How to source the best tea from the mountains

Hi everyone, I hope you're doing well. The weather is getting colder and colder now and it's been the autumn harvest has ended about two three weeks ago and we are now pressing our cakes in the tea factory. They should be released in about two weeks and I think it's a good time of the year to talk about sourcing. So every season we source tea from different producers. Of course the tea that we make in Chiang Mai, so the tea from Chiang Mai that we sell on the website is made by ourselves, by Ubai and I. And the tea that's made in the other mountains is sourced and processed by other farmers that we know. And so in this video I would like to talk more about how we source that tea, how we get to know the farmers. So I started the tea business over 10 years ago and when I at the start I would buy tea from the wholesale tea markets, mainly from Kunming sometimes from Guangzhou. And it's quite a tedious work because if you go to a tea market you'll find out that 80% of the tea is trash. And you might think that's an exaggeration but I invite you to go and see for yourself. It's very hard to get some good tea at a good price in the wholesale tea market. So since we've been in Yunnan, so I graduated in 2016 and then I moved to Yunnan to live with my wife. And since then I think we've never bought any tea from the tea market, at least not any raw poor, because we find it much more worth to source directly from the tea farmers. And actually many tea businessmen nowadays do that, which means that the business in the wholesale tea market is not at its best. I think it's harder to do tea business as a wholesaler nowadays because many private buyers would buy larger quantities or even companies who would get the tea as gifts would go to the tea mountain to source tea. And this is mainly thanks to WeChat, which is a bit like WhatsApp. You can go to the tea mountain, add the farmers WeChat and get the tea directly from his factory. So there's that trend of having the middleman being cut. And this is especially prevalent in Menghai at the low level. I don't know too much about the situation in the big cities of China. But I'm in this particular situation in which I'm both a tea buyer and a tea producer, so I kind of know both sides of the coin. And I'm going to share my experience as a tea producer. When you produce tea, regardless of your skill, you're going to have different qualities of tea because throughout the harvest, the weather will be different. So there might be times when it's raining and the tea tastes a bit flatter. Maybe you might have some gardens of different tenderness in terms of leaves, so you'll get higher grades, lower grades, and you will get you will source leaves from gardens of different qualities. For example, in Jingmai Mountain, there's a big difference between the Shanghai, the natural tea gardens at high altitude bordering Tapingzhong on the top of the mountain and the tea gardens which are lower in the slopes, which tend to taste weaker because they have a much higher yield. And we have some tea gardens on the slope down the mountain, and we tend to send the fresh leaves or maybe make some white tea or black tea, types of teas for which the quality of the material is not as crucial as in raw poor tea. We used to do a lot of wholesale before Farmerleaf started. Now we still have a few wholesale customers, but less than in the past. First, because a lot of our production goes into the pressing of our own cakes. And second, because of the COVID crisis, the sales have dropped drastically in China. And I think this is true for most of the producers out here. The quality of the relationship between the producer and the buyer will determine, to a large extent, what kind of quality of leaves the buyer will get. Because usually in each village, there's a standard price that's determined by the market. But you know that the Gu Shu in Jingmai will cost that much during this season. Of course, this can vary. Producers have some leeway in adjusting the price to how hard they want to sell tea. Or if their tea is good, maybe they can claim a higher price. But generally, if people come and ask for your tea, they already know the price in the village. And so you have the choice of giving them different qualities of teas. And you can imagine that you will keep the highest quality teas for your long-term customers. Which means that if during the season, a tea buyer comes to your house, a tea buyer you don't know, and asks for a sample, you will usually not give him the highest quality of the tea. Because that highest quality batch is already booked, has already been sometimes prepaid, or at least through a kind of moral contract kept for your long-term customers. And so usually, the harder sales are for selling your lower quality tea, which you do not want to sell below the standard price, but simply sell it at the market price to someone. And that someone will probably be a buyer you're not really familiar with. So I see some vendors taking pride in going to villages and collecting dozens of samples from different farmers, and then tasting all of those teas. And I think at best, they will have to sort through a lot of mediocrity before finding those hidden gems. And at worst, they might just waste their time because they won't get the quality that they were looking for using this method. So I never do that. I rarely ask for samples during the production. It's interesting to see that most of the tea buyers will visit during the early spring harvest. The problem is, my strategy for getting good tea is to establish a good relationship with the producers. And during the early spring, people are very busy making tea and meeting with visitors and customers. So it means it's the worst time actually to establish a long-term relationship. Personally, I prefer to visit the tea mountains in late autumn or in the middle of winter, when the farmers are at home and hopefully have some time to drink tea. And so the samples I will try will more likely be teas of their past productions. This will allow me to assess the way they process tea, the quality that we can expect from their tea gardens, and also how their tea ages. And you cannot really assess these things during the early spring. The only thing you'll be able to judge is the processing quality. But again, you'll need some experience because tea, when it's very fresh, tastes very different from after one or two months after its production. Of course, you can get this experience, and we also got it through our tea farm in Chiang Mai. But I guess most of the buyers will have a hard time adapting to that. It will surely take them a few years. So when I go to a village I'm not familiar with, I first have a look at the houses and especially the processing facilities. So I have a look at the tea factory. Usually, by the size of the drying house, you can estimate the size of their business, of their operations, because that's often the limiting factor during the early spring production, how much tea you can dry in your house. Then I tend to evaluate maybe the conscientiousness of the farmer just by looking at how clean the factory is, how organized it is. Now, of course, you have to use your good judgment, and it will vary a lot depending on the situation, depending on the socio-cultural factors, because in those villages you'll find a wide variety of situations. And for example, my expectations wouldn't be the same in a very famous village such as Lao Man Ra or in the famous villages of Yiwu, as it would be in a more remote area, which is maybe less accustomed to producing very high quality tea or having high standards. Then I will meet the farmers, and so on this you kind of have to rely on luck, it's called the Yuan Feng, you know, the fate. I think what matters is to meet people you like to work with, which means maybe your personalities match, and that's primordial in order to establish a good relationship. So I guess, of course, it's hit and miss, but I guess usually 30% of the time you visit someone, you feel you can do business with them. Then when you're in the business of high quality, you should not haggle with the farmers, because as I said, the farmers, ultimately the farmer has the power of giving you his best teas or his average teas, and so if you want the best teas, you need to please the farmer. So I think haggling is a big no actually in that kind of business. Haggling can surely be useful when you're in the market for cheaper teas, but personally I don't like doing that. If I'm not satisfied with the price at the first offering, I will just try to look for another deal somewhere else. And I think we tend to say that in China there's a lot of haggling, but it really depends, I think, on your personality and the kind of trade you're in, and I would say in high quality tea, it's kind of inappropriate, I would say. Sometimes I might run into some tea in which I like the raw material, you can feel the good qi, you can feel some good thickness in the mouthfeel, some hui gan. These aspects of the taste tend to be imported mainly to the raw material, but I might not like the processing in this tea. So in this case, I will first discuss with the farmer, because even though I have my own ideas about the processing, sometimes I'm open to sourcing teas which have a different philosophy of processing. This was the case, for example, in some teas we sourced from Laos in the past, which were, I think, a bit too red to my taste. So we did some training sessions and the teas from Laos we get now are processed more according to our view in Chiang Mai, but it can become kind of a philosophical debate, because if everybody in a place processes a tea that way, maybe that's really the authenticity of that tea, and you don't really want to alter the authenticity, because that's part of the overall quality. So usually, if I find the processing is odd or different from what I'm used to, I will just engage with the farmer and discuss that part, see if he does this because he doesn't know better, or if he does this because he's thought about it and that it's a conscious approach that he takes. Now, of course, there are limits to that, and usually I will just trust my gut feel to see if the tea will be good or not. And if you look at how big companies sources their tea, they tend to ask the producers a lot of samples, and then they have hundreds of samples that they have to evaluate. And I think this approach is counterproductive, because in the early spring, if you ask me a sample in mid-March, for example, at the beginning of a production run, I cannot send you a sample that will be representative of the final product, because at the beginning of the tea season, you don't have the best tea trees. Usually, the older tea trees, they sprout in late March or even mid-April. So you will only have a different quality. And at the end of the processing, we will pile the tea, we will blend the tea, what we call Dadue, so make a pile and homogenize different batches. And only then you will have the final quality. But if you're a good producer, by that time, your tea will probably be sold out. And this is why if you use this approach of sampling, you'll always be chasing, well, you'll always be too late when it comes to buying tea. By the time you receive the sample and try it, maybe the good tea will be sold out, or you might be disappointed because what you receive is different from the sample you tasted. Or you might not really like the sample from the beginning of the season, but the final batches turn out to be very good. So I think you shouldn't rely on sampling during the season in order to make a purchasing decision. To me, what matters really is to know the farmers, understand, make sure, know that they are conscientious, understand their personality, their ways of working, make sure that they are honest, that they have integrity, and that they won't cheat you, and establish good relationship to hope that they will send you the best things in their production. And so that's why I tend to do my sourcing trip outside of the harvest seasons, and also for the practical reason that during the harvest season, we're using my making tea. So that wouldn't really be possible anyway. Actually, if many buyers come in early spring for their sourcing trip, it's mainly for marketing reasons. It allows them to take pictures of them in the tea gardens, to put some little cards of their company below the tea trees and take pictures, have them process some tea and take pictures, all for their social media and for their customers to see. But I think we don't really need to play that game. Another way of getting the tea is to have a network of farmers, and during the harvest season, you go to their home and process the tea yourself. But it's not very practical, I think, because you'll have to travel a lot. If you want to make 10 different teas, that's 10 different trips in which each of them you'll spend three days. It's not really practical, actually. And I believe that the farmers eventually will make a better product because they know the mountain and they are more used to processing their leaves. So if you work with conscientious people, you should really trust them. And I'm sure they will do a better job at processing their tea than I would do, for example. Also, when people come from outside the village to make some tea, they might not be able to source the best tea gardens in the mountain. For example, in Chiang Mai in early spring, the ancient tea gardens tea is very high in demand, and it can be very hard even for us to secure the leaves because many people in Chiang Mai know where the good tea gardens are, and they will book the tea on the trees from their relatives. So it's also sometimes a big game in Chiang Mai on securing those leaves from the good areas. And I think generally the work of the tea producer, if he wants to improve the taste of his tea, once he has mastered his way of processing the tea, he should really work on refining the terroir, understanding where the good tea is in his mountain. And this is a job that I think the more, well, the more conscientious farmers do, or the more passionate people do, and you might want to work with those people because they'll be able to source higher quality leaves from their terroir. So it's also when I meet the farmers, I also try to talk about the terroir and try to see how much they understand of their terroir. And this might vary widely also according to the villages and the cultures. You also hear the argument from wholesalers that they can get cheaper prices than a private buyer because they will buy in large quantities. And it might be true, I think, for the cheap teas, the cheap teas which are used in the industry or that you'll find in Western tea shops, it could be true because then economies of scale matter. But I would say for high quality tea, for gushu, tea from ancient tea gardens and famous tea mountains, you don't really have those economies of scale. And since those teas tend to sell well, ordering a large quantity will not necessarily grant you a large discount because those teas sell out anyway. Now, it might make sense to go through a middleman in order to get tea from more remote areas in which there's an extensive sourcing job to do, and you might not have the time or the ability to do that sourcing job. So it's all still on a case-by-case basis. And there are some areas in which it would maybe take too much time to get familiar with the area, and then having a middleman will allow you to get a better deal. But most of the time, people who tell you those stories of getting cheaper tea from a wholesaler, it's obviously because the tea is blended or the tea is mislabeled and comes from a cheaper area. So generally, if you want tea from a famous mountain, I would recommend you go there directly. So in conclusion, I would say the analytical approach of sourcing a lot of samples and evaluating them, it's not very efficient. It doesn't work well for sourcing high-quality tea because you will likely not get the samples from those best teas. So you might be able to select some better teas among the samples you got, but you won't be able to get the best teas. And those best teas are hard to catch because if they go to the hands of private buyers, you will never even see them in a wholesale tea market. They will be in some rich people's private collection. So if you want to get access to those teas, you really need to spend time with the farmers, visit them outside of the harvest seasons, visit them when they have time, have some good discussions with them, spend some time there, get familiar with the area, know some people. And after some time, you will be able to get access to those teas. And so I rely much more on trust, I think, than many would. And it can be counterintuitive in an industry in which mislabeling and fraud is rampant, but I hope what I explained makes sense. So that's why I don't really need to try a lot of samples every year. Of course, I will usually share samples from different mountains with my friends in order to compare the quality I get and also to learn more about the tea awards and different ways of making tea. But when it comes to purchasing, usually if I contact someone, it's already that I trust that his tea will be good, so I don't need a sample for the tea I'm going to order. And so that's about it for today. So thank you for watching and see you later. Bye-bye.