Anupa Mueller, owner of Silver Tips Tea Room, will be offering samples of Eco-Prima teas.
June 09, 2010 09:44 AM Filed in: STORE NEWS
On Wednesday, June 9, from 11 am to 2 pm, Anupa Mueller, owner of Silver Tips Tea Room in Tarrytown, will be offering samples of Eco-Prima organic and biodynamic teas. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Anupa and experience some of the extraordinary teas she makes available to us. Here’s an excerpt from the biographical sketch on her website:
My own roots to tea go back to my childhood in Darjeeling, India one of the tea capitals of the world and home of “the Champagne of Teas.” My sister and I attended boarding school at the foothills of the Himalayas, surrounded by lush tea plantations. After graduating college, I went to New York to work for the United Nations and then later became an executive for a large communications company. My sister, meanwhile, had married Rajah Banerjee, whose family owned the beautiful and vast Makaibari tea plantation. Thus began my own journey back to the path of Tea! Tea was now firmly rooted in my family’s past, present and future.
Over the years, I visited Makaibari numerous times and each time learned a little more about the flavorful beverage I had taken for granted during my childhood. I discovered how tea bushes were pruned to a certain height for optimal picking; how the women plucked the top two leaves and a bud; how the leaves were weighed, how the fresh green leaves miraculously became black tea; and how the teas were sorted and graded. I learned that no detail is too small to escape attention, even down to the meticulous hand-crafting of tea chests on the estate.
Decades ago, Makaibari became a pioneer in the tea industry. Ahead of their time, my sister and brother-in-law turned to organic and biodynamic farming. They returned two-thirds of their land back to sub-tropical forest, which improved the health of their soil, brought back teeming wildlife and improved the lives of the people who shared this ecological system with them. Their tea sold for the highest wholesale price, $400/kilo and other farmers both local and international began to try to emulate their methods. The Banerjees have lectured on biodynamic farming throughout the world.
Impressed by what I had seen and learned at Makaibari, I decided, in 1995, to market my family’s biodynamic tea. Soon this venture grew to include all kinds of teas from all over the world! I began to realize that this new work was a continuation of my desire to make the world a better place. It was an extension of my UN and corporate work, but on a gentler plane and at a more relaxed pace. I could now help struggling farmers sell their tea and help expand the markets for tea in the US and internationally. I could offer fair-trade teas whose surcharges went directly to the farmers who grew the crops.
My own roots to tea go back to my childhood in Darjeeling, India one of the tea capitals of the world and home of “the Champagne of Teas.” My sister and I attended boarding school at the foothills of the Himalayas, surrounded by lush tea plantations. After graduating college, I went to New York to work for the United Nations and then later became an executive for a large communications company. My sister, meanwhile, had married Rajah Banerjee, whose family owned the beautiful and vast Makaibari tea plantation. Thus began my own journey back to the path of Tea! Tea was now firmly rooted in my family’s past, present and future.
Over the years, I visited Makaibari numerous times and each time learned a little more about the flavorful beverage I had taken for granted during my childhood. I discovered how tea bushes were pruned to a certain height for optimal picking; how the women plucked the top two leaves and a bud; how the leaves were weighed, how the fresh green leaves miraculously became black tea; and how the teas were sorted and graded. I learned that no detail is too small to escape attention, even down to the meticulous hand-crafting of tea chests on the estate.
Decades ago, Makaibari became a pioneer in the tea industry. Ahead of their time, my sister and brother-in-law turned to organic and biodynamic farming. They returned two-thirds of their land back to sub-tropical forest, which improved the health of their soil, brought back teeming wildlife and improved the lives of the people who shared this ecological system with them. Their tea sold for the highest wholesale price, $400/kilo and other farmers both local and international began to try to emulate their methods. The Banerjees have lectured on biodynamic farming throughout the world.
Impressed by what I had seen and learned at Makaibari, I decided, in 1995, to market my family’s biodynamic tea. Soon this venture grew to include all kinds of teas from all over the world! I began to realize that this new work was a continuation of my desire to make the world a better place. It was an extension of my UN and corporate work, but on a gentler plane and at a more relaxed pace. I could now help struggling farmers sell their tea and help expand the markets for tea in the US and internationally. I could offer fair-trade teas whose surcharges went directly to the farmers who grew the crops.
