Tea Light: Taylor Cowan

What inspired you to start Spirit Tea, and how has that inspiration shaped your approach to sourcing unique teas?

 

I feel like I have an unfair advantage with this question because I write about this all the time in little ways for our releases, Tea Club etc. You don't need to hear more from me about Spirit or tea than's already been written! Instead I'll give some personal insight: it was just the chance to inspire a better tea appreciation in America—and if that goes well, maybe in some small way we'll help sustain the folks responsible for tea's existence. We loved tea and worked in tea but were never really happy. We were part of what was called the Underground Tea Club in Chicago, where a group of us from all industries would bring tea from our favorite niche online vendors, take turns "driving" (steeping) and complaining how this kind of tea would never reach most Americans where they were. We watched in horror as beer, coffee, wine, whiskey, and cold-pressed juice all got their comeuppance among the general public while tea was left thoroughly behind. Looking back honestly it was also that weird serendipity of "right place, right time" elements in 2014 Chicago: the stupid confidence of being 26 and feeling like you know everything, the dissatisfaction with what was out there and, honestly, the fact that if there had been another tea company out there that looked like what we envisioned, we probably would have gone and worked for them—but there wasn't.

 

Are there any particular tea rituals or traditions that you personally enjoy or incorporate into your daily routine?

 

Secretly, I try to have other people make tea for me. I'm not joking. You're talking to someone who meticulously and feverishly dials in teas, with a bad habit for wood-fired ceramics, who is always challenging their technique, but I'd really rather not make myself tea. One thing is annoyingly true: I almost never steep something I'm happy with, even when it's my fourteenth try. Conversely, if someone at home, a cafe, or the office pours me the most casually made cup of tea, or something they're interested in, I'm usually over the moon with curiosity, appreciation and dodey. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Let someone make tea for you.

 

My more literal answer is, if I'm committing to an appreciation session, I light incense. I have a little frog holder I got at a tea shop in Kunming that I love and I'm very specific about varieties and quality. If anyone has "a spot" where they get their good incense, please hit me up, I'm always looking!

 

 

What time of day do you typically drink tea?

I usually don't have any until after breakfast or when I get to the office and, without special occasion, am done by 5.

 

What has been the most rewarding or challenging aspect of running a tea company?

Oh wow, you all really put me on the spot. You couldn't softball this one? I'm going to do “challenging” because the “rewarding” part is easy: getting to see the answer to question one coming true.

 

My biggest challenge is this: when you start almost any business you don't do it to "get into management," you do it because you believe in what you believe in. Jordan and I didn't really have a cogent five-year plan for Spirit when we started because we didn't think we'd necessarily be around in five months. It was just us two and we'd watched too many good tea companies come and go in our short time to believe we'd be anything different, even if “our hearts were in the right place” and we had a big new vision for tea. But after it was clear our idea was resonating more than we could have known we experienced what Tennessee Williams calls “the catastrophe of success.” Suddenly we had a team, an incredible group of people who wanted to help us get there and I see they're all looking to something—I look to my left, look to my right and realize shit, I'm the guy in charge. What do I do now? It's this constant feeling.

 

Sourcing and sharing great tea? We can do it. Being a leader is hard. I've made so many mistakes over the years. There are things that I've failed for no reason other than I didn't step up in the right moment. I'm still learning. I’ve never felt uniquely convinced we "earned" our success, nor that I'm anyone special, nothing like that, but there's a real pain to distinctly knowing the person you want to be and knowing how far you still have to go. Put it this way: being a boss and being a leader are very different things.