For our next interview, we sat down with David Duckler who is the founder of Verdant Tea. He is a direct importer, working with farmer-friends in China who cultivate an incredibly unique green and black tea on their 15 acre plot. To continue to learn more about David and his tea journey, grab your cuppa and take a read of his insightful, and elaborate responses to our questions. Enjoy!
How & when did you first notice your love for tea?
My love for tea is an extension of my love for classical Chinese culture. I am a translator of Chinese literature, and a scholar of Chinese philosophy. When I was a young boy, my mother was finishing her degree in art. She would let me wander the Minneapolis Institute of Art (under supervision) while she was in class. I would go straight to re-built reception halls and scholars studios in the Chinese art section and imagine myself as a Song Dynasty calligrapher. The culture of the Song Dynasty, with its devotion to appreciating beauty, appealed to me innately.
I first went to China to improve my classical Chinese language skills. I was seeking the beauty I found as a child at the museum through old texts, language and philosophy. What I found was tea. Nostalgia for times past is fine, but I was struck irreversibly by the thriving, dynamic, and still very much living culture of tea present in China. The culture of tea embodies humility, hospitality, and of course, instills a love of beauty. It does so through the involvement of all the senses. When I saw tea ceremony in China, there was no going back. I fell head-over-heels in love, and it wasn’t for taste, health benefits, or caffeine. It was for the culture.
Tell me about your company, Verdant Tea. What/who inspired you to create it? and are there any bigger plans in the future for it?
When I first got back from my last trip to China doing field research collecting the folklore of tea farmers, I wanted like nothing else to share what I had discovered. In my mind tea was the perfect antidote (or compliment) to the way we live our lives today. The ritual of drinking tea every day brings people together, it creates a time and space in the day for a person to enjoy the simple beauty of taste and aroma, and to contemplate our connection to the land. I immediately started teaching classes on tea, doing seminars at universities, and writing on the subject of tea. Unfortunately, I found that my point just wasn’t sinking in for people.
I did some investigation, ordering tea from top-rated businesses across the world, drinking tea at local teahouses. Much of it was good tasting, but it lacked a certain magic. There is a subtle line that separates good tea, from revelatory tea. I was and still am interested in the latter. I realized that companies selling in the US were buying from larger brokers in China, shipping slow ocean freight crates for resale. The human element was missing, the connection between the farmer and the tea drinker. Tea that is cultivated on a small family farm, picked by hand, and consumed fresh is a totally different experience than drinking commodity tea. I started importing tea simply to make a point- to show people that tea could be moving, inspiring and life-changing. What I forgot to factor in is that once people tried such tea, they couldn’t go back. The demand for the small shipments of tea from my friends in villages like Laoshan has grown immensely over the last year, allowing me to grow Verdant Tea into a business that is changing the industry.
I plan strong expansion for Verdant Tea in the coming year- as we reach new customers, we are empowered to take on bolder sourcing projects and continue pushing the boundaries of what tea can be. In 2013 I plan to spend a good portion of the year in China, setting up a permanent office there so that we can more easily work with our farmer-friends, buying their harvest before picking, and getting limited 10-20 pound shipments on the market within days of it being processed. We have meetings set up with Taiwanese tea farmers to expand our selection, and a brainstorming session with Dayi Pu’er on ways we can work together to expand their tea culture institute initiative beyond China. It should be an exciting year!
What is one of your earliest and favourite tea related memory?
One of my earliest and favorite tea memories is from my college years. Of course, I drank tea long before then, but it was in college that tea began to act as a gesture of hospitality for me. I had a big case of mystery green tea bags from an Asian market, and finally got my own water boiler to do tea in the dorm. That year, I started a group to debate philosophy, and one of the most vehement debaters stayed later than everyone else arguing against me. I offered her a cup of green tea, and conversation turned to more civil and light-hearted topics, marking the first cup of tea I shared with the woman I would marry six years later. Many cups of tea would follow that one, leading to our shared cup of tea enjoyed as part of our wedding ceremony.
If you had to choose, what would you say is your favourite cup of tea?
I cannot pick a favorite kind of tea, only favorite individual cups of tea. Each tasting experience is so different, even when you brew up the same tea twice. The experience is dependent on place, company, general mood, etc. My favorite cup of tea has to be the first spring picking of Shi Feng Dragonwell offered to me as a gesture of hospitality by Mrs. Li on her farm when I visited. It was prepared with water drawn from the local spring, just picked and roasted, served in a chipped glass tumbler. The aroma of the tea and the fields, the vibrant green of the dancing leaves, the sound of cicadas in the afternoon heat. That was a perfect cup of tea. The first perfect cup of many to follow, from old cakes of pu’er, to a rare cache of Big Red Robe, to the humble tea of Laoshan Village.
If there was one place in this world you could travel to experience their tea culture, where would it be?
For me, Laoshan Village is the epicenter of tea culture. It is an obscure village in the north of China, far from the traditional centers of tea production, but the people are honest, and kind, with a sincere devotion to their land and to tea as an act of hospitality.
To further my own tea education, I would love to take up offers from farmers in Yunnan to study with them and delve further into wild-harvested tea and pu’er in general. I also have a standing invitation to go back to Japan and study their unique tea culture further. Any opportunities to continue learning can and will be explored. Nobody ever truly becomes a tea expert. The culture is far too vast to absorb in one lifetime. Whenever I can keep learning, I will do so.
Any last words you would like to say about your life and tea?
I am happy to admit that I live in service to tea. I may be the president of Verdant Tea, but the farmers are my supervisors. I exist to facilitate their work, and they exist to facilitate the humble leaf. Tea has captured the devotion of humankind for thousands of years. It is a thrilling prospect to be a part of this long tradition, and hopefully pass the tradition on to many others across the world.
**You can read more about David Duckler at his tea blog on tea folk stories, tasting tea, etc. Feel free to check it out here.