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