If you want to be more earth conscious, and health conscious, consider drinking loose leaf tea.
Firstly, when it comes to loose leaf, you’re getting mainly tea and just a little bit of packaging. It’s a very value-dense way to purchase premium grades of tea, since you can brew one "serving" of loose leaf tea several times. In fact, brewing larger doses of three to five, even seven, or nine grams of certain teas per brewing session allows for more thorough enjoyment as the flavors, aromas and overall energy of the tea can be savored over the course of many infusions. Loose leaf is not only economical, but it also tastes the best. It has the most aroma and the most energetic impact on your life, health and overall well-being. It’s also the most earth friendly, sustainable and fair-trade way to be a "tea consumer." For when you purchase loose leaf tea from a Direct Trade company such as Rishi, the farmer gets the most impact from your tea sale—not the packaging companies.
Still, many people prefer tea sachets for their convenience. For this reason, we recently launched unwrapped and bulk-packed sachet tea bags, which feature more tea and less packaging materials. Made of plant-based, non-paper infusion filters, these single serve sachets deliver more aroma and taste than the average paper tea bag—and much less packaging, too.
I mentioned the word "sustainable," so let’s talk about it. A lot of brands use this term when they talk about the groups and logo organizations they apply to their packaging, but do they really mean it when it comes to the actual teas and ingredients? What I care most about in terms of sustainability is how I source tea.
What a lot of people don’t know about Rishi Tea is that we strive to source teas and develop projects from non-timber forestry-product agricultural sources located in Southeast Asia, where tea leaves are grown in a sustainable, regenerative way, amongst the trees, flora and fauna of the forest. Take our top line black teas—Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Masala Chai, the list goes on—these Rishi Teas come from old growth forest plantations in northern Thailand, Vietnam, Yunnan and Myanmar, where tea is planted and naturally propagated by seed. These forest tea "farms" are naturally organic, biodiverse and authentically regenerative because the tea farms expand naturally from seeds that fall from elder tea trees, and new trees come up. Local people who are descendants of some of the first tea farmers in human history have mastered this practice of planting tea seeds from heirloom trees amongst the biodiversity of endemic plant species that exist in the surrounding jungle and fertile soils. This is a different model of tea farming from the clear cutting or mono-crop tea gardens that you see all over the world. At Rishi, we deal directly with sustainable tea projects in remote forest regions, allowing us to positively impact families that have been producing tea for generations, upgrading the price they get for fresh leaves, and helping them connect with the organic tea markets in the United States, Korea, Canada and Europe.
We care about the quality of the cup we're delivering, and the relationships we hold directly with the farmers—that’s our business model and, frankly, we would be out of business if any of it was done unfairly. I hope when you buy our tea, you can smell, taste and sense what we mean when we use the word “sustainable." Quality like ours cannot be sourced and sustained without passion, attention and care from the place of origin to the cup.
And if you’ve stayed with me this long, here’s a little tip I picked up when traveling in Taiwan. When you’re done drinking your loose leaf tea, put the infused and spent leaves of oolong, black tea, jasmine or any type of tea and herbs into a dish and leave it in the refrigerator overnight. It helps freshen the air of your fridge, and remove any unpleasant cooking-or food-aromas in your fridge. The next day, throw those spent tea leaves into the compost. If you are a strong user of tea, like me, your compost bin will be quite fragrant, and your heavy tea habit can be up-cycled to break down in the soil and nurture your garden.
Happy Earth Day,
Joshua Kaiser
Rishi Tea & Botanicals
Founder & CEO
Summer Teas
