March 2nd, 2010
I am proud to announce that our company, Chicago Tea Garden is finally open for business. We have 9 teas from David Lee Hoffman’s Phoenix Collection to start and some local tea-ware from Chicago Potter — Chris Chaney. Lainie Petersen has written a wonderful article on us as the Chicago Tea Examiner, see it here. The Little Yellow Teapot also wrote an article about our opening: here.
I chose to sell David Lee Hoffman’s teas to start for a few reasons… the man is a pioneer in the tea industry. He has relationships with farmers all over China and has been granted unprecedented access to some of the finest teas to reach our shores. Second, most of the pu-erh he has was obtained years before the pu-erh craze — and since then it has been aging in man-made pu-erh caves that he has created here in the United States. So not only is his pu-erh old, but it is authentic and has been stored properly for years. It is hard to buy pu-erh from China these days without having doubts towards its authenticity.
We are also working with tea farmers in India, Japan, and Hawaii as well — we just wanted to see how things go at first with our offering of 9 teas… no use jumping the gun here. But as I sip my last bit of tea for the day — I am thankful for everyone that pushed me to reach this goal – especially Erin — without her support this wouldn’t have happened. It was an exciting day today – I launched the site at noon and I sent out an email to the 77 people that had signed up for the newsletter, I notified my facebook friends, and tweeted. I’m pretty sure my host hates me because as the tweets started to flow, the site went down a few times and things moved at a general snail’s pace. At one point so many people were on the site at one time that I couldn’t even access the admin panel to view orders so I just left the house and went for a walk hoping to return to a working site. I can’t believe the support everyone gave me on twitter — I want to thank each and every one of you for helping me spread the word, that I am finally a tea merchant. A dream I joked about several years ago. Thanks also to everyone that blogged about our teas so far. Every time I find a review on one of our teas, I will link to the review on the product page.
Thanks again! Now that the site is up, I can get back to the normal World of Tea routine — sorry it has been so long.
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Tags: chicago, tea
Posted in Tea Events | 3 Comments »
January 26th, 2010
Its been a long time coming, but I am finally starting my own tea company. Things are in the late stages, teas have been sourced, packaging is finalized. I’m just working on the web site at this time, so if there is anything that annoys you about tea shop sites, please let me know asap! I’m a web developer by trade, so I’m developing the site myself. It should be up soon. Thats all I can say, soon. This idea started in 2006 with a trip to China. My partner, Erin Murphy and I are excited to get things up and running! The website is: http://www.chicagoteagarden.com you can sign up there to receive an email when the shop opens. We hope to open a brick and mortar shop in Chicago within 5 years. Chicago needs good tea. Tea shops here are few and far between. World of Tea will remain in its current format — nothing will change here, this will not become a marketing engine — I will still review any teas and any tea-ware and I will still write about tea culture here. I’ve met too many great people through this site to ever shut it down. I am thinking about shutting down The Tea Roundtable though [http://www.tearoundtable.com] it has been overtaken by spam and I just don’t have the time to maintain it. If anyone would like to take over ownership of it, please let me know. I want to thank everyone for supporting my dream. Erin and I are very excited to start this up! Here are some sneak-peek photos:
If you’d like you can sign up right here to get an email when we go live with the online store:
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Tags: chicago, tea
Posted in Tea Online | 5 Comments »
August 10th, 2009
I set out about two weeks ago to explore Chicago’s Chinatown — just off the Cermak-Chinatown Red Line stop. I hoped to find tiny tea-houses tucked away off the main streets, tea importers, tea shops — I hoped to find a mecca of tea right in my own city. However, I found none of this. Not even an inkling of hope. I left completely and utterly disappointed.
I began walking around, first North on Wentworth to China Square on Archer, there were many shops, Americanized restaurants, Chinese Herbs, bookstores, and a few stores selling cheap souvenirs. The only store slightly of interest was the Chinese Cultural Bookstore [2145B S. China Place] which had a small selection of Yixing pots (all above $100USD) and an instructional video called “Learn China’s Art of Enjoying Tea With Me” which I purchased and have not yet watched.
I then walked down Wentworth into the heart of Chinatown, going down each side-street a block or two just hoping to uncover a gem of a shop. But there was nothing to be found. I stopped by the well known Ten Ren tea shop on Wentworth. It is a classic Chinese tea shop, the walls lined with shelves of large tea tins. I had to wonder how long the tea had been sitting in the tins. They had one pu-erh cake priced at $20.00USD, and many tea-wares — few items to be found under $50.00USD.
Surprisingly the most “authentic” Chinese teahouse I’ve found in the Chicagoland area is in Evanston. It is called Dream About Tea [http://www.dreamabouttea.com/] if you get up there, make sure you check it out. Lastly, if anyone knows of any tea spots in Chicago’s Chinatown (perhaps I missed a few streets? maybe an entire section of Chinatown?) please enlighten me!
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Tags: chicago, chinatown, tea, teahouse, ten-ren
Posted in Tea Travel | 4 Comments »
Hooray for you! As soon as my tea budget recovers, I have my eye on a few of your teas. All the Best to you.
Is there/will there be a brick-and-mortar store in Chicago?
Jay, we’re only going to be online at first! Hopefully a brick-and-mortar is in our future, depends on our success, thanks!