Angela and Dominic Valdes are a married couple who have brought their love of teas to the rest of the world via their etsy shop, website store, and tea shop. They have a facebook page, twitter and blog as well. Peacelovetea boasts over 120 blends that are handcrafted in small batches. Read the interview below (answered by Angela) about the couple and their business.
You’re a married couple. How did you two meet?
Dominic and I met in junior high. My family had moved up to Oregon from Palm Desert, California and Dominic befriended my sister and I on our first day of school. After attending separate high schools for 4 years, we started dating in 1998 and have been together ever since. We were first loves and grew up together and have enjoyed how our life paths and interests have always converged.
How did you each discover your love of tea and making it?
I've had a love for tea since my Comama (Grama) used to have tea parties with my sister and I when we were young. She would serve us strawberry scented black tea in this beautiful navy oriental inspired tea set complete with gold foil trim and a bamboo handle. Dominic's dad worked for Lipton Tea when he was little and our boys still play with Dominic's childhood Lipton branded metal trailer trucks. Tea has been in our souls and we've found our calling in bringing a healthy product to the economy while also providing a peaceful atmosphere for people to enjoy it.
How did you get started making tea? Did you take a class or experiment on your own?
In college, Dominic bought me my first teapot (a beautiful cranberry colored Brown Betty style teapot with metal basket infuser) and some loose leaf teas with blends like vanilla peach black tea. I was hooked on the simplicity of the process and the amazing complexity of flavors. There's something about infusing the essence of tea into water that I find meditative. The aroma, the taste, the whole experience has me both at ease and transfixed, eager for more. Dominic was inspired to start the tea shop by doing a business plan in college on a hypothetical tea business at the University of Oregon. It was only 7 months after graduating from college that he and some other students in the group decided to make the tea shop a reality. Taking the reins, Dominic has turned our tea business into one that not only inspires us daily, but has become a haven of unity and respect. We have deep appreciation for the earth and all its inhabitants, and we've fine tuned our products over the years to be unique handcrafted organic blends by us combined with highly prized and respected teas like hand rolled Jasmine scented green tea pearls or our top grade Japanese Gyokuro.
How did you come up with the name peacelovetea?
Peacelovetea started out as a meditative craft adventure for me personally. Fighting a 3 year migraine that was triggered by an anaphylactic allergic reaction (the migraine finally ended this spring), I started practicing active mediation, where I would allow my hands to create whatever was inspiring to me at that moment while letting my mind rest. I created little teapot and teacup cards with recycled magazine envelopes for our customers to write a note to a loved one while sipping tea in the tea shop. Then it progressed into including many other projects I've done from crocheted cup cozies (a great way to encourage our customers to use less waste and get a discount on their tea), jewelry design, crocheted slippers and finally to paper lamp creations. I created a blog called Peacelovetea to share these projects with loved ones, eventually selling them online on Etsy. The teas we sell on our Etsy site are our own original handcrafted recipes, organic and made in small batches for consistency in flavor, aroma and health benefits.
You’ve been on Etsy for over a year, and been making tea since 2003. What was your journey from homemade personal teas to Etsy?
When we first opened our tea shop back in 2003, we started with carrying a large selection of other wholesaler tea blends, but we started experimenting on our own almost immediately, finding that there were elements we felt were missing in some teas or that there were recipe ideas just popping up. Dominic started playing with the combinations of tea types with spices, herbs and natural flavors and really developed his palate through the process. The first tea on our menu that Dominic decided to take control of the creation process was our Pumpkin Spice Chai. Now considered one of our best selling chai blends (out of 15 chai blends now), we're really happy with the combination of warm spices like ginger and cinnamon with our pumpkin infused vanilla black tea and it's all organic. We now hand blend 86 of our teas in our menu and continue adding more as inspiration strikes. Some favorites we've had fun creating were our herbal Apothecary line, with tasty blends targeted to improve vision (Clarity Blend), calm digestive issues (Tummy Blend) and even combat insomnia (Sleep Blend). We also enjoyed creating our best selling Chocolate Chipotle Chai, a spicy kick in the pants with organic chipotle peppers and lots of smooth chocolate flavor.
Where else did/do you sell your teas?
We started selling our tea blends in retail tins this year and now have 33 different teas we blend available. They are currently available both in our shop, on our tea shop website www.teachaite.com and in many grocery stores and co-operative grocers in the local Portland, Oregon area. Our customers can find where and which teas are available to purchase in stores on our website.
What’s each of your favorite teas?
As the seasons change, our favorites change too. My personal favorites right now are our Blue People Oolong, Velvet Oolong, Vanilla Macadamia Nut Mate, Ginger Green Chai (with Hemp Milk) and Peach Blossom White. Although I doubt I could get through the week without having our Coconut Oolong. At the moment, our large iced tea dispenser in our fridge is ready for summer thirst quenching with Iced Coconut Oolong. Dominic's favorites of the moment tend to lean more towards our Japanese Gyokuro and spicier tea blends like our Kashmiri Chai. The cardamom and telecherry pepper in the Kashmiri Chai are so invigorating and make for a strong cup of chai.
Do you have a favorite to make?
My favorite way to prepare tea is using a Gongfu set. A fairly recent tea tradition, it started out in the 1940's as a way to showcase the flavor of fine quality teas by serving it in small tiny yixing clay tea cups. Although my version is probably less ceremonial, making our Velvet Oolong, a Taiwanese milk oolong, gongfu style, is my favorite way to start off each morning. The trick to making tea in this method is to be attentive to the characteristics of the water used (we filter our water), the temperature of the water when steeping the tea leaves, and to be extremely forgiving towards yourself if you accidentally over steep the leaves; being willing to just start over if it doesn't meet your personal taste standards. Nothing can take the peaceful essence out of the whole experience faster than being bummed out about an overly bitter cup. So it helps to plan on taking time out of your day (about 20 minutes) to devote to making yourself some terrific sips of tea . Frankly, we all deserve that small amount of time to experience something that makes us feel great everyday.
You have a lot of organic teas. Do you prefer organic yourselves?
We are working very hard to continue to carry more organic teas as we feel the less invasive people have been with the tea plants, the better the health benefits. Personally, we try to only put into our bodies foods and teas that will help us maintain and improve our health. Life is too wonderful to be bogged down with chemicals our bodies were not designed to fight against. It's important to note though, that the majority of the highest quality teas come from small family tea plantations that can't afford the expensive organic certification, so we look at their process and the quality of their finished products. We choose to support like-minded eco-conscious businesses.
As a tea maker, can you really tell the differences between organic tea and non-organic?
I can taste the difference between something that doesn't sit well with my palate and something that makes me want another cup. I can taste chemicals, artificial flavors and even the left over alcohol from something that wasn't properly blended. My sense of smell and sense of taste are very important to me and I find immense pleasure in experiencing unique food combinations and aromatic scents. Dominic shares the same interest- so one of our favorite things to do is go out to a new restaurant for dinner in Portland. We really love to eat, drink and enjoy those senses. And we enjoy using the senses we love in our business, so we choose to match what we love in taste and smell with tea suppliers that feel the same way.
Flowering teas has become pretty popular. Have you ever considered making those and what are your thoughts on them?
Flowering teas are beautiful and you can tell most of them are handcrafted. In order to create our own flowering teas, we would need to be able to create them at the source (at a tea plantation), as they are rolled, twisted and tied together with other flowers during the drying process. This is a skill that seems to take years to perfect and they produce very light, fragrant teas. We don't carry any ourselves at the moment, as we're still looking for some flowering teas that meet our standards of stronger aroma and higher grade white teas.
Talk to me about your birds nest teas. How does one brew them? How many pots does one nest usually make?
Puer teas are incredible dark teas from China that are distinct for post fermentation after green tea leaves have been pressed into shapes, such as our Sheng Tuo Cha. As there is raw puer "Sheng" and ripe puer 'Shou" tea cakes, the flavors of each type vary so the brewing process can too. For our Sheng Tuo Cha puer nests we recommend for a 16 oz serving to do a hot rinse over 1 (unwrapped) nest for about 20 seconds, then steep for 4 minutes. You can get quite a few extra infusions out of it and the flavor will change with each one. One of the best parts about tea is the limitless experiences you can get out of it.
You’re a part of the Tea Chai Te website/company. How does that partnership work?
Peacelovetea is a handcrafted division of Tea Chai Te. As our focus is on bringing something healthy and peaceful to others, we also want to inspire others to take the time to do something that makes them feel great about who they are. We are all creators in our own way and just like making tea, we all have the personal choice to make our life how we see fit.
You sell loose teas. Is there a reason you don’t sell teas in teabags? Do you prefer loose tea? Are there any flavor differences?
Loose leaf tea is unique in that when kept together in a dark, airtight and humid free environment (like a tea canister), the flavor, quality and aroma of can be preserved longer than if crushed up, bagged in advance and then left in a cardboard box on a shelf for a few months. In other countries, tea is revered and respected for the process of it, the people who make it and the experience it brings, where in the United States, we are bombarded with attractive branding and the promise of instant gratification with less than high quality products. Dominic and I have been fortunate to learn this early in our youth through our personal pursuits for a great tasting tea. It's an honor to be able to share something so significant with others who are looking for a tea product that can appeal so greatly to the senses and be healthy for the whole body. We don't sell tea in teabags, however, we do provide biodegradable paper tea filters for our customers as they are a great technology in the world of tea that is good for the environment.
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