Youth Tea Club is a space for high school students to learn about and explore tea at our Teance tea bar. We will meet on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month for one hour (4:30-5:30pm) to explore teas together through education, hands-on experience, and more.
High school students! It’s your responsibility to sign up as well as cancel if you can’t make it! Please send Chih Hui an email at [email protected] if you have signed up but can no longer make it. This is out of respect for Teance staff and your high school peers’ time and energy.
The goal of Youth Tea Club is to introduce and support youth in their tea brewing practice, as well as learn about tea knowledge, ritual, and culture. We want to help youth to practice focusing and building in-person, true connections with your peers and community.
Teance tea buyer Chih Hui 智慧 will lead the meet. She will brew tea for the group to observe and learn how to taste, guide the youth in brewing tea for each other, and lead discussion. If we have enough attendees, we might divide into different groups.
Back Story:
The Youth Tea Club started with Teance founder, Winnie Yu, in 2002. She would see kids grow older and come visit us for tea. Some of them even helped at our teashop for a small period of time! It is a truly community connection. Current Tea Buyer, Chih Hui, remembered the good old time of this community connection with youth, and this new iteration of the Youth Tea Club is something she has been thinking of creating for a long time.
While Teance started its new chapter after Winnie’s passing in 2019, we had not created another chapter of the Youth Tea Club. However, we’ve recently seen youth coming to the teashop for tea and being excited to taste and learn more. In the back of our minds, we knew we should create a space for them to come together to learn more about tea, try different teas, and connect with each other. We encouraged an Oakland Tech High School student to create a tea club in his school, and he did. Their club had a field trip to our tea bar, which was a wonderful experience. Most recently, a high school student from Maybeck High School joined one of our Korean tea tastings and we saw her eagerness and curiosity to learn. As a result, we decided to finally start hosting a youth tea club for her high school last school year.
Now we are opening the Youth Tea Club for other high schoolers to join! Let’s bring together the young tea community through hands-on experience and education and in-person connection.
