The Tea Letter #12: The San Francisco International Tea Festival 2022
I got my first chance to serve and sling tea on the other side of the table at this year's SFITF.
It’s been three years since my last trip to the San Francisco International Tea Festival (SFITF). Like all other events, the SFITF went on ice during the pandemic.
I was happy to hear it was back in 2022 but I don’t live in California anymore and didn’t feel the need to make a special trip to attend. Then, my friends decided to sign up as a vendor. They asked if I’d be interested in coming out to help them with the booth, which sounded like too much fun to miss.
I jumped a plane and headed out west to see what the International Tea Festival was like from the other side of the tea table.
Old and New Ways Tea
My friends Phil and Mengjiao over at Old Ways Tea (OWT) are two of my favorite people. I met Phil in 2017 on TeaForum, an obscure online forum for tea nerds to hang out and talk about tea. He invited me down to San Jose to meet him and his wife Mengjiao and we’ve been good friends and fellow tea nerds ever since. We added a couple more local tea friends to the fray since then and made for ourselves a cozy little group of tea friends in San Jose.
It was our motley crew of four (Mengjiao decided to stay home with their beautiful new baby girl) that set forth to meet the thirsty throngs at the tea festival with as much tea as we could muster. But what kind of tea were we bringing with us?
Yancha—The Flavor of Wuyi
The type of tea OWT sells is called yancha (岩茶), which translates loosely into “cliff tea” or “rock tea”. The name is a reference to the mountain valleys and rocky soil of the Wuyi Mountains (Wuyishan; a UNESCO World Heritage Site) in the Fujian Province in southern China, where it’s grown. The name also refers to the heavy mineral notes often present in the flavor of the tea itself.
As a category, yancha is a type of charcoal-roasted oolong tea and is Wuyi’s main tea product. That said, Fujian is also famous for black teas such as Golden Eyebrow (jinjunmei, 金骏眉) and what we in the US commonly know as Lapsang Souchong (正山小种). (Note: American Lapsang is often smoked–usually artificially–but OWT’s is not.)
While yancha is famous in China, it’s not well known in the US outside the tea drinking community. It was a great time serving it up to hundreds of people for the first time throughout the weekend.
Crafting A Tea House Experience
Until now, OWT has been an ecommerce-only operation run out of their home. With no experience in a live retail situation, it’s hard to know what’s needed beforehand. What should the booth look like? What kind of gear will we need? Which and how much tea should we bring? Phil had the notion of trying to recreate as much of the true tea house experience for event attendees as he could but we weren’t sure how well we’d pull it off.
What typifies a tea house experience is the opportunity to come into a thoughtful space, sit down at a nice table or bar, and try a variety of teas on offer (usually whatever is brewing at the moment). The tea house is often a communal and intimate space where veterans and beginners alike mix and mingle across cups of hot tea. The host adds commentary and answers questions but tries not to be overly intrusive. Each guest fills the space with their own experience.
Between the four of us in our group, we came up with the best strategy we could and showed up on Saturday with only one thing clear: we were about to serve a lot of tea.
Serving the Thirsty Throngs
We were definitely building the plane as it was flying, but by midday we had things worked out.
We would offer groups of attendees a flight of all the teas we had on offer (between 4-6, depending on when you arrived), arranged like a wine tasting from “light” to “dark” (all our teas were either black tea or roasted oolong, so this is more in terms of flavor profile). We traded off in different roles (serving, brewing, and selling) and it was fun to see how each of us brought our own ideas and flair to every step of the process.
By our estimate, we served somewhere between 300-400 people on Saturday and something close to that on Sunday. I can think of only two reasons why things went so well: Phil’s excellent preparation and our years spent as a group drinking tea together.
There was no arguing or disagreement over what needed doing. Everyone happily accepted their role and did their best to contribute. We came together and supported each other like an operational team that’s been working together for years.
It was awesome.
By Sunday night we were as spent as the buckets of tea leaves we’d gone through in the 14 hours of total time we spent brewing and serving tea. I was completely exhausted but intensely satisfied. I left the event and California thinking about how I can spend more time serving tea to others in Austin.
I’m looking forward to figuring that out after the new year, so stay tuned for that.
Until next time, happy drinking.
This is so cool. I can host at my apartment if you’d want!