Tell us about your company.
Chaba means “tea leaf”’ in Japanese, but it can also be translated as “the place for tea”. With Chaba, we want to bring the experience and culture of Japanese tea to more people outside of Japan. The world of nihoncha (Japanese tea) is deep and has a lot to offer. We focus on finding rare loose leaf teas that you wouldn't normally be able to get in the US, representing growing regions all over Japan. We go to the tea fields about once a year, looking for new teas and catching up with our grower friends. When we are back in Portland, we often do tastings, workshops, and events - we're excited to share this world with people, and are constantly looking for more ways to do that!
How did Chaba & Co start?
Chaba started purely from our own interest in tea - we both love tea and drink it every day, especially sencha. When visiting family in Japan, we started to go to tea shops to find good teas, and we'd bring stuff back for friends. It's stuff you can't get your hands on here in the States, so our friends would ask about it, and their friends as well. Then it became our thing, finding new teas. We decided we'd go visit the places where tea was actually grown - tasting at shops and asking the locals what their favorite teas were, or we'd find famous tea bars in magazines and go visit them.
We started looking up the makers, and meeting growers and farmers, blenders and others in the industry in these different localities. As it turns out, there's a lot of good people in the tea industry - we kept meeting these kind, hardworking, straight-talking, very giving individuals and we fell in love with the people. We started to make friends and thought, "would people want this? Could we show the experience of Japanese tea back in Portland?" and we weren't sure at all.
What inspires your craft? What is your philosophy?
We're inspired by the people that keep the culture of tea alive in Japan, especially the growers. The people we've met are so hardworking and down-to-earth. When we travel around, we like to treat tea like you would treat wine - we're looking for rare teas that really show the terroir of their region, and the character of their growers. Small family farms, unusual cultivars, generations of people caring for their land and really dedicated to their craft. We love finding competition-winning teas, but ultimately we choose based on what we like best personally, and hope that by sharing it others can find the teas they like as well.
What do you hope to inspire others with your products?
In her childhood, some of Aya's favorite memories were of having tea with her family and friends. Her grandmother loved brewing sencha and always had neighbors coming over to share a cup. That memory and feeling of community being created through tea has always been with her.
Nihoncha is more than just a beverage. We're trying to communicate the experience of tea in Japan - brewing tea is a chance to slow down and become intentional, a moment to reflect and a moment to share. There's a great culture of sharing surrounding tea in Japan - whether it’s sipping fine sencha, or a rustic bancha shared by a grandma in the countryside, tea is a beautiful way to show our appreciation for each other.
What is a typical day like for Chaba & Co?
We haven't settled into a typical day quite yet! We're still very young, and we're constantly learning. We're trying to get involved in as many ways as we can - both with the community here and the tea industry in Japan. Along with the online store and getting Chaba into local shops, we also do pop-ups, workshops, collaborations - we're looking for different ways to bring tea into people's lives and share this world with them. The traditions are old but the way we share about it is ever-changing!
What’s the process for creating Chaba & Co. tea? Tell us about the traditional techniques to create tea? What makes Chaba & Co. tea different from other tea brands?
All of our teas come directly from Japan, from growers and producers that we meet face-to-face and work with as friends. We're thankful for their kindness, and we're honored to represent their efforts. Sometimes we're even able to pitch-in with the harvest, in general we just want to be as helpful as we can. On harvest days, after being picked, tea leaves are steamed, rolled in various ways to remove moisture, and dried. Toasty hojicha will go through extra steps of roasting, and flowery wakoucha will go through a process of oxidation - each tea has its own ways of being processed.
The harvest days are long - typically sunup to sundown for picking, and then about 5 additional hours for the processing. Although it's possible to roll a very small batch of tea entirely by hand, for practical reasons they use machinery that mimics the movements of the hands. Each machine represents a specific movement, and the tea is moved from machine to machine until the moisture has been removed and the tea rolled into tight needles.
With Chaba, we're trying to introduce people to the culture of tea in Japan, beyond just its flavor. We wish for people to experience the stillness and tranquility that this long tradition offers, while exploring and finding their favorite teas along the way.
How does sustainability fit into the work that you do?
We're farm-to-cup, so we're intricately connected to the land. We love working with farmers that are caretakers of their land, handing it down the generations, appreciating the past and planning for the future.
The fact is, the tea industry in Japan is at a turning point - domestic sales have been in decline as younger generations have been drinking less, and what they do drink is often bottled teas from the vending machines which use lower quality tea leaves. The high quality leaf that small farmers pride themselves on doesn't go for the prices it used to, so economically it's difficult for them. Even worse, that doesn't make it an attractive career for their kids to take over, many of which have been leaving for jobs in the big cities. For these farmers, their families, and the heritage of their land, we want to share the depth of this wonderful world with new generations and new people - the world of Japanese tea is wide, interesting, and has a lot to offer.
Where do you hope to see the company in 10 years?
We want to find deeper and more meaningful ways to share the experience of tea with people. Something that excites us is the idea of bringing groups to the tea fields in Japan - we're not set up for anything like that quite yet, but it's something we're working on. We would love to deepen the Portland / Japan connection. A tearoom in Japan, as well as here? These are the things we talk about, but for now, beyond bringing in more teas, we're also working to expand our teaware offering. More workshops, more events. We're trying to keep ourselves open to new ideas and ways of finding people who are intrigued by this deep world of nihoncha.
Discover Chaba & Co.'s amazing products here!
