A reflection from Maria Uspenski, founder and CEO of The Tea Spot.
This year, when it came time to choose teas for my birthday collection at The Tea Spot, I didn't overthink it too much. I simply chose the teas I most wanted to live with right now. There was no business strategy behind it. These weren't teas that needed a spotlight. They're simply the teas I've been genuinely reaching for lately.
Pan Long Yin Hao has completely captured me this season. There's something about its brightness and energy that feels like the first warm mornings of summer. Kukicha too! It's humble, comforting, a little nutty, and endlessly easy to return to. And I love having a Chinese and a Japanese green to alternate between in the mornings.
For my black tea mornings, I've been steeping Mary's Breakfast Tea almost daily. I still think of it through the lens of Mary from Lumbini Tea in Sri Lanka, who prepared it for us so beautifully when we visited: a surprisingly strong leaf ratio, but only a brief steep. It was balanced, elegant, and deeply satisfying. It created one of those amazing tea moments, and reminded me that mastery often lives in simplicity.
Then there are the teas that simply make me happy: Lady Lavender and Bitaco Cacao Kisses, both exuberant in completely different ways. And of course, pu'er had to be part of my birthday table too. Wisdom of the Ancients and Organic Black Pu'er are teas I return to every time I need grounding or perspective.
What I absolutely wasn't prepared for was how emotional the response to this birthday became for me: the messages poured in from every direction! From longtime customers who have somehow been alongside us for nearly the entire history of The Tea Spot; from dear friends; from people I've met during tea travels around the world; from colleagues and collaborators working tirelessly to elevate tea in their own spheres; from people on our production floor whom I see every day; from fellow authors, tea educators, importers, retailers, growers, blenders, and tea obsessives of every kind.
What struck me most was not the quantity of messages, but the sentiment behind them. Because tea creates an unusual closeness between people. It's generally not an instant thing. Tea requires more patience than that! But slowly, over years of shared cups and conversations, tea builds forever threads between people. Sometimes those threads are built through travel, hospitality, or simple tea curiosity. Other times they're established through grief or illness. And sometimes in celebration, or simply the comfort and luxury of being able to begin every morning the same way for twenty plus years.
Tea often enters our lives unnoticed, and then lives there quietly. But once it settles in, it tends to stay. As I've grown older in tea, I've realized that one of its greatest powers is its ability to erase perceived distance between people. Tea levels things in a beautiful way. Around tea, status and titles matter less. Even language barriers soften. You can sit someone from almost anywhere in the world across from someone else, pour tea between them, and conversation tends to emerge naturally. We know that offering tea is an intimate gesture. There is generosity in preparing it for someone, and there is humility in receiving it.
I think this is part of why the birthday greetings moved me so deeply this year. They felt like evidence of something larger than business, than our brand. They reflected years of shared human experience connected through tea.
Co-authoring and publishing 101 Teas to Steep Before You Die last winter pushed me back into a state of intense curiosity and rediscovery. Writing about tea at that scale reminded me how infinite this world really is. Every tea opens the door to another region, another processing style, another cultural tradition, another human story. And meanwhile, tea itself never stands still. There are new developments happening constantly at origin. Climate shifts. New cultivars. Young tea makers experimenting with old methods. Ancient traditions being preserved in some places while being rediscovered in others. Entire new categories and formats of tea are evolving in real time.
At The Tea Spot, we've also been immersed in new developments, new sourcing conversations, and new blend ideas that genuinely energize me. After all these years, I still get excited tasting a tea that feels truly alive. I still get excited when a tea surprises me. That may be one of the greatest gifts of spending a lifetime in tea: your capacity for wonder does not diminish. If anything, it expands. Your palate expands too, of course, but not merely in terms of flavor. Your palate begins to taste context, bringing in memories of people, landscapes, aromas, even how the soil felt under your feet. A tea no longer tastes "floral, mineral, roasted, creamy, fruity, or earthy." It also tastes like the weather conditions during harvest. It tastes like a conversation you had with the tea grower or maker. It tastes like a tiny mountain road, a rocky hillside or fertile tea garden, or a factory floor, or steam rising from a tasting cup at dawn. All these tea memories accumulate meaning over time.
And as I was thinking about this, I realized that perhaps birthdays do too. I find that aging has made me less interested in chasing novelty for its own sake, and more interested in finding depth in the present moment. I think I'm finally learning how to pay better attention. And I surely recognize how fortunate I am to still feel curious after all these years. There is still so much tea I want to taste, so many people I still want to learn from, so many tea-growing regions I want to revisit, and I have so many ideas still unfolding. The older I get, the less tea feels like a category of beverage to me, and the more it feels like a lifelong conversation with the world.
This birthday reminded me of that in the most beautiful possible way. Every message I received carried a small thread of connection with it. Some came from people I've known for decades. Others from people I may never meet face to face. Yet tea had somehow created enough shared ground between us that reaching out felt natural. That feels pretty special and rare today. So while this birthday began with a handful of teas I wanted to celebrate, it ended as a reflection on something much bigger and more precious: the extraordinary capacity tea has to bring people together gently, quietly, and over time. I'm grateful that tea does not force connection, but invites it, one sip at a time.
--Maria Uspenski, Founder and CEO