Our importers & Tasters Team...

For many years the core of our teahouse has been our four professional tea-tasters, each specialising in a different tea growing region. Every spring, as the first teas begin to appear, our tasters travel to the tea gardens to select the premium leaves that make up our famous catalogue.

Each growing region has its own, very specific, qualities of both terroir and production techniques. Travelling the gardens and meeting the growers gives us both access to a higher quality of leaf and also a greater exposure to the variations of technique that these craftsmen are using to achieve it. As tasters it increases our understanding of garden practice, transformation and grading and the results that varying these procedures yield in the final tasting. Such direct contact naturally gives us access to some teas that would not otherwise leave Asia. It also gives us the opportunity to sell our seasonal teas in their prime, while they are still fresh (surprisingly unusual in the tea industry). Reducing the need for intermediaries also means that these teas can be both bought and sold at a fair price. Then there are the enriching advantages of human contact with the people of the many diverse cultures that we visit. With passion for tea giving us common ground we are privileged to experience the producers' daily activities and to learn from them directly the histories that have unfolded into their present lives. From an eleventh generation Japanese tea family to a Himalayan experimental artisan.

We invite you to explore our catalogue of discoveries.