate covers 6,000 hectares with 2,560 hectares under tea. Crops include citronella, banana, pineapple, vegetables, Guatemala grass, neem and sugarcane. Some are grown to make bio compost and some to feed a herd of dairy cattle. farms. Three Hydel green power units drive turbines generate a large portion of our power requirements. There is immense potential to expand the tea plantation and increase our production.
    The estate covers 6,000 hectares with 2,560 hectares under tea. Crops include citronella, banana, pineapple, vegetables, Guatemala grass, neem, and sugarcane. Some are grown to make bio compost and some to feed a herd of dairy cattle. farms. Three Hydel green power units drive turbines that generate a large portion of our power requirements. There is immense potential to expand the tea plantation and increase our production.

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  • Q|A John Snell


    A century ago, when the Portuguese first planted tea in Gurúè, Mozambique they found gentle, well-drained slopes of rich red volcanic soils at 1,500 to 3,600 feet elevation – identical to the altitude of India’s Darjeeling mid-tier gardens. The climate is cool and dry from May to September and hot and humid between October and April. Annual rainfall averages more than 3,000 millimeters. By 1950 production exceeded 20,000 metric tons a year and there was more land under tea in Mozambique than any country in Africa.

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    Procurement expert John Snell, founder of NM Tea B Consulting and owner of Ela’s Tea.

    Monte Metilile Tea Estate in Gurúè, Mozambique. Photo courtesy Asian Tea Group.

    Mozambique is God’s Country for Tea

    John Snell is principal at NM Tea B Consultancy, with expertise in sourcing that spans 35 years of procurement, supply chain management, and importing tea for major brands and private label suppliers. He also owns Ela’s Tea a specialty tea supplier and blender. John resides in Toronto, Canada.

    Dan Bolton: John why is Mozambique is such a great place to source tea?

    John Snell: Firstly, Mozambique’s latitude is a bonus; given the warming of the equatorial region, Gurúè is a more stable environment for tea and unlike much of Africa’s tea region, has true seasonality. With a true off-season, Gurúè offers an opportunity to produce true first, second, and autumnal flush specialty teas, something quite rare on the continent.

    Furthermore, Zambezia province sits on the Great Rift Valley whose high sides create a rain shed and whose depths collect groundwaters. This together with loamy soils and the seasonality makes Mozambique God’s country for tea.

    John Snell
    John Snell
    The Republic of Mozambique spans an area of 300,000 square miles with a population of 30 million. The estimated GDP is $41 billion with a per capita annual income of $1,331 (PPP)

    Dan: Will you describe the Portuguese era of tea production in Mozambique that began with plantings in the 1920s?

    John: Mozambique was a Portuguese colony for 700 years and chose this place above others, in her vast empire, as the most prodigious place to grow tea, despite being ever-present in South India and Sri Lanka. By 1950, Mozambique was the largest producer in Africa, only usurped by Kenya in the 1960s due to civil war.

    Dan: Mozambique tea production is resurging, its tea industry reborn, with organic cultivation and modern, more efficient processing techniques. What is the business opportunity in Mozambique?

    John: To be honest, during the civil war and thereafter, the tea produced in Mozambique was plain, weedy, poorly manufactured stuff, a price reducer for most normal tea chaps and if this had continued, I have no doubt that the business would be extinct by now. However, the civil war did the industry a favor, if you like, as it precluded Mozambique from an era when the rest of Africa geared up to support the teabag market of the UK, predominantly. When Assamica clones were created for productivity and strength rather than finesse. So, come their re-emergence, the bushes planted by the Portuguese, both Sinensis, and Assamica varieties are still there and have naturally cross-pollinated creating their own unique hybrids. There is now this astounding variety of mother bushes, which need testing and selecting, from which VP [vegetative propagation] can proliferate the types to fields.

    Dan Bolton

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  • Folklore Tea


    A recent development in tea in India has been the rise of new brands, many that have their roots in tea regions. Almost all of them seek to bridge producers and consumers. Most rely on the narrative that accompanies a product from its place of origin. For consumers, it’s in part vicarious living and a window to another world. This is as good as it gets for those who want to know who made their tea and where it comes from.

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    A conversation with Subhasish Borah, co-founder Folklore Tea, Assam

    Birinci Borah at Folklore Tea

    Exceptionally Local Teas that Connect with Consumers

    By Aravinda Anantharaman

    Emphasizing the local characteristics of Assam (instead of crafting tea to the expectations of export markets) shows respect for the land, customs, and artisanal craft, according to Folklore Tea co-founders Subhasish Borah, an urban planner, and Bidisha Das, a business management grad.

    Folklore Tea founders Bidisha Das, left, and Subhasish Borah

    Folklore Tea, based in Guwahati, actively works with farmers to become something more than a marketing platform for their teas, explains Borah, 30, and Das, 29. The couple run the Kohuwa Collective, a space that comes with a slow food café and tea room, with rooms for collaborative clothing and pottery workshops – concepts that seem to drive their work. They launched Folklore early in 2020 and, as a brand, are keen to carry the farmers’ stories.

    Folklore is anchored in the idea of storytelling and connecting to consumers intimately. Each tea acknowledges the farmer who grew it. Each tea is given a name, and a poem accompanies it.

    Each eco-friendly packet is numbered with a handwritten note addressing the recipient. And while this helps connect with the drinker, it’s not Folklore’s unique sales proposition. That lies in the experiments and work they do with their farmers.

    Folklore works with three small growers, Beeman Agarwalla, Birinsi Borah, and Tarun Gogoi, who collectively cultivate about three hectares (seven acres) of tea. They also run Prithivi, a farmer producer company that now includes 56 members with farms ranging from 0.2 to 3 hectares in size. All the growers are geographically located close to each other, making this a community enterprise. Beeman, Birinci, and Tarun have chosen organic farming and work with the other members to convert inorganic farms to organic. The process takes a long time, up to five years, during which farmers have to face a loss in yield and income. The association supports them by way of small scholarships for children and providing compost from a small vermicomposting unit.

    Beeman Agarwalla and Tarun Gogoi. Behind it all, there are real people – small tea growers whose innovation improves the craft and whose land stewardship protects the environment and the quality of your tea.

    “Behind it all, there are real people – small tea growers whose innovation improves the craft and whose land stewardship protects the environment and the quality of your tea. It is their passion that makes the tea taste better.” – Folklore Tea

    In Assam, small tea growers sell their green leaves to bought leaf factories that manufacture and sell tea. Most of these factories make CTC tea, which is bought and blended for the domestic market. Farmers adopting organic cultivation find no advantages in price as CTC factories are not always organic. Here, the tea is mixed, and the source and style of cultivation are lost. With no advantages to producing organic tea, the farmer has no incentive to stay the course. And this is something that Folklore is trying to address.

    Subhasish describes a proposed project for a mini-community factory that will be used to manufacture organic CTC with leaves sourced from their own farmer community. Currently, they have six small units where their tea is made. These units are not heavily equipped with machinery, and even the CTC is made using traditional wooden tools.

    Related: A Local Movement is Brewing in Assam

    “Right now, there are 56 growers who have joined us. So, collectively, whenever we will be able to set up the factory then we have a huge leaf bank. If we get this funding, which I’m not sure we will get, then of course we go for CTC as it will help not only these three people but all 56 families. That means almost 180 people will be benefited with this factory, it will be huge change in the village,” he said.

    “Whatever we can do in terms of packaging, design, or marketing will help them,” he said.

    Folklore’s association with Prithivi is a close and mutually beneficial one. Prithvi and its farmers brought knowledge of cultivars and tea making, along with market intelligence. Says Subhasish, “Most of the small tea growers with whom we are working started back in the early 1990s. They planted whatever tea bushes they could get from nearby tea gardens. The knowledge of cultivars was not very prominent at that time.”

    The Folklore team decided to study tea and brought knowledge and the willingness to experiment in tea making. Their experiments are with clones, leaf-to-bud ratio, and processing methods such as pan-roasting and naturally scenting tea. Only a small volume of made tea, not more than 300-350 kilos, is sold under the Folklore brand, primarily black and oolong whole leaf tea and some CTC.

    On average a small tea grower can pluck 6-7 kilos of unprocessed tea daily to make 3-4 kilos of finished tea.

    They are experimenting with rolling techniques to improve appearance, experimenting with blending to get the right flavor. And they have also taken on the immense challenge that oolong brings to tea making.

    Artisanal tea making is still has a niche market within India. Folklore seems conscious of this, taking a B2C approach for India and a B2B platform that caters to a global market, with customers in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Since the scale is still small, the brand can sustain its relationship and customer base.

    As Subhasish says, there are two main challenges and opportunities of Assam’s tea industry: people who live in the tea areas of the state don’t know enough about loose leaf teas. The irony of producing one of the finest teas and yet sending them to faraway markets is the story across India’s tea-growing regions.

    “It’s very sad,” says Subhasish, “because people in their own region, especially in the villages and towns that are surrounded by tea gardens, the people don’t know much about loose leaf teas. It’s absurd that mainstream media is promoting the concept of green tea in Assam. Green teas have been grown here for years. It is supposed to be the other way around,” he says.

    “Paying 500 rupees for a kilo of tea is not a thing here,” he says. The economic status is not very high. Assam’s annual per capita income is INRs 119,155 ($1,700 compared to the all-India average of $2,100 per capita).

    “People collectively have less money so marketing loose leaf teas at a higher price is difficult. It takes a lot of effort to make loose leaf tea and if you’re selling it for let’s say INRs 300 to 400 rupees per kilo then it’s not giving me anything.

    “Consider that you can get a kilo of CTC for INRs 90 to 100 rupees ($1.20). In this scenario everyone is going to buy CTC but it’s weird. In Assam the culture of water-based tea is also very high but that water-based tea is made using CTC, not loose leaf teas.

    “Most of the growers face difficulties here, they don’t have the human resources or the financial resources to do marketing or packaging. Many people who start making teas go back to selling fresh leaves so that they don’t have to think about marketing again. And many people go back to inorganic because if they ultimately have to sell the leaves to bought leaf factories then then there is no point in maintaining organic because the factories are not certified to process organic tea,” he said.

    Due to financial limitations, few of our growers can afford the expense of the organic certification process, but the growers are far beyond it. They preserve ancient processing traditions and care deeply about their environment. They put their heart and soul into the teas they make naturally, says Subhasish.

    As much as the conversation is on branding and experimentation, ultimately, what will make a brand like Folklore work is its impact on the community. Already there are plans to set up a bamboo cottage on one of the tea farms open for experiential travel. Assam has a lot on offer, from textiles to food, and of course tea. “We want to bring people,” says Subhasish. We want to show the things that are going on here. That it’s not only tea, but a lot of associated cultural elements too.” He talks about the vision to make the area an open museum, where “the entire place can act as a museum, all the houses can act as a museum and the traditional tools which are used in the processing are living heritage.”

    Subhasish describes Folklore as a “passion project.” Perhaps that’s what Assam needs more of, passionate marketers who can join hands with farmers to create quality teas and find a market for them for the greater good of the community. And if it includes nudging local preferences towards better tea for their consumption, that’s a bonus. 

    Trouville Black Tea

    People have spun stories on my genesis.
    Was it a monk who discovered me? or
    Was it a king who dropped me in boiling water?
    Yet my origin is unknown
    Since then, I have grown
    And grew and grew some more
    Moving across spaces and borders
    A living chronicle of several cultures.
    I’m Trouville. I was found through pure chance.

    Subhasish Borah

    Birinci with his wife. Small holder farms ranges from a half an acre to seven acres.

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