it's not a tea problem, it's a Darjeeling problem

a kilo of the good stuff

A while back I talked about how impressed I was with Günter Faltin and his Teekampagne. Actually, in the US it's called the Boston Tea Campaign, and I wrote about it in tea entrepreneur. While I promised I'd come back to the topic, I couldn't talk about it in any way but theoretically. The unavoidable truth was that I'd not had the tea. No matter how good it might be, I couldn't say so without personal experience.

The thing is I have quite a bit of Darjeeling in my possession. People know this stuff is my weakness, so they send it to me. Even when I already have plenty of Darjeeling, the thought of more increases my heart rate and I'm pretty sure my eyes even dilate. I don't have a tea problem. I have a Darjeeling problem.

That's why as excited as I might be about this extraordinary company, the thought of actually going out of my way to get this stuff was really impractical. Just didn't make any sense. That is until my friend Dermot reminded me that he's been ordering this tea for nearly as long as they've been sending it. If you want to know about the Boston Tea Campaign, go take a look at their American website. Really, go check it out. The vision as well as the history of this organisation is very well explained.

Decided to take this opportunity to do a very informal interview with Dermot and ask him how he learned about Teekampagne, as well as some other tea-related things that you might enjoy reading. It's not a very German name my friend has. If you guessed that he was Irish, you'd be right. You've likely heard this, but the Irish drink a lot of tea.

His description of how tea was prepared when he was a child in Ireland would make some of you tea obsessives recoil in horror, but we have to go there. This teablog doesn't just deal with the light and pretty aspects of tea. When it's ugly, I intend to show it in all of its gory detail. If you're sensitive about steep times and such matters, you may want to avert your eyes right now.

It's actually very simple really. Add tea leaves and boiling water to teapot, let it steep, and then drink the tea till it's gone. Don't take the leaves out. They stay in the pot to the bitter end. Literally.

I asked him if the tea was a sludgy abomination by the end of the pot, he insisted that no. It never took that long to finish said pot of tea. That made sense. Not so gory. Those who looked away can come back now.

How did Dermot learn about this source of Darjeeling goodness? He said he moved into a Wohngemeinschaft (shared flat) years ago, and that they already ordered their tea from Teekampagne. Even when he moved away, his taste for this stuff had developed.

Evidently, he has a tea problem, as well.

He told a funny story about going to his doctor years ago, and devising which medications he could take while still drinking coffee. He came to the conclusion that it was easier just to switch to drinking this above-average Darjeeling than have to worry about duelling medications.

He insisted that what he liked most at the outset was Teekampagne's economical price and convenience. If it'd cost more for the fair-trade status, he truly doubted that he'd have become such a loyal customer. I got the impression that only later he realised that the quality of the tea was so noteworthy.

What about the fact that the tea changes from year to year? That each season's tea really has it's own character? 

He smiled from ear to ear, and assured me that that was in fact the very best part.

overly satisfied customer

tea entrepreneur

Some weeks ago, Neil from Neil's Yard told me a story that I'm sure I've heard before but not in such detail. The way he explained it was that there was a business professor in Berlin who wanted to show his students an example of entrepreneurship. He also happened to really enjoy drinking tea. Darjeeling tea to be exact.

If you've read even a little of my blog, you know that this story quickly got my attention. The professor's name was Günter Faltin and his company is called Teekampagne. He was fascinated with how inexpensive products were in their country of origin, so he resolved to sell Darjeeling tea in bulk with nearly no markup. He was offering fair-trade long before it was the done thing. Here's how he describes how his rationale for not charging more for fair-trade:

'The education reformer Ivan Illich who I got to know in the early 1980s, used to argue vehemently against charging extra for fair trade. In this practice, he argued, the customer pays not only for the product but also contributes to an invisible “charity box,” a modern version of buying “indulgences” (paying money to save your soul) – a trade that Martin Luther was already inveighing against. Although charity has some positive effects, it does NOT challenge the business models that put pressure on commodity prices in exporting countries and inflate prices for consumers at the other end. Since it does not represent a systemic change of business practices, it is also not sustainable: it may stop when the charitable giver’s attention is drawn to
another urgent need. We practice fair trade with a different method: we do not charge the consumer so that we can feel good about ourselves; instead, we challenge costly conventions, and the savings benefit everyone. '

That's just one interesting point he makes in a lengthy article called “Citizen Entrepreneurship” for a Meaningful Life. There's enough here to make several meaty blogposts, which I intend to write, but I wanted to quickly introduce him to those of you who might not have heard of him or his company yet. Teekampagne is Germany's largest mail order tea company, as well as the biggest Darjeeling importer in the world.

If you're in the US, you might know his company as Boston Tea Campaign. In Japan, it's called Teeidee. Can't wait to dig in deeper to this guy's ideas.