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Our History
I am June Lau,
founder of Just4Tea. I love tea, and drink at least 10 cups a day. You could say
tea is in my blood: My family has been steeped in the tea business for three
generations.
My grandfather’s brother opened a tea store in Chaozhou (Chiu Chow), China
around 1930. People there were known for their great skill in performing the
Gong Fu (Kung Fu) tea ceremony, and tea was a vital part of life there. Tea was
a prestigious business in the old days. It required a combination of hard work,
tea connoisseur skill, and tea-making experience, including perfect blending and
baking methods. My uncle had all these qualities and skills, and his business
flourished. My father became enamored with tea, and studied for many years with
famous tea companies and relatives. He eventually became a Tea Master, and when
his family migrated to Hong Kong, he started his own tea business there.
I grew up in our tea store. My father always sat with me and did side-by-side
tea tasting while he was catching up on father-daughter time from his hectic
schedule. He would teach me the characteristics of various teas, and he liked to
test me to see if I could distinguish different grades of teas or different
season crops of teas. I always hung out at the store to sell tea to customers,
and did some chores for my parents so I could earn pocket money. Watching my
parents as devoted Tea Makers and great parents is the sweetest memory in my
life, and it is one of the reasons I have such a great passion toward tea.
I grew up drinking various teas every day and often secretly opened the tea
canisters and popped Dragon Well, Jasmine, Oolong and Tie Guan Yin into my mouth
as snack. They are very crunchy and the aftertaste is very memorable. My father
used to roast tea in a gigantic wok using charcoals. His face was full of
charcoal and sweating when he finished baking aromatic tea. Our bodies, hair and
fingers smelled like tea. People could smell the intense, nutty and smoky aroma
of the baking tea from miles away. It warmed up the entire store in winter, but
it also felt like a dry sauna in summer.
Our store evolved gradually in the last 40 years, and now we use machinery to do
baking and other tea processing instead of charcoal. (We also have
air-conditioning in summer!) In the old days, Chinese had big families, and
family business was inherited from generation to generation. My brother and
sister now have their own tea stores in Hong Kong and Toronto.
Although I settled down in the San Francisco Bay Area and work in a large
financial corporation, I still carry around a big bottle of tea every day. My
co-workers at meetings laugh at me sometimes, because I sip on my tea throughout
the entire meeting and the bottle is a really big one, and full of tea leaves.
They look at their little paper cups with a tea bag and wonder what kind of good
tea I am drinking today. I tell them about the tea information and stories.
I started to import some more teas from my parents two years ago, and sold it to
my co-workers at a price far less than local tea stores. After much
encouragement and support from family and friends, I decided to launch my online
store and promote the tea in a plain and straightforward manner, without
gimmicks, as my relatives have been doing for generations.
I am so proud to be carrying on my family legacy of providing customers with
top-quality tea.
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