Steepster
Recently, my friends Mike, Jason and I flipped the switch on Steepster, a project that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for some time now. The idea’s pretty simple: you keep a tealog—a quick daily journal of the teas you drink—and follow friends and other tea lovers on the site and see what they’re drinking:
This way, if you’re obsessed with tea or even just getting into it, you can keep a tasting journal and discover new teas through people you know and trust.
An experiment in self-awareness
It all started over a year ago, when I was using the now-defunct morale-o-meter to track the hours of sleep I was getting, the amounts of caffeine and alcohol I was consuming, and how good I felt as a result. After a month, one thing was clear: I was drinking way too many cups of coffee and cans of Coke.
So I switched to tea.
Over time, I found myself consuming more tea in both quantity and variety. I started reading books about tea, taking classes on tea and even doing little projects with tea. The more I immersed myself in all things tea, the more I saw it as a way of thinking about the pressures of the daily grind.
Right place, right time?
About a week after our site launched, Wired posted an article declaring tea “the new coffee—the tipple of choice for the Twitteratti.” Brian Chen writes:
The culture that brought us pizza as a food group and $20,000 coffeemakers has now discovered tea. And its internet-savvy boosters like [Kevin] Rose and [Tim] Ferriss are leading a movement in the United States to promote the leafy beverage as a trendy drink for new-age geeks who are as obsessed with having energetic bodies as they are with fast computers.
Something’s not quite right here. If you look at the outside the U.S., you’ll find that tea’s been drink of choice for nearly every generation for hundreds (and in some cases, thousands) of years. After water, tea is the second-most popular beverage in the world (here, it’s 6th, behind carbonated sugar-water, coffee, beer, wine and bottled water). So why is tea suddenly hot shit here in the states?
It’s 1990, years after Mel Ziegler and his artist wife Patricia sold their first company, Banana Republic, to The Gap. On a plane to San Francisco, Mel is seated next to a young consultant by the name of Bill Rosenzweig. Both avid tea drinkers, they begin talking about the poor quality and availability of real tea in the U.S. Even after they land and Bill returns to his home in Arizona, the two continue to hash out plans for a new venture called The Republic of Tea.
Keep in mind that this is the early nineties: the Web hasn’t gone mainstream yet, so in order to communicate, Bill and Mel send faxes back and forth to each other. Peppered throughout the faxes are Patricia’s sketches of logos, merchandise and packaging. Their book, The Republic of Tea is a collection of these exchanges.
It’s one of the most thoroughly fascinating business-type books I’ve read (there’s even a copy of their business plan in the back), but some of the parts I find the most enlightening are actually the ones that expound on the need for tea at that moment in time. Here’s a scan from one of the pages:
Big-picture observations from April 18, 1990 (p. 49)
Sound familiar? Today, The Republic of Tea is one of the leading specialty tea retailers in the country and thanks to the web and the numerous other tea operations that have sprung up since the 90s, we have access to the highest-quality tea from all around the planet. Nevertheless, the trends outlined in the list above are not only still true today; they’re even more true! Note to self: when starting a company, find a raison d’etre that gets stronger over time.
Anti-what?
Flash forward two decades: most Americans still consume tea in grab-and-go forms. A commonly cited statistic is that iced tea accounts for 80% of tea drinking in the States. Now, I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to choosing convenience, but I think “functional” bottled drinks that emphasize the physical health benefits of tea overlook the very thing that makes tea tea.
The act of making the tea is inseparable from the leaves themselves. True tea is about the ritual. It’s a ritual that exemplifies slowness, gratitude and attention: you let the water boil, you let the leaves steep, you put everything else on hold and sit down with friends for a fresh cup and conversation. Tea time is lo-fi time.
One reason, I think, the tech-savvy are leading the charge is that we’re the ones knee-deep in overload. For the always-connected and ever-distracted, tea’s a gasp of air amidst a torrent of tweets. Ultimately, when we’re surrounded by products and systems growing increasingly complex by the day, there’s something vastly appealing about the simplicity of leaves in water.
