Chinese style tea will always be at the core of my business. Sharing the roots, origins and culture of this ancient tradition as much as I know and continue to learn.

However, over the course of our western civilization, colonisation and distribution of tea, mass-marketing has done an ill job of informing the consumer of the nature of tea.

The marketing now I feel like is in the undoing, the un-marketing.

When you read articles or blogs online about tea or look at packaging, please take it with a grain of salt.

There is more to tea than just health benefits, weight loss, antioxidants, etc. If that was the case we could live off a tea-based diet 😅

While all those things are wonderful please note these studies are usually conducted only on the tea that is available to researchers and there is quite literally tens of thousands of different teas. To say all tea has caffeine or green tea does this or that can be misleading as there are even thousands of different green teas.

Some of the best tea research to be found will come out of tea producing countries like Taiwan, Japan and China.

Some western studies will not even mention where their tea comes from. Just says 'black tea' for example. Then has everyone in fear of caffeine. The researcher themselves could already have a misconception about tea. They are most likely using a teabag. Now we could perhaps have whole generations fearful of caffeine or encouraging them to consume poor green tea in bags. . It's okay to just enjoy tea. We do this with wine and coffee for instance. Don't need a "health" benefit, but mood or sensory benefit.

To understand tea starts with undoing everything we know about tea and starting fresh. De-colonizing the tea is de-colonizing the mind.

Now, I believe more than ever the focus is our mental health, peace of mind and doing the simple things right including agriculture, food, taking care of nature and one another. Building community.

If you see myself or fellow small tea business owners marketing what you are most likely seeing is the un-marketing, bringing to light the truth about the tea and undoing generations of colonisation.