One of the best things about tea is flavor nuance.  Do you taste chocolate in your Birdsong Black tea? We do!

This tea grows an hour from Cali, Colombia. From the top of a ridge, the tea farm blankets the mountain down to the town of Bitaco. The farm sits at 6,000 feet above sea level high in the Andean Mountains, and the tea plants flourish in the volcanic soil.  The area’s unique terroir imparts a chocolatey aroma and flavor unlike any other black tea.

See if you detect the taste of chocolate in this Colombian black tea. We recommend playing with your water temperature and steeping time to bring out more of the chocolate flavor.  Try dropping the water temperature to 195 degrees and steep a little under 3 minutes. Pay particular attention to the aroma of the tea. You might just find the chocolate flavor intensifies. Enjoy this fun tea brewing exercise to enhance your tea tasting palette!

We use this tea in part in most of our flavored black teas. Do you detect a hint of chocolate in our other black tea? Every now and then we think we do ; )

We source our true teas – black tea, green tea, white tea, oolong tea, puerh tea, and even yellow tea – directly from the tea farms we work with. Most of our tea sources are relatively small tea farms. This is a good approach, because it gets the tea-leaf to our customers faster and fresher. In addition, direct sourcing fosters trust and support with the communities where the tea is grown. We know that the tea we source is organically grown and of premium quality.

Quality, premium tea hosts a myriad of health benefits. These can include weight loss (by replacing high calorie drinks with tea) and heart health. In addition, drinking tea daily has been shown to provide the human body with vitality and longevity boosting properties. High amounts of antioxidants and increased bone density are other properties, primarily found with green tea.

From the seedling to your cup, everyone is invested in providing quality. This ensures ongoing business for everyone involved, all the way to you, the consumer. Along with consistently providing premium tea, farms need to ask fair market prices, and our tea company needs to pay for the tea at that price (not asking for lower prices). We in turn give you the best price we can, while paying employees fair wages. In this way, direct sourcing is also sustainable.

Small tea farms prioritize the health of their community and the environment. If both the community and environment are not in good health, it’s hard to produce a good product. These tea plant photos were taken at Bitaco Tea in Cali, Colombia.  The organically grown tea thrives along with the community. Like many small tea farms, Bitaco supports the schools, as well as provides art enrichment programs for the youth in the area.  In addition, the farm is at the top of the watershed, and they know clean water is good for everyone, including tea! In addition, biodiversity initiatives implementing environmental health ensure organic tea and ecological health.

Our tea comes with the added benefits in the physical, mental, and global realms.  The tea is good for you, and you know it’s coming from well-intentioned sources. Health, vitality and joy – tea truly is a well-rounded beverage!

Written by Boo Curry and Uriah Kreilick

We are proud partners with Bitaco Tea, the Colombian tea farm north of Cali, Colombia! A visit to Missoula, Montana from Andres Velasco, Bitaco Tea CEO, and Santiago Gonzalez, Bitaco Tea International Sales, solidified this relationship. Lake Missoula Tea Company has sold four varieties of their tea for the last few years. In addition to retailing Colombian tea and selling regionally, we now sell an expanded line of Colombian teas and distribute their tea to small and mid-sized tea companies, coffee shops, restaurants and grocery stores.

Try our Birdsong Black and Rainforest Fruit Green, both Colombian teas.

Learn more about Colombian teas and the farm. Interested in selling Colombian tea? Create your WHOLESALE ACCOUNT or email info@lakemissoulatea.com or call 406-529-9477.

We carry Caldera Mist Chocolate Abyss, a blend of several black teas, including one from Colombia and Colombian cacao nibs and cacao husks.

This new blend took me on a little chocolate lesson. I didn’t know if cacao and cocoa were the same thing. It turns out they are and they aren’t. Cocoa comes from the cacao tree. Cocoa is made by heating the cacao bean at a very high temperature. The heat creates a sweet version of cacao. On the other hand, cacao has a slightly bitter edge.

You may have heard that cacao is healthy for you – that’s true – it’s another plant that provides tons of antioxidants and is referred to as a Superfood. However, cocoa, or the heated version of cacao, doesn’t carry as much antioxidant punch, because some of its nutrients are lost in the heating process.

Our cacao products, which include nibs, husks and shells – come from Tumaco, a port city in northern Colombia. Tumaco is world renowned for its cacao and cocoa products.

Keep this in mind as you sip any of our teas with cacao:

• Caldera Mist Chocolate Abyss – sweet black tea with a hint of bittersweet chocolate.
• Stress Less – you’ll get a hint of wispy chocolate in an otherwise savory blend.
• Cycle Goddess – the cacao offers anti-inflammatory and circulatory benefits, as well as great flavor!

Coffee is king in Colombia, but some folks in Colombia are trying to make tea queen.  In the supermarkets, tea options are skimpy. You will find a lot of herbal tea bags and maybe, if you’re lucky, one lone box of green tea.  During a month of travel, I witnessed “tea” drinking only once, and that was a lemongrass and mint infusion.

So, why start a tea farm in coffee country?

In 1946, Colombia’s government wanted to diversify agriculture and received the first tea plants. The mile high elevation, with its rapidly changing weather and naturally rich soil, made the Llanos family’s land ideal for tea. At first, the Llanos wanted to begin the tried and true path to success through coffee cultivation, but one of the Llano sons pushed for tea. He had lived in England and developed a taste for tea.

Over the past 55 years, the company has slowly carved out a foothold in the Colombian market with herbal tea bags, and recently has broken into the domestic and international scene with fine loose leaf varieties (Rainforest Fruit Tea, Birdsong Black).

We got to see the present day operations with a new state-of-the-art tea processing facility with plenty of space for expansion. In our minds, their future is secure, because one thing is abundantly clear: the tea tastes good and stands up next to its Eastern counterparts. But they have a lot of work to do to shift the collective tea drinkers’ consciousness from the old world heavyweights of China, India, Japan. If Chile and Argentina could establish an independent wine culture from their European forebears, then why not Colombian tea?

Selling this tea in Missoula, Montana shows we recommend its flavor profile – it’s a good tea! – but it’s more than that. After experiencing the culture and community that supports it, standing behind this farm tucked away in the Colombian cloud forest is our pleasure.

Written by Christina Bovinette