 |
|
Over the years, we have shared simple, clean teas that remind us to celebrate all the simple moments of our lives, as well as bright and transcendent examples of rare and unique teas that epitomize their genres. But there will always be a much greater variety of tea than we could ever send you, both in kind and quality. Some teas are too rare to get in the amounts we would need to send with our magazine and others are just too expensive for our friends to donate, no matter how strongly they support our message. And yet, a large part of the motivation for including tea with this magazine is so that the education in tea we are providing isn't just intellectual, but experiential. Drinking twelve unique teas together every year is more than half of what Global Tea Hut is all about! And now, it will be about more.
Many of you have been emailing us over the years asking for a way to go deeper into the rarer genres we cover, how to get more of a particular Global Tea Hut tea and other questions concerning furthering your tea education by drinking more and different examples of the many kinds of tea we talk about in these magazines. The issue is that we aren't tea merchants; we are a tea school. And we don't have a lot of experience buying tea online, so we don't know where to send you. Also, in our commitment to stay ad-free and not endorse any one tea brand, merchant or shop, we prefer to abstain from recommending any given tea merchant, even if they are a friend or supporter of our Center.
This year, we are offering a limited number of expansions to the topic we are covering in certain months. The idea is that when we can, we release a limited edition expansion to the topic covered in that month's magazine, affording you the chance to drink at least a couple more examples of the type of tea we are discussing. Often, these extras will be rarer and/or important to your journey exploring that kind of tea. Each expansion pack will be exclusively for Global Tea Hut members. We will keep the expansions transparent, letting you know our cost for the tea, shipping and how much we think is a fair minimum donation. Like with all our work, you will be able to choose the amount you donate based on the cost of the tea and the minimum suggested donation. Our goal is to keep each and every expansion pack around fifty dollars. The expansion packs will be limited, and distributed on a firstcome-first-serve basis. If we find that demand for them is high, then we will try to make more next time.
Dian hong is a kind of tea everyone loves. It is affordable, delicious and when it is made from good raw material, can be stunning to drink in ceremony. Since dian hong is more inexpensive, we wanted to include a greater variety of Yunnanese red teas that we enjoy, each very unique in its own way, including cakes and loose-leaf tea. We have included different mountains, seasons, ages and kinds of trees and vintages so you will taste a broad spectrum of the genre and learn more.
This expansion pack includes:
Our cost for these six teas, including shipping to Taiwan and packaging, is just around $37. Like the first expansion, we only produced 50 sets and we are going to ask for a suggested minimum donation of $50 plus shipping, which Shen thinks will be $20 or less to most places in the world. You can donate anything you want above that. All proceeds will support our free Center. Each expansion will also come with a descriptive booklet that will explain each tea and why we chose it.
We have a webpage with info on the expansion packs and discussion boards for anyone to comment on any of the teas in the expansion packs. We plan to engage in these discussions as well, so feel free to ask questions about the teas, a topic, brewing, etc.
