How I Came to Tea

My first exposure to tea was like a lot of Americans: sweet ready to drink tea from gas stations and vending machines. Snapple, Brisk, AriZona—tea as a soft drink, mostly there for the sweet flavor. I’d pick one up here and there as a kid or in college, maybe once a month. It was background noise at best.

The first time tea really showed up in my life was in the winter of 2021. My wife—who grew up with a bit of tea in her family—wanted some in the house. We bought Bigelow Chai, a Trader Joe’s Jasmine, and an apple cinnamon herbal blend. I wasn’t exactly picky. I drank the chai and the apple one and genuinely liked it, especially in the cold. But we were buying grocery store bags, and the quality wasn’t much to talk about. Eventually, I just stopped drinking tea altogether. No drama—just faded out around March 2022.

What followed was a full tea drought. I fell for espresso instead. After a trip to Italy in 2023, I got a moka pot and a pour-over. I didn’t drink coffee daily, but when I did, it was espresso, flat whites, cortados—anything with depth but not too much volume. I liked the flavor, but pour-over made me jittery. Espresso had my attention.

I spent a little over a year slowly and casually refining my coffee palate, trying new cafes and their shots of espresso. I would often make my wife a pot of pour over coffee in the morning before work. I cannot drink too much coffee as it will spike my acid reflect response and I will feel overwhelmed by the jitters. However, I was enjoying my casual relationship with coffee.

Then came April 2025.

We were in Castleton, England, looking for scones with clotted cream and jam. We found a little café. My wife ordered the tea; I ordered a flat white. It was a solid coffee on its own, no complaints. But I took a bite of the scone, sipped my coffee and something felt off.

Fearing I had ruined my afternoon scone time by ordering a coffee and not a tea, I asked my wife if I could try her tea because I was curious how it would taste and suddenly wrong decision of beverage had been confirmed.

The tea just worked. The warmth, the milk, the flavor—it made the scone shine. That flat white might as well have been a cup of hot water. In that moment, I knew: I actually like tea more than coffee. A lot more.

The rest of the trip, we drank tea every day—sometimes twice a day. Every café, we justified a pot. Not once did it let us down. By the time we got home, we had already bought our first box of Fortnum & Mason and cracked open our first box of Yorkshire Tea. We weren’t turning back.

Since then, we’ve explored widely—Korean green teas, Chinese white teas, puerh, Taiwanese oolongs, Indian single-origin blacks— you name it. I have persuaded my wife to join me on tea shop excursions to find new local spots. It’s not just about flavor anymore. It’s a daily flavor adventure, a cultural curiosity, and a craft I want to keep learning.

I find myself chasing that feeling in small, daily ways—from a quick cup of Yorkshire as a midday reset to a slow pot of Earl Grey with biscuits on a Sunday morning with my wife. Tea has become part of my days, not as a ritual to perfect, but as something fun, flavorful, and worth returning to.

Just over a month later, this site was born —not because I’m an expert, but because I am fascinated by the depth of the tea world. Leaf After Leaf is my way of documenting what I’m learning, what I’m tasting, and where this journey leads. I don’t come from a tea family. I’m not a professional taster. I’m just a guy who fell in deep and didn’t want to keep it all to himself.

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