I used to start every morning with a tea time for myself, the Chinese tea ceremony.
Sometimes that stillness is required for us to really process and listen to others around us.
My name is Jenny Tse.
I'm the owner and founder of Sipping Streams Tea Company, an award winning tea company and the first ever tea farm in Alaska.
It got to 35 below yesterday.
Tea plants are grown all over the world, but this is the first ever geothermal tea farm in the world.
This is the greenhouse...
So we're in a high tunnel greenhouse here at Chena Hot Springs with fins that radiate heat that comes off of the natural springs.
This ground actually has tubes underneath it, so that's why the soil is actually warm.
We're picking like the premium tea leaves right now, which are the top tender shoots of it.
I had discovered Christine Parks, who specializes in the Camellia Sinensis plant in North Carolina, so we got the tea plants transported all the way up to Alaska.
When they arrived, they hadn't been watered in two weeks.
And then there was the fire.
They've been through a lot, but they're now finally starting to normalize, which is kind of ironic because we're picking leaves when it's below zero.
We have about 45 different plants, and right now we're experimenting with what different parameters help those plants flourish.
When it struggles, it actually produces way more density of nutrients.
This beautiful thing comes out of it and gives us more life.
I feel like they're like people.
So this is our first official batch of green tea and white tea.
So I'm trying to bruise the tea leaves to oxidize them, but I'm trying to roll them tight too.
So I'm rolling the tea leaves.
by crinkling them up onto itself.
All of a sudden, it just becomes soft.
I think this might be good now.
You can just kind of feel it when it feels really malleable.
All right.
It's ready to go in the dryer.
I'll turn it down to the lowest temperature, and we're just going to dry it overnight.
I was raised in Alaska, born in Hong Kong, I'm not really American, I'm not really Chinese.
My parents and my grandparents never talked about their past.
I just thought it was normal that we didn't talk.
Like immigrants - - you don't even know like where you fit or how things are supposed to be.
We had those family dinners all the time where everyone started arguing, and then my dad was like, immediately requested silence.
No one was allowed to talk at the dinner table anymore, so it continue that pattern.
So for an ice breaker, I would just randomly just be talking about what I learned about tea.
And then my mom would say, Oh, your dad's from a tea growing region.
They started sharing more about their childhood and their past, and so did all my aunts and uncles and I made better connections to my family's history.
My parents are retired professional chefs.
They helped start a lot of Asian restaurants here in Fairbanks.
My dad never wanted me to start a restaurant, ever.
It's a lot of hard work.
The tea company started because I saw how it brought people together.
The smiles, the laughs -- that brings me joy -- just seeing people be happy.
Oh, let's just drink some of this and see how it turns out.
It is very green.
I'm just going to do a second steeping on this one.
Oh, way more creamy.
I need more of this.
That's very good.
It tastes almost like a mild green tea now.
That first one was like really strong.
It still has that nice green aroma to it.
I see us moving into an acre or two -- really establishing Alaska as a place where it's very unique, especially with the only geothermal tea farm in the world, and we're full of creative people here.
We have those long winters to think about a lot of things and to invent things and to adapt and thrive.
And I feel like that hardiness is what makes us unique, and I want that to continue on.