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The transcription is a conversation between Aaron Sober, the host of The Appropriate Omnivore, and Raj Vable, the founder of Young Mountain Tea. Raj discusses his interest in tea and how he started his company. He explains the importance of sourcing and processing tea organically, highlighting the risks associated with conventional tea and the benefits of organic tea for both consumers and farmers. He also discusses the challenges and impacts of transitioning from conventional to organic farming practices on yield and income for farmers. The conversation emphasizes the goal of Young Mountain Tea to promote sustainable futures for rural villages and the potential of tea to drive social change. Are you confused about real food and what's healthy and good for the planet? Do you need the facts about local, organic and sustainable food? Well, get ready to change the way you eat. Get ready for The Appropriate Omnivore with Aaron Sober. Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Appropriate Omnivore. I'm your host, Aaron Sober, covering lifestyles in the world of real food. Over the last few years, we've seen an explosion of regenerative products and brands. One of the areas we're seeing a big growth in is regenerative tea. My guest today is Raj Vable, founder of Young Mountain Tea. Raj, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me, Aaron. It's wonderful to be here. I appreciate having you on. Right now, I know you're in the growth of your company, starting it all up, and I appreciate that you can come here and talk some tea. Oh, thanks. Let's hear a little bit about how your interest in tea began. Sure. It began with my parents. They migrated from India in the 70s for their graduate studies, and brought with them a tradition of drinking masala chai every single day. And so growing up, that was just part of life. You know, milk with ginger and cardamom, black tea, sugar. It was interesting, though, because I was introduced to tea through that, but I guess your question is how did I get interested. They're actually a little bit different, because growing up, I was lactose intolerant. So I actually kind of associated drinking tea with having an upset stomach. But my interest actually developed for myself when I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon, where one of my friends in the same program, it was an environmental studies program, she took me to a tea house and introduced me to single-origin specialty tea from Taiwan. And from there, just understanding that black tea and green tea and oolong tea and white tea all come from the same plant, triggered what has become an obsession with understanding the whole thing of this magical plant from the flavors that one can create to the botany behind it to the way it can be a catalyst for driving social change. And that's what we're doing at Young Mountain, is trying to thread all three of those needles simultaneously. Yes, and I think it's amazing the different programs that Young Mountain Tea works with with social change. We'll get into that in a little. But first, let's get into how then you turned this into a business. Yeah, I'm laughing because at the beginning, to be honest, there was no real thought about business viability. It was just, I love tea. At that time, I was working with communities in the Himalayas in northern India, and I really wanted to continue working with them. And so, yeah, I was on a Fulbright Fellowship in the Kumaon region of the Indian Himalayas, which is the northern part of India that borders Nepal and Tibet. And the company really began with a promise to a group of farmers that if they would grow tea, I would set up a company in the U.S. to sell it. And neither us, me and my co-founder at the time, knowing what we were committing to, and the farmers really knowing what they were committing to, we shook hands and got to it. So Young Mountain, I guess I've learned, is a little bit unique versus other tea companies in that it started at origin. We've worked our supply chain from India into the U.S. as opposed to starting something from the beginning from the U.S. and working up the supply chain. And, yeah, the goal is much less about tea than it is about sustainable futures for rural villages, where tea is for us a catalyst for that, as I mentioned. It's a vehicle for change, but it's the how of our work as opposed to just the why. So, yeah, happy to go into all parts of that, but I guess just to say that from the beginning, the thought, the emphasis, the drive has always been to unlock tea's fullest potential. And just the way it has for millennia, shaping the course of human history, we hope that it will continue to play a really important role for millennia to come. And part of this work is also ensuring that the tea plant itself has a sustainable future. Because it is a very labor-intensive crop to do well. Unlock tea's greatest potential. I love how you put it like that. And tea has definitely lots of potential to be seen in its greatest form. Tea in general is growing on the market, both conventional and organic. What do you see as the issues with the way conventional tea is sourced and processed? Thank you for that question. It's a really important one for both tea drinkers and for tea farmers. When tea is grown conventionally and sprayed with various pesticides, the reality is that those chemicals are never washed off of the tea. So from the minute it's harvested to when it reaches our cup, a tea undergoes a series of steps that don't involve any cleaning. If you were to wash it, you'd need to wash out the flavor. So when drinking conventional tea, the way one mentor put it, is you're essentially drinking a chemical cocktail. That's the risk that you run. Not that to say that all conventional tea has even a threat of that, but there's a possibility. And so for tea drinkers, drinking organic tea is just smart for protecting your body and making sure good compounds go in and not chemicals. And with organic tea, it's also good. We always do a rinse steep. So pour a little bit of hot water on the tea leaf and then pour that out, which has always traditionally been done to wake up the leaf or to rinse it a little bit. Because even for organic tea, if it's been packaged, it might pick up packaging material stuff from where it's grown in the mountains or along the way. So anyway, that's for the tea drinker. But then for the tea farmer, the use of these chemical sprays, because it is labor-intensive, often ends up on the hands, the skin, the clothing of the farmers, and they bring it home into their houses. So moving away from a model where both farmers and tea drinkers are losing, although yields might be up and the crop might be more pest-resistant, yeah, it's short-term gains to long-term losses. And that's why switching over to more organic-based sourcing is a move that a lot of tea has made over the last couple of decades. My knowledge is pretty specific to India, but even in Darjeeling as an example, which is India's most prized tea origin, almost 50% of the gardens are now certified organic. And that's a seed chain shift from just the early 90s when it was just a movement. And we actually are very fortunate to know some of the people who are at the very beginning of the organic movement in Indian tea, and they're our mentors as well. So, yeah, all of this work, there's always room for improvement, but as it relates to organic specifically, it's a nice one in that there's a direct connection all the way to the tea drinker that helps to justify changes that have to happen and the costs that have to get absorbed by the farmers. Because one other thing is that when a tea farmer switches from using conventional approaches to organic, the removal of a lot of synthetic fertilizers often is accompanied by a drop in yields. So the farmer earns less because their land is producing less. And that's something that the organic premium, the highest price point, helps to mitigate a bit, but usually the farmers sink a little bit. So it has to be a shift that demand justifies. And thankfully, I do think that that is a trend that we see in the market that's likely to sustain and grow as more people care about what goes into their bodies. The yield of crops from organic is a very important topic, I think especially because there are many advantages of organic, obviously the health, which I know some people are skeptic. They say, oh, the levels are low, and obviously I don't agree with that. I'm doing this show, but to get people into organic for a multitude of reasons, the whole yield and that conventional crops, they don't yield the same return in these monocultures. Yeah, that's right. It's an interesting thing to think about yield. It's actually, honestly, personally, something that I've only really begun to study in the last year and a half, because right now, in the same region where we started the company in northern India, we're setting up a processing facility that we co-own with local farmers. That's called Kumaon Tea, and we've been very grateful to have the support of USAID and Friendship Co-op, Acumen, and a couple other partners on that project. And what we've all collectively realized is that the primary purpose of that processing facility and the company we set up that we co-own with farmers is to increase farmers' income, and that is best accomplished by paying the farmers more for their harvest and their yield to go up, and then, of course, sharing the profits of the factory with the community. But of those three levers, the yield is the one that has the most impact for the farmers, but it's also the hardest to do, because when we use organic practices, as I said, even in a monoculture scenario, I have to check with our consultants that I believe the drop is about 30%. So the tea farmers, just by switching off of the synthetics, lose about 30% of their harvested income. And when they diversify out of monoculturing into more agroforestry approaches, they're introducing, hopefully, new crops that could have additional household income, but it's going to take a further hit to the farmers' earnings that they'll get off the harvest. Of course, that doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, but as we got deeper into working with farmers on this, there has to be thoughtful considerations about how that transition from the West to looking outwards makes so much sense for the world to switch to regenerative, but the impact to the farmers is really a pretty complicated one. And it's also interesting because the farmers themselves that we work with, they understand very well and have for millennia the idea of mixed crops as a form of diversity and resilience, not only for their household income, but also for the ecosystem. But with the introduction of cash crops and the introduction of money, capitalist-related thinking into the community, there's already a shift underway. So I know we're covering a lot of ground, but I'm just circling around the complexities involved for the farmers themselves in making these transitions, and the way we've addressed this is with the support of our partners, providing stipends to farmers to help offset whatever loss they might have or drop in yield, and the stipends are given as a form of compensation for them participating in trainings that we've organized to introduce why these concepts matter long-term. Because certainly in the long-term, they are the right solution to diversify the crops, to maintain organic practices, but the short-term is what has often driven these farmers' realities. It's simple for me that the topic of yield is something that I'm still learning a lot about because a lot of the focus has been on agriculture, and as I cover more companies and look more for what are the absolute best, the issue of fair trade, fair working conditions is something that has become very important, and I think that it's a way to then weed out the, okay, organic products from the truly good organic products, that they're not just avoiding sprays, but also that the places where these come from, the conditions are great, and the yield is then one that's another. I mean, I think basically the best way to get people invested in organic is to say as many reasons as possible, so I'd say all these reasons are important, and I like that you've covered a lot of ground because I think it's best to do that when selling the idea of organic and regenerative to everyone. Yeah, thank you. And the stickiness, all these issues are connected. Ultimately, we can't talk about yield without talking about farmer's pay, without talking about soil health. They're all connected, and actually we've entered the world of regenerative agriculture because we need to understand the soil health in order to improve farmer's yields, in order to increase their income. And so we can't start treating these issues in isolation because they don't exist that way. It is a web, and part of the joy, I think, of this work and our approach, which is based very much on partnership with a lot of stakeholders that have expertise, the joy of it is that you get to really dig into the full three-dimensional shapes of these problems and their connection. Of course, the challenge is that it's hard to also run a business when you're putting a ton of energy into understanding things like soil health. And as a small team, like you said, we're still growing our brand in the US. There's definitely decisions that we make around time management to engage with these issues fully while also making sure we're competing in a marketplace. And it's been an interesting check along the way. There's a continual question of, why are we doing this work? And it's been very satisfying for all the members of our team, the broader team, including our partners, to see that by trying to prioritize what we genuinely believe to be the right thing and moving slowly through these things and not trying to aggressively scale things before they're ready, I think we get the chance to create something much more interesting and likely long-term sustainable. But it does come at the expense of the hockey stick trajectory that people like to talk about when they think about food brands in the US. Absolutely. So as we talk about the tea business in general becoming organic and regenerative, let's get into that specifically, Young Mountain Tea. What ways would you say that Young Mountain Tea is sustainable in terms of organic and regenerative and other environmental issues? Sure, yeah. Well, there's a couple of ways we've tried to raise our sustainability game and that's a never-ending process. So it's been kind of fun to adopt the mindset that this is one of continuous improvement and it's not like we ever get to say, like, we're done. We're sustainable. We can eat it endlessly. Prioritize. But yeah, all of the teas in our collection are grown without chemicals. The majority of them are certified organic. There's one producer in this house who the farmer network is to diffuse to secure an organic certification because of the cost involved, but we've tested their teas and confirmed that they're clean. So everything in our collection is not going to be a chemical cocktail when it ends up in one's cup. And that's the starting point. And that's for a collection that is we source about 25 teas from five regions of India and Nepal. And that's from a network of around 2,500 farmers. But really where our work goes deepest is up in this region, Kumaon, that I mentioned previously. And there we are doing soil studies. We have a technical consultant who's an agronomist who has helped us dig into understanding what's going on in the soils. And it's pretty exciting. I was there two weeks ago with him and exciting but also a little silvery in that he said, Raj, I have to tell you the truth. The farmer's yield in this region is the lowest I've seen in my entire career, which spans about 40 years. So he said, the bad news is it's really low. The good news is when you're this low, there's only one way to go and there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. But some of the challenges that he's helped us understand was the low moisture content in the soil, the low NTK values that could be increased to make sure that more nutrients are uptaked by the plant. And it was interesting to understand the relationship between those two. Low moisture means that even if there are nutrients in the soil, they can't get absorbed into the plant if there isn't water to help facilitate that. To some degree. I'm not going to pretend I'm a scientist, but that's what I understand everybody shares. So, yeah. And then also the acidity of the soil. Teas like acidic soils. And this is really touching the edge of what would be the upper range of pH. Tea likes 4.5 to 5.5. Some of the plots that we sampled got up to 5.8, 5.9. So, the plant can survive, but it's not going to be yielding high. And so, I guess when you ask about regenerative, to me this is my understanding, definition of regenerative, is that we're thinking about regenerating the health of the ecosystem that we're stewards of. And by we, I mean the farmers that we work with. We don't at Young Mountain Tea own land. Our work is to empower the farmers to have their own sovereignty. And a big part of that is ownership of their land. So, our role is to help connect them to the kinds of people that can help them understand how they can improve their soil health as the primary indicator of ecosystem health. But at the same time, regenerative, you know, reaching into, as you were saying, the fair trade and social sides of it. Understanding what kind of income the farmers need to earn to make it worth their while. And recognizing that tea is, just reaching Kumau, it is one of the anchors of household income, but it's not the exclusive one. And that's a good thing, we believe, because we don't want the farmers to all be in one basket. And so, in terms of farmers being stewards of the ecosystem, if they don't earn enough to maintain their livelihoods, then the ecosystem will have a steward. And I guess we could talk about it separately whether or not it's better if the ecosystem had no human involvement. But recognizing that we're also trying to make sure that tea drinkers get tea. There's going to be some human interaction and so, yeah. Again, the relationship between thinking of things that are still out, thinking of mechanisms that farmers can earn more, and the big experiment of Kumau and tea is to see what happens when the farmers own the processing facility, which is the most lucrative part in tea's value chain. And so, that's how we're addressing, we believe, the income side of it. And, yeah, beyond that, animal rights are another part of regenerative agriculture that doesn't really fit into our work so cleanly because tea is a perennial crop that doesn't really have any animal-related consideration. So, the way Young Mountain has addressed that at origin, I guess, is mainly through this model that we're developing in partnership with Kumau Tea Farm. Okay, and then beyond that, sustainability-wise, our packaging is always an area where we're trying to improve. This is definitely a collective effort of everybody involved in the supply chain because we, as a brand, are kind of limited to what kind of packaging exists and we're not packaging manufacturers. And consumers also have to be engaged and comfortable with paying more because things like compostable materials cost more. And so, the way we've done that is, yeah, designed our packaging to be zero waste. It comes in tins that are reusable and recyclable. And the tea itself is just the leaves of the tree, so it can be composted. And people buy it in our teabags. Our teabags are made of 100% sugar-free PLA that breaks down into organic matter. So, not microplastics, but also things that will go back into the earth. And we also have an option on the checkout for people buying tea through our site where they can offset the carbon footprint of their tea. So, that's another piece of the puzzle. And then finally, what we've worked a little bit with some people to understand is what we can think of as the carbon capture potential of the tea plants themselves because these are trees that were lived to be over 150 years old. In fact, in Kumau, a lot of the tea bushes are 160 years old right now. And so, they're sucking carbon dioxide out their entire lives. So, I guess there's a lot of frontiers of sustainability. And those are some of the ones that we're involved with. But we're always learning about more ways we can improve our game. And it's a fun road to be on. Yes, many facets to sustainability. I like your definition of regenerative agriculture. You cover, I would say, three important areas. Probably the one that is most associated with regenerative agriculture is soil health, but also animal use and social fairness. Now, I know you mentioned that animal use doesn't really play a role in it. There's different ways that animal welfare can be part of regenerative agriculture. Obviously, some farms do mixed farming where the livestock provides the fertilizer for the crops. But others, I know, it just has to do with being in an area where there is wildlife habitat that's kept in eco-balance. Are there any ways that animals do play a role directly or indirectly with the agriculture of de-farming, specifically the ones that you work with? Yes, thanks for helping me out because I was in fact, in my head, animals aren't really part of what we do. But both the things you said are 100% representative of what our farmer partners do, which is that, in fact, just two weeks ago, we bought a whole bunch of cow manure off of local farmers and mixed it with oak trees, dropping the leaves of oak trees, and spread that out on our gardens to serve as a mulching layer. This is actually to address the low moisture content in the soil. Right before the monsoons hit, by layering it with cow manure, it'll help the soil hold onto the water. So certainly, yes, cows are centrally involved there. And then because a lot of the areas surrounding the farms is wildland habitat, there are a lot of other species that are present in the tea gardens and for better or for worse, feeding on the tea plants at times, especially the barking deer. I remember when I was in Darjeeling and working with a mentor named Raja Banerjee, he was on a point about, if you see spiders in a tea garden, that's a sign that something is going well. He said that if there's pesticides and stuff, that means these insects, which are like critical to the overall food chain, aren't present. And so, yeah, we see a lot of spiders for sure. We see a lot of river insects as well. So thanks for having me on. Maybe you can give us some advice on other ways we can think about ways animals' welfare could be sacrificed. This has been something which has been a major focus of this podcast. I almost feel bad for listeners to, again, hear these questions about regenerative agriculture, but it's such an important area and a new term that I find a lot of people still don't know what it is that I feel there's a need to help. Whether it's listeners or yes, it makes me feel great that I can help also guests learn more about what regenerative agriculture is. Yeah. You know, I'll say this too. It's been interesting. I guess I haven't felt like there's a conclusive definition yet. I feel like the word sustainability is a big umbrella term that are intentionally broad to be able to adapt to the context that they're getting used in. But it has been interesting, generally, to reflect on the ways our farmer partners already work, the way they have done farming for centuries, really kind of speaks to a lot of these practices already. There definitely are practices that we were able to introduce because we learned about them, like not tilling. That was one of the things the farmers would weed around the tea bushes with hoes. And so that was a conversation that I had earlier with them. Like, okay, well, stop doing that and hand weed instead. It takes a little more time. But that was what these stipends are directing at, to the farmers, that if you do these practices, we can help you out with them monetarily. But yeah, it is interesting to me that it feels like it's a lot of descriptions of things that they're already doing. Not to say that it doesn't mean that you can't always improve, but sometimes I get a little skeptical about how much importance we put on things like packaging and formats that, in the Western world, the U.S., are intellectually interesting but have already been in practice in other parts of the world for a lot longer. But thanks. Thanks again. Last week, I had Elizabeth Whitlow, Executive Director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, on my program. And she talked about what's required, the three pillars for regenerative certification. And it was very similar to what you described, of soil health, animal welfare. And then the last one was social fairness, which I thought was very interesting because soil health and also animal welfare are very much commonly seen as part of regenerative agriculture. But the social fairness makes a lot of sense for something, too, to be truly regenerative, that every employee needs to be treated fairly and is receiving a living wage and has opportunity at owning part of the business. Yeah, absolutely. I think it is wonderful that there's a priority about the human side of ecosystem health. It feels like if you're only focusing on the ecosystem without recognizing that we're involved in it, it's just an inaccurate picture. And actually, yeah, I know Elizabeth. I have a tremendous amount of respect for what she's doing with ROA and with SAROC. And respectfully, she knows this. The social fairness part is one of the pillars that I think, again, conceptually makes a lot of sense. But one of the things we learned is that some of the criteria for those certifications exist differently in different parts of the world. So, for example, if an entity is operating in a, quote, global north, they don't have to have the same certification, baseline certifications in place as if they operated in the global south. And that to me is a challenge because that means that farmers already outside of formally capital-driven world have additional administrative work and costs that those operating in the global north do. So, I think social fairness, it's a beautiful idea and needs to be recognized. I hope that as a movement, if that's what the regenerative space is, indeed, that it remains a learning one in being inclusive and correcting itself when it's disproportionately burdening the people that I think it really exists to help serve. You talk a lot about the different processes of making the farm sustainable and everything that goes into it. When you look for farms in the beginning to source with, are there minimum requirements that you need from them? Yes, there are. First, that we can interact directly with the farm. That's the hardest one for us. If we can't actually talk to the people that are doing the work, then that's a no-go. And unfortunately, it's a very common conversation is that, understandably, the people who represent different producer groups in selling feed into the U.S. want to protect their sources and their information. And so, often, that's not something that they're interested in. So, a hard requirement that we get to go talk to the actual people first and foremost. Beyond that, we have what we call supplier scorecards that we go through to make sure that we're checking enough of the boxes that, for us, feel like there's no magic fit, but is the farmer group one that we can actually help? Meaning, like, what is their existing connection to the outside world? Because if they already are marketing internationally, they probably don't need a ton of support from us to continue to do that. Sometimes we have worked certainly with those groups and learned from them. And thankfully, one of the beautiful things and a requirement for us is that, is there an interest from a producer in sharing their experience with other producers within our network so that there can be some cross-pollination and best practices? And so, that's why we have worked with larger groups that probably don't need our help, but have already pioneered a practice that we think another farmer group could work from. So, that idea of, like, yeah, cross-pollination or collaboration is another thing we look for in working with producers. And then, kind of, the flip side of that is if they're too established, then we, you know, what we offer might be minimal. The other side of that is if they're not far enough along being based in the U.S., there's only so much help we can provide. So, are they able to navigate at least within the Indian context, within the Nepali context, the food safety requirements necessary to stay in compliance with what's happening food safety-wise in the U.S.? And that's a tough one because it's not getting any easier and the same standards that are imposed in American-based producers are getting imposed abroad and that's a tricky one for farmers who have no cultural context for some of the rules they're required to introduce. And so, that's a capacity question that we kind of go into and try to do it in the form of partnership and that will help you and learn with you. That's something that we also set out. Of course, it's, is the tea good? That's probably where I should have started. If the tea's not good, then we can't really add it to our collection because we are a specialty tea company and want to preserve that quality at all steps so that if people like the tea, whether or not they know where it's coming from, if they buy it, they're supporting the whole body of work. And that's actually in some ways the ideal is that people, you know, what we like to say is come for the quality and stay for the mission but make sure the quality is always there. And so, that's another piece and then pricing is another consideration although we try not to let that be a barrier. We try to get creative about working with them. Say if we can consolidate with other producers to bring down shipping costs or if we can take a small amount of the most expensive tea and then like a medium amount of another tea, that's something we've explored. But yeah, so all those things get factored in from the quality to the capacity to the do you need our help to are you able to work with others to can we just directly interact with you. All of those things get factored in. There's no magic formula but it's kind of one of these things. A lot of this work is based on trust and it's can fundamentally we trust you and can we enter into true partnership with you so we can grow together. And we try and once we've made that decision really not deviate from being a reliable and good customer to the farmers because the number one sin that we can commit as a company trying to be good is to introduce instability into the farmer's lives by buying a whole bunch of tea one year and then selling it buying a whole bunch of tea one year and then not the next year. And sadly that has happened. We have had to go through that but thankfully it's not a reoccurring problem and it's a question that we talk to with our farmer partners and the understanding that this is a mutual and long term relationship is well understood by both sides and that really comes out of trust which takes a lot of time to build but I go to India and Nepal a few times every year and a big part of that is to maintain those relationships and keep building on the trust that we have. I like that you bring up the importance of the tea being good because that is important for any kind of organic product that it's wonderful that everything is properly sourced that it's fair trade fair working conditions even the packaging is great but ultimately people are not going to buy something if they don't like the taste of it. 100% definitely. Yeah and that's also the fun part as a personal tea drinker is the opportunity to drink really good tea. And to drink not good tea as well and that's fine but this kind of tea for me the difference is is there a complexity and is there a story line to the experience of drinking the tea a sensory story line like from the aroma to the beginning to the middle to the finish to the mouthfeel to all of it like is it an experience that fully captures my attention and is it one that when we share with our customers they grab onto it because yeah a lot of our customers have been with us within the business for their 11th year and many of the ones who I think of as friends trust us to bring them good teas and to your point you can have all the nice things in the world to say about it but if the tea doesn't taste good it's not going to work for anybody and so that is both a joy and a requirement for a good partnership. And also everybody has different opinions different tastes as far as what the best type of tea is so I know that you offer a wide variety of flavors let's talk about those now. Sure thanks yeah this is a collection of almost exclusively teas from the Camellia sinensis plant so the Camellia sinensis is a species sinensis of China first place was really recognized and celebrated and intentionally cultivated although there's several other indigenous homes including one in Assam in India and in that single plant the processing of its harvested leaves make black tea green tea white tea oolong matcha pu-erh and a few others that's a tremendous amount of range and while tea is often thought of because it's got caffeine as a companion to coffee or companion or so I guess it actually as an agricultural product has a lot more similarities with wine in that these teas and the growing condition plants have a strong influence on the flavor and the post-harvest processing is what differentiates the different styles most of the styles I mentioned we have black teas green teas white teas and oolong with the processing facility that we're setting up in partnership with our farmer partners we can begin to make all of those teas from a single tea garden and we can do that from different regions tea getting harvested at different times of the year and different styles as I mentioned we've worked from five regions of India and Nepal so Kumon is the one I've been talking about the most but we also work with farmers partners in Darjeeling in Assam in eastern India so compared to many other traditional tea companies that have blends that's not really our specialty our specialty is in the purest form of the tea and the highest quality we can find in a way that aligns with all our principles we talked about and that's actually a big part of enjoying specialty tea my personal favorite is Kumon white tea our most popular one is Assam black which is the same base that makes all our tea and that tea is called golden black and it's a really wonderful introduction to the way specialty tea is different than say ellipton or what we may have grown up being familiar with and it has a lot to do with the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea is made and that is the way that tea