Opportuni-tea

Brandon Kendall

21 May 2025 — 7 min read

The shared love of tea can take us to many cool places, if only we find good opportunity to come ashore with a fellow band of leaf enthusiasts to learn, trade, and experience with.

⚓ From the Latin: "Coming toward a port."

If you’re ready to dock somewhere with real access — not just to good tea, but to its stories, culture, memories, and knowledge...
Without the fluff, the gatekeeping, or the snark...
Then welcome. You’ve found the right port.

I am honestly not sure how to write this article...

Unity was challenging in some sense to nail down into a concrete theme, and I'm not fully sure how I did at that; but I feel that I got my point across. Community is an easy one to talk about and made me smile to write. This one...I'm not sure.

On the physical access side, this is really going to come down to highly nuanced, highly contentious views on business practices, economics, and ethics. On the information side, I can take a bigger bite out of it.

I'm going to give it a go for you though.

I think I view each tea as sort of "port" to dock in.

Every time we sit down to a tea session, we are adding another experience to our mental map for reference. Each tea brings an opportunity to learn and to expand our horizons on what we know, what we thought we knew, and what we thought possible. However, getting that boutique tea to your table or trying it on a fellow tea lover's table requires the winds being favorable and the trade routes being known, so-to-speak.

I think books are one of the best investments on planet earth, and will often "rubber stamp" the purchase of one in the interest of "giving myself an upgrade". Often times, someone (or multiple people) spent years of trial and error in pursuit of the knowledge, life experience, and capability to write a book on a given topic. For the mere price of $14.99, we can read, think critically about, and assimilate much of that work, and in so doing very likely end up being able to shortcut what would have otherwise cost us years and years of learning life's hard lessons.

The same could be said for tea friends, connections, other communities, online servers, and all sorts of vehicles for experiencing tea and tea culture. These are hubs, docks, nodes on an endless network of knowledge gathering and learning; not to mention friendship and all the other impacts they can bring.

These are all to some degree, ports.

Ports to me symbolize access. If you dock a ship at a port, you and your crew have access to trade, share, buy, learn, and capitalize on all the many benefits of interacting within that port, and possibly it's surrounding cities or regions.

We just talked about these types of subjects, including vendors, markets, capitalism, Eastern vs Western preferences, reference teas, data points, buying tendencies, fomo, knowledge bases, curation, sourcing, selling, and just about everything else you could think of for what feels like about 24 straight hours on the Discord server...

Come back after you join the server, but here you go 😄

In a way, it's sort of timely as I sit to write this article. There is certainly no shortage of opportunity to engage in lively debate and nuanced conversation if you care to throw your opinion in the ring.

All three values are sort of interlocked to a degree, though not necessarily so, you can have one without the others. I think unity and community are the more important ones for sure. What good is ample opportunity without fellowship and peace? Pointless and depressing if you ask me.

Let's nail this down though just a little bit, cause I do think it's worth discussing and I obviously chose it as my third value for the blog. What does opportunity mean to me in light of all this?

Let's repeat the value one more time and pick it apart line by line.

If you’re ready to dock somewhere with real access — not just to good tea, but to its stories, culture, memories, and knowledge...
Without the fluff, the gatekeeping, or the snark...
Then welcome. You’ve found the right port.

Argue with me about the endless sea of minutiae regarding all these ideas another time please; or perhaps go read the Unity and Modern Canon articles at the bottom of this post, maybe you need to. Just take them at face value and attempt to understand where I'm coming from first.

...real access...
- Anything that can be known and shared without genuinely and significantly harming the source, the supplier, and the consumer, should just be shared. Particularly when it comes to public information, even if it's annoying, redundant, or frivolous to you - let the people that have the temperament and desire to explore the topic explore the topic. You don't own or have any claim to determine the proper way to discuss a topic. If it makes you feel angry or annoyed, quit engaging and let the others that can handle it do so.
...not just to good tea...
- Good tea is fantastic but it's just one prong of this discussion. All the other things that people get all elitist about are also crucial for understanding. We've got to be able to have dialogues about things like typical profiles of terroirs, nuances of clay teawares, and preferences of storage.
  Again, if you can't, don't ruin it for the others.
...stories, culture, memories, and knowledge...
- Traditions and histories bring forth so much richness and depth to a studious observer or researcher. You have no idea what someone's motives are for asking "unnecessary" or "hard to quantify" questions, why don't we instead do our best to answer and be curious with them instead?
...without the fluff...
- Let's help people see through the smoke and mirrors while we're at it and not contribute to it. If you want to talk about the more mystical and spiritual sides of the tea world, or even write a book of tasting notes for every tea on the planet, go for it. Maybe we just don't use it in our marketing to sell products or pride ourselves on seeing what others can't though.
...gatekeeping...
- I still don't know where I stand on this, but somehow I want to create some middle ground. You can immediately tell me all the reasons this is utopic and won't work, but that's no reason to brush the idea under the rug and not aim high for the world. I think ideally, we'd have great and honest sources with great tea and wares. Those sources would interface with great and honest businesses that perform a curation and connection service to the consumer.
- The consumer would get great teas at high transparency, but need not be absolute. The business would make good and honest profit relative to the value they add but not heinously so. The source would be protected from harassment by thousands of people, gain the value of interfacing with a business, and still accomplish their personal goals for sale and dissemination of their products.
  - How does that all work out in the real world? Well 1) it doesn't, and 2) I don't know how it would; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
- Regarding information and the simple act of engaging with those that wish to have the conversation, I think you can figure that out with the above.
...or the snark...
- I'm hoping if you're reading this you've read some of my other stuff as well or are somewhat familiar with the tea community already. Don't you see how hard and clunky all this stuff is when people are kind to each other? It's already convoluted, don't contribute to the attitudes and egos, especially your own.