Contents
i. My journey from wine to tea
ii. Building a company I can be proud of
iii. An upset stomach turns my world upside down
iv. The problem with tea in the West today
v. Changing the way teas are sold
My journey from wine to tea
I had always been a wine drinker. In fact, I was so keen with my wine that I took a full week of holiday from work just to take the WSET Level 3, giving me a certificate for wines.
Most recently though, I feel as if I’ve been gripped by some gale force winds in life, bringing me in different directions, often outside of my control. In particular, a couple of recent big changes have compelled me to introspect and to make some changes to how I go about conducting my life.
- Quitting my job
- Food poisoning
I quit my job. The official story is that I was unhappy with some of the changes in the company and the direction management was going.
But the real story is that for many months now, I have been feeling anxious and panicked about moving further and further away from my own life goals.
I’d founded a company in the past, which went very well before going sideways as a result of a double whammy of COVID-19 plus a government policy change that effectively wiped the market I operated in.
Building a company I can be proud of
My dream was to… What was my dream again?
Oh yes, my dream has been, and still is, to build a great company. A company that I can be proud of and does good in the world.
Being in London, I was strategic about what industry I went into the first time I built a company. Fintech is a natural magnet for capital, and is regularly reported on. So that’s the space I had earned my entrepreneurial chops in. And I didn’t do too badly either, making it onto the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2021.
However, one problem with fintech is that no matter how you slice and dice it, it will always revolve around technology that moves money from point A to point B. It can be fun and fulfilling in its own way, but it never ticked the “purpose” box for me. The time in life when I felt the biggest sense of purpose – a calling, almost – was as I was applying to university. I defied the stereotypes of success to go into finance, law or medicine (yes, Asian upbringing), and decided to study Biochemistry, which I believed would allow me to improve human health, and save millions of lives if I put the knowledge I gained from my studies to good use.
Now life happens and the path to the ultimate destination is often windy and laden with obstacles. I’d fantasised about how to get back to something that was related to health time and time again, and there hadn’t been an opportunity I seemed to be able to find yet so far.
This door to a new chapter in life finlaly showed up when I left my job, with nothing lined up.
An upset stomach turned my world upside down
Luckily for me, as I left, I managed to get my employer to agree to a 3-month paid gardening leave.
Unluckily for me, I decided to indulge on cheese that had gone mouldy in my fridge, and I spent my first week of gardening leave strapped to my bed, only interrupted by cold sweats and toilet breaks due to diarrhoea.
My stomach was more than upset, it was in abject misery, and was in need of something comforting. Feeling weak at my knees, I hobbled over to our pantry and grabbed some teas we’d bought from China and brewed it. This tea was pu’er black tea, and unbeknownst to me at the time, was the perfect tea to be having at a moment like this.
As the warmth of the tea washed down my oesophagus and into my stomach, I felt a sudden relief – a gentle, soothing and cleansing sensation swept through my midsection. I reached for the kettle and brewed another cup. And another.
It’s ironic how some of the most major discoveries you make in life can happen when you’re not trying to make them. There I was, feeling sick and unable to any of the projects that I had planned. And yet, it was in this moment as I was sipping this tea that I began to read about the magical properties of the tea leaves that grew in Yunnan Province where the tea tea I was drinking came from.
Apparently, this tea goes through a fermentation process invented in 1972 that transformed many of the chemical compounds in the tea leaves, endowing it with superb digestive and metabolic properties.
I had literally stumbled upon gold.
The problem with tea in the West today
From that moment on, I was hooked. Forced to be teetotal, I as a wine nerd needed a substitute to geek out about.
I was astonished to find how similar the two worlds were – they were almost like parallel universes. For instance, tea leaves, like wine grapes, were also just grown from one plant (Camelia sinensis in the case of tea, and Vitis vinifera in the case of wine). Like wine, tea and its various expressions could be heavily influenced by the terroir of where it’s grown.
Unlike wine though, the best tea in the world is largely kept away from the discerning tongues of the West, being mainly consumed in China. To me, that made no sense – it would be as if the French decided to never export their Bordeaux and to only keep it for national consumption.
And what made even less sense was that unlike wine, there was no discernible, accessible appellation system that allowed consumers to understand the quality and grade of tea. Wine labels like “Bordeaux supérieur”, “Grand cru classé”, “Pauillac”, actually mean something to us (and by the way, supérieur isn’t as superior as they’d have you think). However, in the tea world, it’s pretty much the Wild West, with a lot of false labels that throw you off scent, making it difficult to understand whether you’re paying the right price for what you’re buying. It’s not helped by the fact that all these labels are only in Chinese.
I knew that it was time to do something about this.
Changing the world of tea for the better
This blog article is but one of the first baby steps I am taking to building brut tea – a project to re-invent how teas are consumed. A project to re-engineer how teas are imagined. A project to create novel teas from ancient teas. A project to encourage myself and those around me to create new and exciting things by slowing down. A project to seek a natural and sustainable path towards my end goal.
If I was a photographer, I’ve just switched from digital back to film.
If I was an artist, I’ve just forgone AI generators to pick up my paint brush again.
We are brut tea, savouring life's moments one sip at a time.
comments