Incredibly, there is still no way to send packages with merchandise from Taiwan to the USA* through public postal services. We are not alone. Since August 25th, over 88 countries have placed some form of shipping restrictions on packages going to America due to an incomplete sanctions regime implemented by the USA. 88 countries is rather breathtaking in scope, as is the fact that after so many weeks there has been such little movement on fixing this problem. The problem is not with the countries shipping to the USA being unwilling to pay the sanctions. They, and we, are wiling to pay extra to ship to the USA. The problem lies in those countries not being ABLE TO pay the...
Our AI Policy: All AI generation in any publication of Mountain Stream Teas content will be labeled and described. If we do not mention AI, none was used in the production of that content. If AI was used, a detailed description of what was generated will be placed in the content. "The opposite of life is not death, it's the machine." -Ian McGilchrist The machines are becoming more 'life-like' each day. As we all struggle with the implications of the introduction of AI content generation in the digital commons, we at Mountain Stream Teas have decided to create an AI use policy statement. While we have watched the growth of AI generated content with interest, we have not used any...
The Official Chinese name of the Mountain Stream Teas company translates as ‘Hualien Outdoors’. That was the name of the company when we were a wilderness adventure outfit that supported our family from 2014 to around 2022 or so. For a decade we lead thousands of people into the beautiful rivers and mountains of the east coast of Taiwan, and during the last couple years of business, the tea gardens as well. We slightly oversold those trips as ‘Tea Adventures’, and thankfully people didn’t mind too much. Ending the trips at a hot spring helped. It was a great experience, although admittedly much higher stress than selling tea. As Mountain Stream Teas has grown, we have always known that eventually...
A thoughtful question came from the Discord Server about the last blog post: "In the post, you mentioned that more and more younger folks are involved in the tea industry, and you also mentioned that prices on the premium/organic side are increasing. Have you happened to notice any correlation between those two trends (either on the “young people are more involved in production” and/or “young people are more involved in consumption” sides)? The feedback loops between the costs well-off folks are willing to pay, the general inflation that results, and the increasing operational costs to support workers so they can survive said inflation are interesting to think about, so I’m mostly curious if you’ve gathered any insight into such dynamics...
Our yearly trip to the 2025 Nantou Global Tea Expo was an enjoyable success, but we did see some disappointing trends emerge. There seems to be a growing divergence between the expensive 'premium' and cheaper teas which has been challenging for many companies. While not unique to Taiwanese tea by any means, the divergence did seem to accelerate this year. Some of the things we noticed: 1. We found no new teas or exciting innovations during our visit this year. We couldn't even find the rumored new 'orange' style of tea to try. In the past, experimental cakes, new and interesting hybrid processing styles and unique cultivars were all available to try, evaluate and discuss. This year we didn’t find...
