Closing the teahouse & finding new teas

This last few months has been a time of some soul searching for Kathy & I with regards to our life, our tea business and our hopes for the future. Our tea house in Falmouth has been both immensely rewarding and incredibly time consuming for us. On a business side, it has been just about breaking even since we opened and, despite the steady increase in people beginning to appreciate tea, has seemed that it would take quite a while to be even at the stage where it could employ someone to help us take care of of the shop.

Just after Christmas, we decided that we’d be happier to close the teahouse and spend more of our time concentrating on our online business, spending more time in Asia, learning more about tea and finding better teas for our customers who appreciate the finer end of puerh teas and Wuyi Yancha.

With all the work we’d done to improve the property in Falmouth, offers to take over our lease of the premises have come rather quickly & we’ve closed and cleared out the teahouse just in time for our annual trip to Asia. It’s been a lot of fun having the teahouse and providing a space for people to come and drink tea & we’ve met a lot of amazing people. Some of my most treasured memories of it are the quiet moments at the end of days where friends have come and we’ve spent hours drinking some wonderful teas. We hope to keep in touch with our regular customers and organise some special tea events in Cornwall for those who are interested.

I’ve arrived in Taipei yesterday to spend a month searching for aged teas. Also on the cards in the coming weeks are some time in Malaysia, searching for good aged Liu Bao, some time in Wuyi, Yixing and of course 6 weeks in Yunnan for the spring tea harvest.

While we’re away, there’s someone helping us to pack and send out orders (so our web shop will remain open) and we hope to return home in May with the new season’s fresh Puerh tea and some different aged gems that we find along the way.