Founded By Tea Expert Shunan Teng, Tea Drunk Preserves China’s Historic, Native Plants
Nestled throughout rural China, secret wild tea trees (from when now-defunct villages cultivated trees centuries ago) house rare, high-quality teas. Acquiring them requires tapping into a local network of knowledge about their location and then bushwhacking through swamp and forestation while fending off leeches to pick each leaf. For many in the tea industry, this is far too much dedication and labor for sourcing tea, but for NYC-based Shunan Teng, founder of Tea Drunk, this is a typical day at the office—at least in the spring, when Teng hikes throughout China to work and camp with farmers to find prime tea leaves.
It is precisely this exacting eye and tireless effort that makes Tea Drunk one of the world’s most authentic and quality purveyors of Chinese tea. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Manhattan, the company—which sells wholesale and through their online shop—stands apart from the rest of the massive industry by handpicking tea leaves from historical lands in China where tea has been cultivated for over 1,000 years. The team commissions or works directly with heritage farmers to pick and handcraft leaves into tea, producing unique and often exclusive batches of green, yellow, white and black teas whose taste cannot be replicated…