STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 35 Discover first-class tea solutions from a single source: from premium mono teas and specialities from renowned tea regions, refined herbal blends and fruit infusions, to extracts, ready-to-drink formats and beyond. Whether it's loose leaf or fully packaged products, we create custom-made concepts for you across the entire value chain. Let us create your perfect tea solution. Visit us at www.haelssen-lyon.com WORLD OF TEA Welcome to the Steve Shafer, founder of Viet Sun Tea, works hard to ethically source wild teas from the forests of northern Vietnam. Photo credit: Viet Sun Tea past 20 years, as enterprising farmers successfully cultivated gar- dens to produce a tea touted for its health benefits, sold at a premium price. Much of the time, however, the exact species of tea being harvested remains a mystery to everyone involved. Despite the abundance of wild tea species in the mountains of Vietnam, a dearth of research leaves locals without sufficient tools to verify which tea species they are collecting, forcing harvesters, produc- ers, and tea merchants to apply a vague general term of "forest tea" (chè rừng) to a wide swath of circumstances. When presenting these teas to an international market, Steve Shafer, a US tea merchant who sources and sells wild forest teas from Vietnam under the Viet Sun Tea brand, simply embraces the ambiguity. "A lot of people ask me what varietal the trees are, and I just say I don't know. I try to share as much informa- tion about these types of teas as I can, but there is a real lack of information about them in Vietnam." Deep Forest Tea Some teas do closely resemble the fairytale scenes consumers might imagine upon hearing the word "wild." Locals typical- ly find these teas by accident — solitary trees or small groves growing in remote forest areas rich in biodiversity, often located in national parks or protected regions. However, the journey to the teacup is far from magical. The work of harvesting for- est teas growing in remote areas can prove physically grueling, requiring difficult, time-consuming treks into rugged mountain terrain beyond areas where even motorcycles cannot reach, of- ten becoming inaccessible during the rainy season.

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