The WORST Tea Experience I've Had in the Past 10 Years

Hello hello!

Over the past decade, I’ve had an incredible tea journey. While that journey is filled with love and joy, it’s also filled with experiences that weren’t so lovely and joyful. Although I don’t like harping on the negative (contrary to my blog’s history), it wouldn’t be honest to say that these things didn’t happen. These things did happen, and despite that I wish they didn’t, I can’t deny that they were apart of my journey. So, this is by far the most horrific experience I've had in the tea industry.

Before you ask, no, this is not a re-telling of my experience at World Tea Expo (although I wanted to go with that, I've beaten that dead horse so much that it started to turn to glue).

There’s good, but this is the bad and the ugly…

Earlier in my blogging career, I was more focused on reviewing teas and blogging about the tea experience. After a few years in my blogging experience, I started to take the blog more seriously. With this, I began wiring articles, including a breaking editorial about how we’ve all been lied to about white tea. After my new found success with writing a serious piece, I got an email from a fellow tea drinker who told me to get into contact with Emily (fake name for the sake of the story). Emily was a tea vendor who was traveling to different tea farms, and while on her travels, ran into a horrific event.

The story goes like this: Emily traveled to a tea farm to make a deal to purchase a lot of tea. Many tea farms have multiple lots of tea, and depending on what the customer wants, they’ll reserve one of their lots of tea to be processed into whichever tea type the customer wants (black, green, etc.). With this, Emily went to the farm to secure a contract to purchase the next few years' worth of tea from this farmer. Or, they’ll also sign contracts of exclusivity, meaning that a specific tea farm can’t sell tea to anyone else for the duration of a contract. 

However, as Emily was posting her adventure on social media, something else was happening. Unbeknownst to Emily, Elon was watching.

Elon (fake name for the sake of the story), who owns and runs a massive tea company, was watching Emily explore the tea farm where Elon's tea company had sourced tea from. While Elon sourced black tea from this farm, they were threatened by the idea that Emily was there to source green tea. 

However, Elon didn’t have a contract with this tea farm. Elon only bought tea from this farm, harvest-to-harvest. At the time, it was rumored that Elon wasn’t even buying any more tea from this farm (although rumored, couldn’t verify/confirm). 

At this point in the story, you may be asking yourself: Why doesn’t a tea company this large have any contracts with one of their tea farmers, especially a contract of exclusivity?

Isn’t that suspicious?

According to Emily, after spending several days on the farm, she was about to secure a deal with the tea farm. That was, until the tea farmer received an unexpected text from Elon. 

According to the tea farmer, Elon started sending various threatening messages to them. Elon allegedly texted them, stating that if they sold tea to anyone else, they would pull all of their money from the tea farm and blacklist the tea farmer from the entire tea industry — promising that no one would ever buy tea from the farm ever again.  To make it worse, when Elon stopped doing business with these farms, the farmers had no other customers lined up to buy from them because they had turned away all of their potential clientele. The farmers had no way of avoiding this.

The tea farmers then got scared, explained everything to Emily, and sent Emily home.

Emily wasted hundreds of dollars on this trip and went home empty-handed.

After interviewing Emily, Emily agreed to help gather the text evidence from the tea farmers. On my end, I launched an investigative report on this tea company and its business practices. I began the painstaking process of researching this company, researching where they sourced tea from, and conducting over twenty interviews with various tea-industry professionals. 

After several months of collecting interviews, I was running into an issue: Everyone whom I interviewed — all the way from individuals to larger businesses, involved in the tea industry, was too scared to speak ‘on the record’. I pleaded with various interviewees to speak anonymously, but they were too scared of Elon. Every single person I spoke with said that Elon could ruin them. Although I had collected a dozen damning stories of mobster-like behavior from this company, I couldn’t use any of it.

Although it was a recurring theme that this company would purposefully refuse to sign contracts with tea farms so they could blackmail their way to acquiring whatever tea they wanted, I had nothing to run off of. While interviewing multiple people, it had been claimed by various people that Elon had done this to nearly every farm they had worked with. 

Then, after another month of searching for people who’d give a testimony, I received a message from Emily. 

I got my ‘smoking gun’ evidence. 

Emily had acquired text messages from the tea farmer she had worked with, and messages that claimed how this farm was terrified of being ruined by Elon. One text specifically claimed the evidence that I had been searching for. 

I was elated. 

I had been working on this project for months at this point, and dozens of stories I couldn’t use, but now? Now I had the biggest piece of evidence I needed to be able to run this story. 

However, almost a day after obtaining this piece of evidence from Emily, I opened my Instagram to see that I had been followed by Elon. 

Given my investigation and the timing of acquiring the evidence, I’m being truthful when I say that it made my skin crawl. 

As time went by, and after eight months of work, I had my first draft of my report. As I was getting prepared to sell the report to several larger publications, I got a notification from Emily. 

She said that the tea farmers were too scared for their safety and livelihood, and wanted to retract the evidence they gave, and no longer wanted to be a part of the report.

Safe to say, the investigation was now dead in its tracks. 

By this point, I had gathered dozens of stories with bombshell evidence to back them up, and yet, I couldn’t use any of it.

I went into my bedroom, buried my face in my pillow, and screamed as loud as I could.

Not only did these tea farmers have no protection, but there was also no way to protect future farms from being Elon's next target. Besides that, there was no way to protect anyone else, even small business owners, from a company as large as Elon's. 

For the next few months, any time I went out, I started asking various restaurants where they sourced their tea from. When they mentioned this company’s name, I’d switch my order. Eventually, it got to the point that I couldn’t avoid ordering tea from this company, no matter how hard I tried.

I went to a high-society event that served tea, and although I wanted to ask them where they sourced their tea from, I couldn’t. I looked at my cup of hot tea, noticed it was from this company, and drank it anyway. I willingly looked the other way and drank their tea, and thought if I went with blissful ignorance, it wouldn’t matter. But it still did.

That was the lie I told myself. 

That night, I laid awake in bed and couldn’t go to sleep. That was the moment I realized that as a consumer, I’m a part of the problem.

While I’m not okay with everything that went on, I also had to realize that I was just one person. Without the backing of anyone who had these issues and without evidence, I couldn’t do anything on my own.

That was also the day I realized that although I have a voice, my voice was powerless, and I couldn’t make real change — even if I wanted to.

The system is too big, and I am just 1 person… 

~Cody 

Aka The Oolong Drunk

“Blissfully Tea Drunk”

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