Young Mountain Tea

🌍 HOW TEA MITIGATES CLIMATE CHANGE 🌍

On this International Climate Action Day, we’re reflecting on how even small steps can help reverse the effects of climate change. 🌱 Did you know that tea gardens actually help sequester carbon? At Young Mountain Tea, we’ve always known it happens, but we wanted to dig deeper. So Raj dove into the research and found that tea plants are really good at reducing carbon emissions! ☕️🍃 Curious to know how?

Head to the link below to read the full blog and find out!

https://bit.ly/4gX0Glw

🇮🇳 Happy India Independence Day! 🇮🇳

On August 15, 1947, India gained its independence from British rule. Seventy-seven years later, the spirit of independence continues, now on a more personal level. Empowering women to achieve financial independence is at the heart of our mission at Young Mountain Tea. 🌱

This image is from Churakharak, the first village in Kumaon to join us as co-owners of the Kumaon Tea Factory. We've been collaborating with about 20 incredible women there, helping them understand what it means to be owners of a business—a concept that can feel abstract but holds immense power for their futures.

To bring this idea to life, our close partner in Kumaon, .earthcraft, has been leading hands-on trainings like the one shown here.

True independence, especially from old ways of thinking, is a lifelong journey. We're honored to walk this path alongside our farmer partners every step of the way. ✨

Photo by .gua courtesy of +

🎙️✨ Dan Bolton, editor of Tea Biz Podcast and Tea Journey Magazine, chats with Raj in a recent episode of Tea Biz, spotlighting the revitalizing of Kumaon. 🍃 Tap the link below to listen now! 🎧

https://bit.ly/3YGlbMv

☕️ 🧁 BLACK TEA CUPCAKES FOR YOUR JULY 4 HOLIDAY FEAST 🎉

For our 4th of July backyard get-together, we’re whipping up some irresistibly delicious black tea-based cupcakes. We love the blend of caramel and citrus flavors that shine through in these fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth treats. 🎇

👇️ Click the link below to grab the simple recipe! Trust us, your friends and family will definitely appreciate you for adding these to the spread! 💙

https://bit.ly/3xGILO6

🌞☕️ Get ready for summer with our Memorial Day sale!🥤

Enjoy 25% off all our iced tea favorites now through Tuesday. With the warmer days just around the corner (or for some of you, already here!), now is the perfect time to stock up on teas that we think are just right for making delectable cold brews, refreshing sun teas, and all manners of iced beverages! No discount code needed, just follow the link below to start shopping 👇🍹🍃

https://bit.ly/3QVz5pt

🍵 🌷 Celebrate Mother's Day by treating your mom and her morning routine to some delicious Indian Breakfast Tea ☕️ Get a FREE tin of Indian Breakfast (12 biodegradable pyramid tea bags) when you purchase one pouch of 100 Indian Breakfast tea bags. Our refillable tins make it easy for her to enjoy her favorite tea wherever she goes.

To redeem this offer, add BOTH items to your cart and use code TEAFORMOM at checkout 💚 Offer is valid until midnight on May 12th 🍃

Follow the link below to send some tea her way today!

https://bit.ly/3y9FBlX

🌏️ Happy Earth Day! 🌿 From now until midnight on 4/22, enjoy 20% OFF ALL 1 LB TEAS, our most sustainable option! Simply use checkout code:

EARTHDAY24

🍃 While we work hard to ensure all of our packaging is as sustainable as possible, we can't deny the fact that packaging of any kind creates the possibility of waste. When you buy a pound at a time, your tea arrives with much less packaging (and you can refill your tea tins for easy daily access)!

But reducing waste isn't the only reason to buy in bulk, it'll also the most cost-saving option. Our 1 LB TEAS are the lowest price per ounce of any size we offer. And this weekend, they're even more economical with the EXTRA 20% off! ✨️ 🍵 Cheers 🍵✨️

Hey hey, our 🌿 Spring Tea Subscription Box 🌿 is here, and it’s flying off the shelves!

This season, we are happy to partner with the awesome to include a unique and tasty blend made with the only caffeinated tea plant native to North America: Yaupon. This is a new discovery for us and we are excited to be able to share it with you! Plus, you’ll be getting a full-size tin of our popular Assam black, as well as the delectable Nepali Silver Needle. A nice bit of range for your discerning palates! 🍵 🍃

If you are not a subscriber already, here are a few enticing reasons to become one:

☕️ You will get 3 top quality teas to try per season (every 3 months!),
☕️ sourced from us & partner companies we love,
☕️ team-tested & approved,
☕️ and a screamin’ deal!

Click the link below to get started on your subscription, or if you are already there, comment below and let us know why you subscribe! 💚

https://bit.ly/3Q7PLcZ

🫖 It’s nearly impossible to love tea without occasionally (or often) dipping into the world of afternoon tea. This nearly 200-year-old tradition that began in the UK has a very specific vibe associated with it: trays of small bites paired with tea in a few rounds to make a scrumptuious mini meal. But did you know that India has its own version? We took the greatest hits (at least in our opinion) and thought it’d be fun to present them in a fusion-y way. What would afternoon tea—a time for relaxing and catching up around sweet and savory noshes and bottomless cups of tea—look like in an Indian-street-food-celebratory sort of way? 🇮🇳 

☕️The tea lineup: 
❇ A creamy cup of Masala Chai (made with our Assam tea) to get us warmed up, followed by:
❇ A strong, and smooth black tea (Nilgiri Gold) to balance the spices and sugars

🥟The savory lineup:
❇ Samosas with potato & pea filling
❇ Pani Puri, thin spheres made with chickpea flour,  filled with all sorts of veggies, and spiced water, popped in the mouth at once for a gently exploding treat! 
❇ Palak Patta Chaat, with giant battered and fried spinach leaves, pomegranate seeds, and a yogurt/tamarind/potato chilled soup. Thanks to for introducing us to this gem! 
❇ Mint chutney, to go with all of the above!

🍡The sweets lineup:
❇ Gulab Jamun. We just had to feature these well-known warm donut holes smothered in syrupy rosewater.
❇ Burfi. Another famous Indian sweet, made with ghee, cardamom, and pistachios. Yum. 
❇ Roasted Cashews. Because they are a great addition to everything!

Tell us in the comments below what you’d add to your Indian-style afternoon tea 🔥

NEW BLOG ALERT: 🌱 SINENSIS VS ASSAMICA 🌱

Hey there, tea enthusiasts! 🌿☕️ Ever wondered about the main differences between the sinensis & assamica varietals of the tea plant? We get this question often and since we love nerding out about tea, we have dedicated our latest blog to exploring the key differences between these two most common Camellia sinensis varietals—and what it all means to your cup experience!

👉 Follow the link below to check it out, and don't forget to leave us a comment with your thoughts and tea knowledge. 🍵💚

https://bit.ly/3PHkoFM

🌸 Happy Spring Equinox & Persian New Year! 🎊

☀️ Fun fact: This year the Spring Equinox is early on March 19 due to 2024 being a leap year, only the second time since 1896! (The first one was in 2020)

🌼 Regardless of what the weather is doing around you, we hope you are surrounding yourselves with tea, community, sweet treats, and plenty of greenery, indoors or outdoors! 🫖🍪🌿

📣🍃 TeaVendor & Young Mountain Tea will be pouring tea together at the World Tea Expo March 18-20! Come see us both and drink tea with us! ☕️We’ve got exciting updates from the Kumaon Tea Factory including tea samples, video journals, and information on how you can visit. 🔸Booth 🔸

☀️Today, we're giving a big shoutout to Nigel Melican for his pivotal role in designing and equipping our factory, as well as helping our farmers increase crop yield. 🌱 This is one of the most exciting parts of our work: connecting our farmer partners to international experts!

It’s hard to describe how valuable Nigel’s deep expertise is within the tea industry, but here it goes:

With over four decades of hands-on experience in agronomy, processing technology & market development, Nigel’s expertise has helped tea producers in 31 countries – from developing green tea cultivation in Australia to extracting antioxidants in Zimbabwe to teaching Kumaon Famers how to implement no-till regenerative practices.

Nigel is CEO of Teacraft Technical Services, co-founder of the US League of Tea Growers and President of the European Specialty Tea Association, and his trophy case includes the John Harney Lifetime Achievement Award.

His particular interest is the challenge of producing commercially viable tea in non-traditional origins, which is how our paths crossed.

Raj first met Nigel at the World Tea Expo in 2015, when he came to our booth and we nervously poured him Kumaon White. In response, he picked up the dry leaf, literally ate (yes, ate!) the tea leaf, and said "I don't taste anything offensive." From there Nigel became a mentor to us in supporting Kumaon farmers. Most recently Nigel has been analyzing Kumaon’s soils and just last week he was emailing the lab to clarify test results.

His unquenchable curiosity and attention to detail (not to mention his pink socks) set him apart in our hearts. For us to be working so closely together is incredibly special and, honestly, mind-blowing. ☀️

🙌 Happy International Women's Day! In honor of this day, we are spotlighting our favorite women-run tea factory: Tea Studio. 🌿 If you haven’t already read our blog about Muskan and her great work in this state-of-the-art processing facility in the Nilgiris, follow this link to learn more 👉 https://bit.ly/3wFI0Uy

🎉 And just to make sure we celebrate these amazing women amply, we are running a sale on all our Nilgiri teas now through Friday 03/15. Just add any of our Nilgiri teas to your cart and use code 20NILGIRI to get 20% off all of the following delicious teas:

🔹 Nilgiri Gold 🔹 Nilgiri Black Orchid 🔹 Nilgiri Black Pearl 🔹 Nilgiri Platinum Needle 🔹

Want to study tea at origin? 🍃 Join us in October for a guided trip to Kumaon, India, to learn about every aspect of how tea is made – from seed, to tea bush, to processing – inside India’s first farmer-owned specialty tea factory. We’re truly honored to have Nigel Melican leading the trip’s instruction, inside a tea factory that he helped design and equip with cutting-edge technologies.

We ran these trips before the pandemic with our partners at , and after a several-year hiatus, we’re thrilled to be able to offer them again! Nigel shared this is likely to be his last guided tour, so this is a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 🌿🌎💫

⬆️ Check out the link in the images to learn more! 🙌

           

⚡️✨ HUGE SAVINGS ALERT: TINS ARE NOW ON SALE! ✨⚡️

🌿 That's right folks, to celebrate our new shiny tins of tea, we are offering a BUY 2 GET 1 FREE deal for a limited time. 👉 Follow the link below to save now, with checkout code:

GOLDENDEAL (Expires March 3 at midnight)

🎁 Just add 3 tin products to your cart, apply the above code, then sit back & relax till your teas arrive at your door! Cheers! 🍵

Shop now: https://bit.ly/42OLMqQ

🥁 MEET OUR NEW TINS 🥁
If you haven’t heard already, we just launched our new REFILLABLE, RECYCLABLE tins for all our loose-leaf and tea bags (that are less than 1 lb)! 🍵

4 REASONS WHY WE'RE PSYCHED ABOUT THIS NEW PACKAGING... 🙌

1️⃣ MORE SUSTAINABLE: The tins will produce less waste because they're reusable, and in many communities, curbside recyclable. Our new labels are super eco-friendly—50% h**p and 50% post-consumer waste—and our unwrapped tea bags and strings are still biodegradable too, being made from sugarcane.

2️⃣ MORE TEA: We heard you about the gap between our small and 1 lb sizes. Since the tins are roomier, we are able to bridge this gap and include more tea inside each tin. That means you'll pay less per cup!

3️⃣ ELEVATED LOOK & FEEL: These good-looking tins are more giftable, and if you keep them for yourself, they can look great on your kitchen counter—and of course you can always refill them with our bulk teas.

4️⃣ BACK-IN-STOCK FAVORITES: In order to restock many of your favorites, we needed to have this new packaging complete (long story short...it involved a bunch of red tape). But starting February 10, most of those teas have been restocked in every size available.

🍃 A quick note: For a brief window, our tin labels will not display organic certification. But you can rest assured all of our teas are still organically grown, and what's inside is the same leaves you've always loved.

📣 New Tea Blog Alert 📣

In our work to build a farmer-owned tea factory in Kumaon, we realized that raising the tea bush yield is a key factor in raising Himalayan farmers' incomes. 🌱 However in Kumaon, low yields are a challenge to the farmers, so we are delving deep into the whys of it and the hows of increasing the tea yields. ⤴️

🫖 Follow the link below to read Raj’s newest blog, and learn more about his latest trip to the region, what he learned, and our next steps!

https://bit.ly/49hN6Et

🎁 Our winter 2024 subscription box just dropped and there are still a few spots left!

🌿 The winter box features 3 loose-leaf teas from 3 Himalayan tea regions: Darjeeling, Kumaon and Nepal. ⛰️ Follow the link below to read more about the teas and watch Raj's lowdown of them all!

🌟 In addition to getting 3 teas for $30—a savings of 40% off the retail price—Tea Box subscribers get loads of other benefits too: When you become a subscriber, you'll gain access to a unique selection of teas many of which are not available elsewhere on our site, the chance to expand your tea tasting horizons, and flexibility (you can cancel at any time). Join us!

https://bit.ly/3HywNYb