Huxbrook Tea

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The Huxbrook Story

Ten years ago I was fortunate enough to be best friends (and also roommates) with someone who got a job at a high end tea shop in Beverly Hills. Not only did Jordan bring home hundreds of estate samples and bags of overstock that amounted to appreciable pounds of specialty loose leaf tea, but he took valuable personal time to pass on his growing knowledge of this vast, exciting, and somewhat gated world.

I was an eager learner. I had always been a tea drinker, owing partly to my sensitivity to caffeine but mostly to my upbringing in the deep south, where admittedly sweet, but unmistakably bold iced tea courses through the proverbial veins of approximately everyone. I thought of myself as the genuine article when it came to being a lover and regular drinker of tea — tea, as I thought I knew it — but I’ve rarely been so humbled as when I took my first sip of silver needles. “These are just the young buds of the tea plant, hand picked in early spring,” Jordan had said. “It’s the highest grade of white tea. Did you know it’s all the same plant? Green, black, white... it’s all made from the tea plant.” Though it sounded obvious, I didn’t know that. As I took another sip, I considered that I also didn’t know that unadulterated tea could possess such rich flavor and depth of character. I felt at once that I didn’t know anything about tea.

This is something I’ve come to realize: many tea drinkers, or self-identified tea lovers, are barely aware of the fundamentals of true tea (meaning from the tea plant — not herbals or botanicals such as chamomile), let alone the larger world of specialty tea, which comprises a different industry than that of commodity tea, the lower quality stuff that is found ubiquitously in tea bags and, for the time being, the tea cups of most Americans. And who could blame them? There’s simply not many resources for getting into specialty tea in America. Tea hasn’t followed the same upward trend of coffee; more often, it rides the coattails of a peripheral lifestyle or health trend, such as the current embrace of matcha in American yoga culture, or the last decade’s green tea boom fueled by new and highly publicized antioxidant research. This kind of trending results in upticks in tea consumption... but not necessarily of the good stuff.

Complicating things, there’s an ongoing disparity between branding and quality. In an industry with very little standardization, it’s as easy as it is tempting to fool unwitting consumers into thinking they’re already getting the premium experience. But in most cases what they’re getting is a chichly designed package littered with relatively meaningless jargon and filled with mediocre tea. And how would anyone know the difference? We seem to be somehow conditioned to just know the difference between good coffee and bad coffee, perhaps because they’re both in ample supply and we encounter them regularly. With tea, not so much.

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