2023 Eugene Tea Festival

May 21, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM PDT

Farmer's Market Pavilion, 85 E. 8th Avenue Eugene, OR 97401

I volunteered with the 2023 Tea Festival, helping to run the educational workshops at Mountain Rose Herbs Annex. It was a smooth event, the first year of this tea festival coming together, but it was good. Got to meet some interesting folks and talk tea, and listen to some folks talk about tea, too.

Guru Hari Khalsa talked about the history of tea "as culture, art, and medicine" while brewing some quite delicious oolong and puer for us. Would like to brew with this guy some time.

Nepal Tea Collective talked about the formation of a collective of farmers in Nepal growing tea on unused land and pooling their resources to process it themselves rather than selling the raw leaves to middle-people to resell and blend. The result are some really nice single-origin teas. They do agrotourism trips to their farms in Nepal which would be rad as hell to go to some day. open threads

Jugetsudo had some really nice Sencha Tea and Matcha on offer, I brought home some matcha and a gift set for someone.

Local purveyor of fine indian and nepali tea Young Mountain Tea were there too and I had a really nice conversation with Raj, their founder, and got some more of their Nilgiri Gold, my "every day" Black Tea.

Enthea Teahouse in Portland had this incredible traveling tea van. I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time probably. (Open a Tea Shop)

I'm looking forward to this event happening again and being a part of it in the future. I'm really glad to see the Farmer's Market Pavilion hosting more events, too. Such a rare, cool, public space to have in town.