Practice Odd Duck Dreamdance Convergence!

OK so I haven't been blogging every day like I said.  It's really hard.  But I'm working on it.  I'll catch you up.

1.  Monday we had tea with Struan of Practice Yoga, and are excited to announce that we're going to be their tea sponsor.  That means we're going to provide private tea services for their teachers-in-training, hold gong fu cha classes and events there, and pretty much any other fun thing we can think up.  Tea + yoga 4evah!
2.  Tuesday we got our new vacuum sealer and are ready to start implementing our new packaging, which essentially an unabashed rip-off of Yang Qi's cute little paper-wrapped bundles of Yellow Sprout.  I brought over one small test batch of this rare and completely obscure tea from Mengding Mountain and it immediately sold out before I even had the chance to blog about it.

Granted, it is an amazing tea, but that's not why it sold out so fast.  Nobody even knew what it tasted like, they just bought it because it's so charmingly packaged.  And so, henceforth, all of our loose leaf teas will be wrapped into a little bundle and fastened with twine.  We also got scientific with our French Press steeping techniques for restaurants - we have exact dosages, temperatures, and times for milk oolong, zhengshan xiaozhong smoked black tea, su mao feng green tea, and an herbal blend of white chrysanthemum and jiao gu lan, as well as for iced milk oolong which is as awesome as it sounds.
3.  Today (Wednesday) we went and had a delicious lunch at Odd Duck and shared some of the aforementioned iced milk oolong (you make a lot at once) with them.  Odd Duck makes classic rustic dishes with genuine sincerity and inspiration.  This year they won Best New Restaurant in Austin from the Austin Chronicle (Sugar Mama's, another West China Tea Company client, also won a Chronicle award for best bakery).  We're developing a tea program for Odd Duck which is exciting not just because they're a great up-and-coming restaurant in a city full of great restaurants, but because they're not afraid to get super classy.  The teas they'll be carrying are some of our higher end teas - including Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong, the elegant smoked black tea of Wuyi Mountain - that we seldom get to show off.  One day, we're hoping, they will also carry another of our finest second-tier teas, Duck Shit.  Then they can call it Odd Duck Shit.
4.  Coming up:  Fall Equinox Convergence starts on Friday and goes through the weekend!  Tonight is your last chance to pre-register and if you do, and you should, use the code "TEA" to save $10.  The following weekend we'll be heading down to Houston to serve tea at the first Dreamdance of the season.  These monthly conscious ecstatic dance events started in Seattle and are entering their second year in Houston, and on November 12th we'll be doing Dreamdance here in Austin as well. That means we'll be serving tea at, at the very least, two dance parties per month. So I hope you like tea with your conscious revelry, because we bringin' it Texas style.
In other tea news:  Little white tea balls are a thing, more on that later, as well as a belated review of that adorable yellow tea and the mystical tale of Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong by request.  Creeping ever closer to the reality of a teahouse at Spider House, and soon I'll be doing Tuesday office hours at the Wunder-Pilz Tea Gallery on South Congress instead of at the east side warehouse.  We're calling it Teausday.
That's all for now.  It turns out I have more stuff to blog about than I have blog juice.  Ciao tea lovers, out there in tea land.
S-H

Fall Equinox Convergence!

Good news for those of you who missed us at Spring Equinox Convergence: it turns out fall has an equinox too, and we'll be celebrating it at Jacob's Wellspring with tea, cacao, yoga, kirtan, sound healing, workshops and education, and Happy Happy James!! Register with the code "TEA" and get $10 off your retreat package.  Pre-registration ends Wednesday night. 

Come have some positive fun that builds community and promotes physical, spiritual, and environmental health.  

A Teahouse for Austin

When I was little and personal computers were new, we would play some very simple computer games at school.  One of my favorite ones of these was a simulation of running a lemonade stand.  You had to buy the sugar, lemons, and water, and then set your price for a glass of lemonade, choose what your sign would say, and gradually you would build up the amount of materials you could buy and grow your little lemonade business. 

This is how I feel every day, as an actual business owner.  I sell off my tea and save my money and then, next time around, I can buy a little more tea than I had before, and make a little more money.  I put away the surplus profits and use them to buy a sign, or attractive packaging, or something less interesting like buy insurance.  But it all feels like this jolly little simulation, where your success – how often someone actually buys your product – depends on a combination of choices you make and an infinitely complex algorithm that we call fate. 

The basic maneuver is, at its essence, straight arbitrage.  It goes in little escalating waves, like a rollercoaster, getting higher and higher with each pass.  Eventually, hopefully, you build up enough steam to crest the tallest hill and soar down the other side for a while before it all begins again.

The next big hill for my company is a brick and mortar space where we can sell and serve tea.  That’s the beginning of Phase II – controlling the means of acquisition and distribution of the tea. Having a teahouse/teashop means that there’s a real, solid, consistent place that people can go to buy our tea.  Up until now, you could only buy it at HOPE farmer’s market on Sunday, or our East Side headquarters on Tuesdays and Fridays, or a very limited selection scattered amongst a dozen or so local Austin businesses.  Getting over that next hump means that when someone asks me “where can I get your tea?” I can send them to a physical place with normal business hours. 

Soon there will be two places like that.  Under the auspices of Wunder-Pilz kombucha, several of my friends and I have joined forces to create a secluded little upstairs boutique and art gallery space on South Congress.  In addition to West China tea it sells Chocosutra Chocolate, Wunder-Pilz Kombucha, handmade jewelry by Clementine & Co., handmade ceramics by Chris Long, and imported Oaxacan goods.  It’s by-appointment only and features a rotating art installation by different local artists, curated by Katie Rose Pipkin.  It’s small and doesn’t have all of my inventory but it does have the higher-end teas and teawares that I don’t want to bring back and forth to the Farmer’s Market every week, and more importantly, it’s open Monday through Saturday from 2-7. 

The second place is going to be an actual teahouse where people go to drink tea, like the teahouses in China.  Chengdu, my adopted Chinese hometown, is famous for the many traditional teahouses that line the lazy Funan river.  These are generally quiet courtyards and verandas, paved with flagstones and shaded by trees and pots of bamboo.  The leisure-loving people of Chengdu spend hours in the creaky wicker chairs drinking tea, playing ma jiang, reading, and enjoying the breeze and the river. 

Austin’s new teahouse is going to be based on the traditional Chengdu teahouse, and its courtyard will be the broad, brick-paved courtyard of Spider House, an Austin institution tucked away on a tree-lined side street just north of campus, right off the main drag.  Once a coffee shop, now more of a bar, Spider House hosts a fleet of symbiotic mini businesses on its sprawling campus, including several food trucks and a tattoo parlor.  We intend to open next month in a free-standing building at the back of the courtyard, where we will remain true to the core principal of a teahouse and do nothing but serve tea.  No food, no coffee, no sweeteners or milk or lemon or flavorings – just pure tea, by the cup or the pot, and, God willing, we’ll even have a dark, quiet little inside space with cushions and low tables where people can practice the exquisite art of Gong Fu Cha.

My intention is for it to be a distinct entity from West China Tea.  I’m not interested in taking on investors for West China Tea but I’d be willing to for the teahouse, which will essentially be a separate business that buys, prepares, and serves West China Tea.  I’m not sure what I’ll call it yet, but I’ve been toying with Bat City Teahouse.  Austin is Bat City after all, and bats are good luck in Chinese culture, and the West China Tea Company logo is a bat.  I’m open to suggestions on the name! 

We are supposed to open the Spider House space next month, but it all depends on my ability to get the space up to code – that means lots of sinks, apparently – and on Spider House getting their Change of Use approval for the space.  Once it’s open, Austin will have its own Chinese style teahouse, and I’ll finally have a real life lemonade stand.  The anxiety, and the anticipation, of trying to make it a reality forms a knot in my stomach as the rollercoaster climbs, trestle by gut-wrenching trestle, to the precipice of destiny. 

The Tea Gallery is located on South Congress and is open Monday through Saturday, 2-7.  Call 512-387-4770 for directions and to make an appointment.

Tea of Consciousness

It’s 2 AM and I can’t sleep because the words are whirling around inside me like moths looking for an open window.  Writing a post for this blog – I was going to write something about Yellow Tea – has been on my to-do list every day for a long time and I keep trying to start but I keep getting stopped because at the end of the day, the thing I’m writing, it can’t really be what it is because when I’m writing it it feels like an advertisement.  That’s not to say it has to be, but that’s how it was feeling.  So I guess I’m A Little Teapost is going all gonzo meta-tea blog for a while, maybe forever. 

I’m not a naturally disciplined person.  The only way I can convince myself to do something every day is to make it into some kind of ritual – something that you do for its own sake, because it’s sacred, without any anticipation of a material outcome.  

Somehow, promoting myself or my business never felt “sacred” to me, it actually feels very profane on a deep level.  Marxist leanings aside, it’s a personal thing – I’ve tried to approach it with an attitude of sanctity, but it just doesn’t take.  It’s like trying to stick something to the fridge with a Lego.  That doesn’t mean I don’t believe it can be a good, positive thing – some of the best things in life are profane:  Sex, Doritos, pooping.  But to my mind the most profane of all things is money, and the world we live in is one dominated by money, wherein acquiring ever-increasing amounts of capital is an absolute necessity.  Without it, bills pile up, you go into debt, and you’re driven into a kind of existential slavery.  Either you find some way to make money or you’re chewed between the gears of the great Free Market like a pomegranate seed in the teeth of a laughing Shah.

So here I find myself, “balls deep in Capitalism”, as they say.  Importing tea was a natural step for me because I love tea and I had possession of one of the hardest pieces of the puzzle:  direct contact with Chinese tea farmers.  But I don’t just love tea; tea is one of the things I love the most.  I almost love it too much to sell it.  It’s been my hobby, my spiritual practice, and my main form of social interaction for more than a decade.  Selling it puts my ideals at odds with themselves.  Even just two sentences ago, when I mentioned my farm contacts, the affected voice of a used car salesman emerged in my internal narrative, replacing my own voice.  I find myself upon the horns of a dilemma, which is something I always wanted to be able to say I found myself upon.

I’ve resolved this internally by two routes.  The first is based on the postulate {Tea is good for people, therefore, it is good to sell tea to the people}. Even if you don’t invest as much spiritual significance in it as I do, it has been found repeatedly to have beneficial effects on human health, and that’s SCIENCE.  So, even if I’m selling it, at least it’s not hurting people, it’s helping them.  That’s really good and so is spreading tea culture, because tea culture is beautiful and practicing the elegant traditions of other cultures enriches people.  That’s super subjective but I believe it to be true and that’s what really counts, right?  It gives people a way to socialize without alcohol or substances, and teaches patience, quiet reflection, and the appreciation of austere luxury.  And it’s also Chinese culture, which helps promote unity and cultural understanding.  Thusly do I assuage my raging inner Socialist, who remains skeptical.

The second route is based on the postulate {Once the company makes enough money we’ll buy land and establish an alternative society}.  I’m not going to get super into that, because it would be premature, but it’s going to involve a tea farm, badass little wood and earth Chinese houses, aquaponics, and a zeppelin.  What it won’t involve – at least not the actual tea farm and its associated community – is money.  The goal is not to acquire money but to transcend it.  That said, everything leading up to the establishment of the farm will involve rampant money-making, because if you want to make a place where you don’t have to use money, you have to first have a place, and places cost money. This is Phase III of the company’s business model and I’ve been hesitant to talk about it publically but I figure it’s not like tons of people read I’m A Little Teapost.  Anyone who’s willing to read this far through so much stream-of-consciousness nonsense can be privy to my deep-seated counter-Capitalist Utopian ambitions.  Anyways, it’s getting too frustrating to keep on keeping it a secret.  I feel like a chump because trying to hustle things all used-car style is chumpy in the extreme.  I’m not giving up, I’m not saying that the world is ok the way it is and that I’m just going to make my way in it the best I can because it’s all we can do after all.  I’m just building up enough rocket fuel to get a ship out of orbit, far from the gravitational pull of money and the need for propulsion.  It just takes a lot of rocket fuel to get there.

So I’m going to let I’m A Little Teapost be whatever it wants to be.  I’ll just do something in it every day.  I can’t promise it will be good or interesting or even, as this post turned out, mostly about tea.  But it won’t be advertising.  It’ll just be me, talking about my life and my company and whatever else as I attempt to Judo-flip the American dream.  

I also write monthly for a widely-read tea blog, T Ching.  They encourage me to promote myself through my blog contributions and I’m going to ignore the Looney Tunes theme song that cranks to life in my head as I shamelessly promote it to coincide with my latest article being published and post the link, www.Tching.com. I’ll try to keep Business So-Han on that side of the internet. 

Thanks for reading,

Regular So-Han