Verdant Tea | Small Family Tea Farmers

Verdant Tea is dedicated to
the story of the growers,
our partners.

We are all about representation, bringing teas never before seen outside China to the world with a unique direct trade model based on personal relationships.

SPOTLIGHT:
our oldest partners -
the He Family in Laoshan Village

Mr. He in Laoshan Village remembers when his father struggled to even grow enough food on their land to feed the family. Now Mr. He’s work in tea has raised up the whole village, and helped to establish a shared workshop space for tea finishing.

By partnering with Verdant, Mr. He is able to take risks on new growing techniques like Laoshan oolong that are bringing national attention to the new growing region. Today, his now internationally famous tea provides a living for his entire family and the cooperative that has grown up around it, and inspired local regulations to declare Laoshan an environmentally protected growing region.

Mr. He in his tea fields

He Qingqing and her mother in the workshop

Mr. He works while his granddaughter watches

What makes good tea?

Ms. Li and her mother climb their trees to pick in Qianjiazhai

Good People

The best tea in the world takes the skill and care of people committed to what they do, people who own their land and control their entire process without being hidden or controlled by a brand.

Craft starts in the fields.

Our partner farmers work over generations to care for their land, encourage biodiversity, plant the right tea for their climate, use clean organic and sustainable techniques, and pick every bud and leaf entirely by hand.

Native plants grow alongside tea in the Zhang Family's fields

Craft continues in the workshop.

Tea requires skills that take generations of accumulated knowledge to perfect. Our partners craft every batch by hand and adjust their technique to match the harvest and the weather. Some of their teas take over 40 hours of straight finishing work to bring from fresh leaf to finished tea, and months or years more for some aged teas.

Shui Huamin finishes Dragonwell green tea

All this so that - no matter how you brew - your tea tastes perfect.

Brewing great tea takes no fuss. Our partner farmers got all the hard work out of the way.

Try our simple tea challenge:

Take the leaves, put them in your favorite mug or tempered glass, add hot water and enjoy. No timers, no thermometers, no scales, no worries. Even brewed this simply, these teas should be unlike anything you’ve tasted before.

That’s because they are the true work of real small farmers - our partners and co-founders - not the work of big plantations with a mechanized processes. These will change the way you think about tea, and about tea farming.