Gift Guide Series: Teakan
Today’s feature is Teakan! A two woman shop in Canada bringing you tea exploration kits. I have connected with Claudia, one of the owners over instagram and was so excited when Teakan was finally able to ship to the United States. I purchased their most recent tea exploration kit and it was so lovely! My favorite tea so far was the osmanthus Tie Guan Yin!
Learn a little bit about Claudia and Jan below!
Can you tell us a little bit about you and your passion for tea?
Hello, my name is Claudia and together with Janice we are the founder of Teakan Tea Company. For us our professional career has no direct relationship with tea before Teakan. In a way I guess we are lucky to be born in tea drinking families where tea has been around us from the beginning. Our passion for tea slowly developed over the years bit by bit, without much thinking behind it. I guess in a way we were both also lucky to have crossed paths with many knowledgeable tea people who are passionate about tea and were willing to share their experience( and tea) over the years that have cultivated our own passion for it.
Was there a catalyst that pushed you to open your shop?
Simple: so that we can order more tea! All jokes aside, there wasn't really a plan to open up a tea business at the beginning. We started Teakan on IG in June 2019 after a tea session at our favorite tea house Cultivate Tea - we both feel the strong urge to share about the awesome-ness of tea. Not necessarily just the tea but the whole experience. We love how tea connects people in many different ways, how it opens up dialogue and even leads to friendship. We also love the mindfulness that the whole tea brewing process promoted that we simply want to tell more people about it.
Then, Vancouver Tea Festival came along and we saw that as a good opportunity to test our concept: a Tea Exploration Kit. We came up with this concept because we want to make it easy and accessible to "explore" tea. When we talked to many people at many tea gatherings, the number one hurdle about tea is often how overwhelming and / or intimating it is because of the vast selections. Furthermore, many people expressed (including us) the dilemma of wanting to try new tea but not liking the idea of storing bags and bags of tea at home. We also knew that we wanted to focus on single origin teas because we feel it is underrated compared to all the fancy blends in the market. We strongly believe that their stories needed to be told.
Our worst scenario for the launch is to be stuck with a lot of tea for ourselves. Luckily, the tremendous support we've received at the festival was wonderful which led to the launch of our Vol 2 kit.
What is your personal tea ritual like?
It varied depending on the mood and what we were doing. For me, gongfucha is always going to be my number 1 favorite ritual. I love how you can taste the subtle changes in each brew and the whole process just calms me down. Jan is more of a grandpa style drinker which means she is always on the lookout for high quality tea that could withstand the "abuse" from this style of brewing.
What is your favorite tea in the exploration kit?
Is this a trick question? LOL Can I say all of them? For each kit, once we've decided on the theme/season, we would sample as many teas as we could get that we think would work. Then there would be some debates between us because our preferences are not always the same, while taking into account what might be interesting for our customers as well. So the final choices are the ones we absolutely love.
But if we really need to choose, I will choose the Long Jing because I am not usually a huge green tea fan, yet I found myself going back to this time after time. For Jan, it would be the darjeeling because its muscatel feature is just so different from many other black tea.