By Jecca Berta

Jody Beavers of Tap Twice Tea was one of our original tea partners when we opened Bloom in 2019. We always look forward to his visits and tea tastings, as conversation inevitably moves to which chocolate tastes best with which tea. Jody recently joined us to discuss his tea journey, which began right here in San Francisco — with a life-altering cup of masala chai. We talked about that moment, his tea travels, our new collaboration on the Tea & Truffles Collection, and more. 

Tea is clearly more than a beverage to you, Jody. It’s a ritual — a way to slow down and connect with others. How has it come to take on this grander meaning? 

When I was growing up, my family made a lot of sweet tea. I didn’t really see the value in it. I moved to San Francisco in 2000. At the non-profit I worked for, someone came in and made a large batch of his wife’s masala chai recipe from scratch. We all sat down and drank it and talked more deeply than we had before. It was kind of this “aha” moment. 

That same man later taught me to make masala chai, and I started getting together with others for tea gatherings. We all enjoyed finding unique, delicious teas and sharing them with each other, tasting them, nerding out …  Tea is part of all cultures, and a representation of hospitality. There’s something about it being enjoyed together that invites a deeper, more intimate connection. 

All types of tea come from the same plant, Camellia Sinensis. Many people are surprised to learn this. How are thousands of types of tea derived from this one plant? 

That’s true. It’s an evergreen plant. One of the main factors in varietals is the level of oxidation. Exposing the tea leaf to oxygen will change it — it will become wilty, darker green, more pliable. If a tea is exposed to very little oxygen, it is a green tea. If it is fully oxidized, it’s a black tea. Oolong teas are a category of tea that is semi-oxidized. Many other processing techniques go into forming the tea. Even which part of the leaf you pluck matters! 

Some teas are just the bud. The most common plucking is the bud and the first two leaves down the stem. Some teas are rolled, some teas are baked, some are roasted with charcoal — each tea master or tea producer sees what the harvest does that year, when to pluck the leaf, how to bring out the best flavors of the tea. They tease out all of the flavors to hand-make that year’s batch of tea. 

Once you’ve oxidized the tea, you halt the oxidation by exposing the tea leaf to heat. Otherwise every tea would become a black tea, because it would fully oxidize. In China and Taiwan, they use the pan-frying method. Using almost like a large wok, they expose the tea leaves to heat but not enough to actually cook the leaves or fry them. Just enough to halt the oxidation process. It’s called the kill-green process. 

For Japanese green tea, or sencha (Sen = steam, cha = tea), you use steam to halt the oxidation process and capture the fresh vegetal goodness. With matcha, there’s an additional processing technique that happens in the spring, when they harvest within two weeks of the plant’s new growth. The plants have been dormant all winter, and all the stored potential energy bursts forth in the spring season. Before they harvest it, they spread out canopies to shade-grow the trees, which prompts the tea plants to produce extra chlorophyll. After they harvest it, they take out the veins and stems from the leaves, so you just have the meat of the leaf. They feed it into a granite stone mill and mill it into a powder. 

For readers who aren’t familiar with Tap Twice Tea, will you tell us about the business and how it got started? 

After some time in San Francisco and Seattle, I started my career in tea at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I’m from. Then I moved back to San Francisco and worked at Samovar. I became their tea trainer. I loved learning about tea and educating people. 

Tap Twice Tea began coming together while I was working at Samovar, about 13 years ago. The name comes from Gongfu Cha Chinese tea ceremony, where it’s customary to tap twice on the tea table to show gratitude. It’s about honoring the person who poured your tea. The original co-founder and I both just loved tea. So we met with a producer, tried a bunch of teas, made our wholesale order, and the tea arrived. 

We thought we’d made a mistake after realizing we had just bought 120 pounds of tea! But friends started buying some, and then friends of friends, and a small grocer in the Mission. From there, we just kind of stumbled our way into having a company. Neither of us was passionate about starting a business. It was just a passion project that we let grow whatever way it wanted to. 

The more I had tea, and the more I learned, it seemed to call out to me. Whenever I had it, it drew me in deeper. I wanted to share it with more people. Eventually, my co-founder stepped out, and I began to focus more on the business. Now it’s my main thing. It’s my baby. It’s what I love. Tea is a mind-altering beverage that only has positive benefits: mind awakening, energizing, social lubricant, anti-oxidant, and no hangover the next day. 

When you’re tasting a tea that’s new to you or deciding what to include in your offerings, what are you looking for?

I love tasting new teas, with new tea farmers or producers. There’s a lot of just “pretty good” tea out there. A lot of times, a tea smells really good or looks incredible, and it tastes pretty good but doesn’t jump out as something that really excites me.

I like to find tea that has unique flavors, that when I taste it, it really stands out on its own and is memorable as a delicious version of whatever tea that is. I like sourcing teas that show the range of flavors that tea can have. Most people have in their mind what black tea tastes like. It’s limited to what they’ve had before. If I can source some black teas that are absolutely incredible, [tasters] would swear that there are ripe raspberries in them. 

I love that tea can expand people’s minds. It excites me when people can have their world blown by tea, and by someone who knows what they’re doing in teasing out those flavors, highlighting what nature did to produce that type of tea, on that field, or that mountain. I also look for teas that are well-made and come from small, family-owned operations. I look for teas that have a long-lasting flavor. For most teas we carry, you can get at least eight steeps. I like to make sure the tea’s got good longevity. 

Similarly to Dandelion, you work directly with farmers and producers. What unexpected places have your travels taken you to? 

A million different places. The Himalayas, Nepal, Northern India, all around Taiwan. Tea travels are incredible! I love getting to know a country and getting to know people through the lens of tea. Even if we don’t speak the same language, we have this familial connection of tea, so we have that commonality. I can get to know people in a small village on Nannuo Mountain, in the mountains of Southwest China. Extremely remote. Getting there took a flight to Shanghai, a fast train to Fujian Province, three days on a slow train to Kunming, an overnight bus to Xishuangbanna, and a couple of hours on the back of a motorcycle. It’s unspoiled. I love seeing the different flora and fauna. Their bananas are different, their cats meow differently, they have flying lizards.

But then also, everyone I’ve met in the tea industry has been very welcoming. I was trying to find our Eastern Beauty tea in Taiwan … I visited a few factories, and my tea connection drove us out to the tea farms, and we started going door-to-door to tea farms. Every single person was very welcoming. Staying with a tea farmer and having dinner with their family, and eating their local foods has led to a lot of beautiful cultural experiences. In beautiful areas. 

The ideal is “farmer direct” — you meet the farmer who grows the tea, and you have a relationship with them. Sometimes the tea farmer grows it and produces it, and you can buy direct from them. Other times the tea farmer just grows the tea as a crop. They’re putting their efforts into growing it perfectly, growing it well, and giving an excellent raw material product to the producer, and you buy it from the producer. Sometimes the farmer sells to a distributor. A lot of times I’ve found the grandparents will be the tea farmers, their kids will be processing the tea, and the next generation will be in the shop doing the sales for it. 

Cocoa beans grow within 20 degrees of the equator. Is there a tea equivalent to the “cocoa belt”? 

Tea grows within 45 degrees of the equator, so that’s basically everywhere — down to the very tip of South America all the way up to Michigan. Large swaths of the world can grow tea. It thrives in tropical and sub-tropical climates, at temperatures of 65° to 85° F, with a lot of humidity. Tea doesn’t grow much below 50°. It can’t survive a frost, basically. 

Tea likes some direct sunlight each day (about five hours) but doesn’t want a lot. It tends to thrive in mountainous areas or foggy areas, where there’s some shade or shrouding in clouds or mist. That helps the tea leaves to be more flavorful. It’s harder to pluck leaves from a tall tree, so a lot of times the plants are kept at waist height to collect leaves and process them into the teas we know. 

During COVID, we worked together to develop cocoa tisanes, which remains a favorite project of ours (we hope to bring it back one day). For our latest collaboration, the Tea & Truffles Collection, will you describe how the three pairings came together? 

First Course: Chocolate-Dipped Fig Truffles & Eastern Beauty (Champagne) Oolong

The sweet honey notes of the fig combined with Dandelion’s Camino Verde, Ecuador chocolate mimicked the tasting notes of our Eastern Beauty bug-bitten oolong from Hsinchu County, Taiwan. The tea is known for its aromatic honey notes, and its malty, almost dark-chocolate flavor. We thought these two flavors worked really well together, each playing off of and enhancing the other. We also love that this tea is known as Champagne oolong, so it felt perfect for a celebratory Mother’s Day pairing.

Second Course: Afternoon Truffles & 2018 Aged Shou Mei Dragon Pearls

For this course, we went with our 2018 Aged Shou Mei white tea from Fuding, Fujian Province, China to pair with the truffles. White teas are known for their delicate, light, floral and vegetal flavor profiles, and when you take those flavors and age them for — in this case, for seven years — all those flavors morph into rich, deep notes like plum, fresh-baked bread, leather, and pecans. The complex flavor profile, combined with the three truffle varieties that Nick came up with, resulted in three enjoyable, unique flavor pairings. This tea also showcases a processing technique where they roll five grams of tea into a dragon pearl shape before beginning the aging process. This locks in all of the delicious flavors and aids the aging process.

Third Course: Single-Origin Chocolate Hazelnut Spread, Maison Nico Chocolate Sablés, & Rosemint Cacao Herbal Tea

After enjoying two caffeinated teas with this pairing, we wanted to finish with a caffeine-free tisane that is bold in flavor and itself incorporates Dandelion’s Camino Verde cocoa, to be enjoyed with the delicious sablés from Maison Nico. Our Rosemint Cacao is mint-forward, tempered by an herb called damiana, with a hint of rose petal. It finishes with just enough sweetness from the cocoa. This is a great tea for relaxation and comfort. It is warming and calming, and pairs beautifully with the final course both flavor-wise and energy-wise.

Yum. You moved your fulfillment center from San Francisco to Appalachia, where you’re from. What prompted that change?

As we got started, we were operating very much like a cottage industry, out of the other founder’s garage. But then when he moved down to Palm Springs and stepped away from the business, I had the idea of moving our tea facility to the small town in West Virginia where I lived until middle school. That area had a lot of coal mining back in the day, but that’s dissipated. People leave to find good jobs. Tea has given me so much … I want to embody those same principles in the way I’m doing business. I’d love to provide good jobs for folks. 

Ideally, my end goal would be to have this be a social enterprise where we can hire folks who need jobs the most — people who are formerly incarcerated or are rehabilitating, but not quite there yet. I also value family very much. As my family has been getting older, I’ve wanted to be present. Splitting time between San Francisco and Charlottesville allows for that. I come from a culture where you care for your elders. 

Lastly, do you have a favored tea varietal for feeling energized? And conversely, one that’s calming? 

For energizing, I like to go with a black tea in the morning. A lot of times I’ll start my day with Golden Monkey. It’s a black tea from Fujian Province in South China. The leaf material is normally used for white tea, but then it’s oxidized. The buds turn a copper color. It’s got a good energy to it. It makes me ready for the day. Tea is really good at awakening the creative mind. Any time I’m going to get into a creative project, I make sure I have a good pot of tea. It’s energizing but not anxiety-producing. 

The caffeine in tea is less water-soluble than in beverages like coffee or yerba mate, so it’s absorbed into your body more gently and slowly rather than making you feel jittery or giving you a caffeine crash. It stays with you longer too.

For calming down, I will go with a ripe pu’er, like our Chocolate Wood Pu’er. Pu’er tea goes through a fermentation process. It’s aged. A ripe pu’er has gone through accelerated aging. They pile the leaves, wet them, and then turn the piles so the leaves will start to ferment. That ripening process decreases caffeine in the tea leaves and increases its calming energy.

If we’re talking about tisanes, I’ll calm down with our Adaptogen Blend. There’s no caffeine, but it’s got a few different types of ginseng and adaptogen herbs, so if you’re too up in energy, it’ll bring you back down. If you’re too sleepy but need a boost, it’ll boost your energy back to a healthy medium. 

Thank you so much for taking time to chat with us, Jody.