Down on the tea farm we are having a supply and demand problem. Its green tea. Folks are convinced that drinking green tea will cure their cancer, brain disease, sickness and ailments of every kind, as well as a bad hair day, dog bite and the price of groceries. A biochemist tea distributor friend told me that green tea and black tea are the same except you destroy a little of the antioxidants ( catechins and lucoanthocyanidins ) when you oxidize the black tea, 7%, that’s not much. But commercialism has convinced the public otherwise.
This past year we made 110 pounds of green tea. That is about what we do every year and is a lot of tea. But our sales have been unbelievably brisk. About three times a week a drive up, usually repeat customer will say “how much green tea do you have bagged up…ok, Ill take it all.” People are telling me all their international tea orders for their favorites are being put on back order ( especially matcha and Chinese greens) and that store brands of green tea taste “earthy,” and our green tea is the best they ever had!
This is putting a strain on our ability to keep on hand the units which we sell to our regular tea tour customers. So, this past week after making green loose leaf bags at night and selling out the next day for three days in a row, my wife and I decided we not want to work at this pace. We have decided we will not sale anymore pound or half pound bags of loose leaf green tea for the rest of this season. Production will start again next march.
So the next morning a gentleman drove up wanting four pounds of loose leaf green tea. An hour later a lady wanted a half pound and that afternoon another lady bought 14 of our last green teabags. It is a supply and demand thing. We will continue to sell individual cup size green and black teabags as well as half pound bags of black tea, which we have plenty of.
Everyone says “Great, time to expand!” As growing, producing and selling tea is our past time farm hobby and not our income livelihood, we are not going to expand. We do not want to expand, which would be easy to do and is the natural American capitalist’s dream, but not ours. I have to explain this over and over to people who has bought my book.
I appreciate our regular customers understanding.
Donnie Barrett