A conversation with co-founders Ayumi Takahashi & Diana Zheng. Edited for brevity.

On the presence of tea growing up in Asia —

DZ Ayumi, Daphne, our former co-founder, and I all met at the beginning of 2019. My family is from this part of Southern China that is both really food obsessed and very tea obsessed. In Mandarin it's called the Chaozhou region. A few years ago I actually did my first Kickstarter for a cookbook of the food of the region. I had wanted to do that because after like multiple trips back as an adult, I realized that like the food there is so special and it's so unique. I really felt like no one in America knew anything about it. I barely knew anything about it. Growing up, I just like didn't really pay attention to it. Once I started visiting more as a grown human and taking more of an interest in my heritage, I felt like more people should know about it. I went back and visited my family. My dad's side of the family all still lives there. And every time that you go to visit them you basically just drink tea and eat and drink tea and eat. 

My mom who is also from Southern China, but her family is not from this particular region. I remember like on family trips as a kid, when we'd go back and visit my dad's side, she would be like, you know, the only thing that we do with your family is just eat. We just like eat all day. And my mom loves eating too. There is something about this region where like everyone is totally obsessed arguing about the best place to get X, Y and Z all day long. Most likely over tea. Gong fu tea is a big thing in this area. The region is considered one of the potential birthplaces of tea. Originally it's a little contentious because there are like a couple of different areas around Southern China that lay claim to that. 

It's hard to say definitively, but it's definitely a very important region for growing food, tea culture. The Phoenix mountain is right there, hovering above Chaozhou. And that's where dan cong oolongs come from which makes up three of our six oolong selections from our first collection of teas. I was exposed to casually at first. Every visit back, first thing you would do is an aunt or an uncle would set up a tea set and all our cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents would just mill around the tea set and catch up. It was a really nice way to spend time with each other, debate what to eat next. it wasn't unique to my family. Every family there has a gong fu tea set, everyone drinks going through tea all day. If you go to the wet market, the butchers, the vegetable vendors, the fish vendors, everyone has a gong fu tea set. If you go to a shop and you want to buy a dress, the proprietor will invite you for tea first, before you do business. It's very much part of the culture there. It's a way to extend hospitality.  

AT I was never really a tea drinker. I'm not really from a tea drinking family. My family is from China, the Northeastern part where we drink more beer than tea. I was born in China and after elementary school went to Japan and coincidentally lived in the two biggest tea drinking countries. I never really knew anything about tea, but one thing I liked about it is this international culture. Every kind of culture has their own version of tea drinking. As an artist myself, living in a lot of places, I think I've been moving once a year for the past 16 years. Part of my goal is to make something more borderless and universal that can speak to more people. I think that value of tea aligned with what I wanted to pursue with my art. 

On the name Three Gems —

DZ Three is a traditional number for the number of cups that you serve in a Chaozhou gong fu tea session. Traditionally, even if you have a number of tea drinkers and it’s not a multiple of three, you would still set out multiples of three and people would just cycle in and out of drinking tea in these sets of three. Even if you had eight people you'd have two sets. You'd sanitize them in between, rinsing in the hot water. It's this continual flow of tea drinkers cycling in and out. It’s not this rigid formal that I think the words tea ceremony often evoke in America and elsewhere. It’s totally casual. It's more about the hang than the tea itself.

AT I've always really liked three as a number because in Chinese, there's a saying three gives birth to everything. It always has this positive meaning behind it especially in Chinese or Japanese culture that I'm more familiar with.

On the mission and vision —

DZ We talk all the time about our own three gems for tea time, which is keep it good, simple and fun. There's a lot of complexity that goes into mixing, making something ultimately simple, but we're trying to make the brand for the tea drinker good in terms of good teas to drink that are really tasty, really flavorful and aromatic, but also grown sustainably. All of our oolongs are organically grown. They're not certified organic because that's a whole other discussion of the bureaucratic hurdles to getting the official organic certification in the different countries that you're selling in. The dan cong oolongs actually just recently got their US certification so they can officially be certified organic, but our other growers, they use organic practices too, but as a small tea farm, it's really prohibitive both financially and logistically a lot of times to go through all the hoops that are required to be registered as an organic grower.

Good teas, trying to keep a pretty high level of quality across everything that we do.  Making it really simple for tea drinkers, especially with the new tea drinkers that we're trying to invite to tea for the first time for them to feel welcomed and to really streamline the process so that it can be customized. We're just giving you kind of the simple framework for the bare necessities that you need for tea. Honestly, you don't need even need a gong fu tea set. or even a strainer for a tea time, you really need a vessel of water and tea leaves and you can go from there. We really want to invite more people to enjoy all these different loose leaf tea, these beautiful loose-leaf teas that the world to offer. We want to make it feel approachable. Good. Simple and fun.

On the tea Midnight Blossom oolong —

DZ The midnight blossom is one of our three dan cong oolongs in our oolong lineup. All of our dan congs come from this one grower that we work with. He and his family live in the Phoenix Mountain outside of Chaozhou, China. We were very lucky to be able to go spend a night there and witness the harvest and the making of the tea in 2019. It was super special. I had like seen tea making a few times casually, but had never stayed the night and seeing the whole process and how labor intensive it all is. It goes from growing the tea leaves, obviously handpicking them, weathering them out under the sun briefly to begin the wilting process and then transferring them to baskets indoors to control the oxidation process.

That requires literally every few hours going in and tumbling the leaves. They use these bamboo baskets and the tea makers will go in one by one, take them down, give them a shake, tumble them. You're really relying on your experience and your intuition at that point to figure out exactly how much tumbling needs to be done. It very much relies on the senses of the tea maker. Taking into account the growing season, that particular climate to figuring out how to make the most out of this batch of tea. When you're in the tea making season, the tea maker doesn’t really sleep, they have to get up every few hours to take care of their babies, the oolong teas.  

After it's been oxidized to the right level, it goes into this process called killing green, where you stop the oxidation with a quick, tumble in and applying heat. You roll it and then you roast it. There's just so many steps depending on the style of tea that you're making and where you're making it too. So many little deviations that you can take from this, but it's such a labor intensive process. We decided to focus on dan cong oolong, because we're just blown away by how diverse dan cong oolong can be. Medium roast, they are ribbon oolong, long and twisty. It's named after a flower that blooms at night.

It's a pretty floral tea, a little bit of creaminess to it. They don't have anything added. In addition to the floral notes, there's also a little bit of milkiness and a little note of wood or forest.

Names are a little tricky when it comes to translating because there's not one translation for a lot of teas. So that was part of our like brand's creative process too-- trying to figure out what is the right name? That is true to the original name in Chinese, but also captures the feeling of drinking this, like midnight blossom. Chinese can be very poetic and you can jam a lot of meaning into a few characters. We were trying to figure out how do you get that kind of romantic vibe, the feeling of fragrance at night without having it be a whole sentence on our package.