Yunnan Tea is Made to Turn over a New Leaf in Beijing

The perfect sip is given the cafe touch, a l'americaine

A man from Colorado showing Chinese how to drink tea is akin to a man from Chongqing showing Americans how to eat apple pie, but that does not seem to be putting off Martin Papp. The 30-year-old from the Centennial State, who has lived in China for seven years, has given himself the mission of reinventing tea, and cultivating a new culture of tea drinking.

He runs Papp's Tea Lab and Papp's Tea Lounge in Beijing, which both eschew the genteel decor of most teahouses and instead emphasize the modern and the fashionable in venues whose target audience is young adults.

"Tea does not have to be something that's old, traditional, and your parents' drink," Papp says. His philosophy is to make tea drinking fun and trendy.

Papp says that one problem with teahouses in China is that their prices are anything but transparent. There is a lack of standardization in the industry and a lot of teas are over-priced, he says.

"When I go to a teahouse in China I don't know how much money I am going to spend. What I do know is that if I walk into any cafe and order a cup of coffee, it will be anywhere around 30 or 40 yuan ($4.6 or $6.1).

"In a teahouse, it's sometimes 80 yuan for a pot and it's sometimes 800 yuan for a pot, and even if you spend a lot of money, you don't know whether the tea warrants it or not.

"Young people are not going to teahouses any more. That's what I want to change, to create a quality, international, modern tea brand in China."

Papp's Tea Lab is a versatile space where Papp and his team research and develop tea products, do training and host events, and Papp's Tea Lounge is more of a relaxed place for customers.

The menu includes not only some of the best Chinese teas including Pu'er dark tea, Dragon Well green tea, and Phoenix oolong tea, but also a collection of high-quality world teas including rooibos from South Africa, chamomile from Croatia and black tea from Nepal, to name but a few. Here you will pay for a cup of tea about the same as you will pay for a cup of tea or coffee at Starbucks.

Papp says that if tea is to be for the young and to be modern, it needs to be international.

"Chinese tea is a small part of the tea culture. Tea is an international phenomenon, so I want to create an international experience, and the variety of drinking tea, educating the Chinese community about foreign teas, and foreigners and Westerners about Chinese teas."

Some good Chinese tea brands still exist, he says, such as Zhu Ye Qing (Bamboo Leaf Green), a Chinese green tea as well as a company trademark, "but they don't do the international approach". "For example, I went to a nice teahouse in Chengdu that had a modern and cool setting, but all the teas were only from Sichuan."

Apart from single-origin teas that Papp's team selects directly from tea farms all over the world, the functional tea blends go for more fun. These include Get Well Tea, to get over a cold, Study Tea, with a refreshing aroma to get the work done, and Bedtime Tea made of rooibos tea that is caffeine free.

There is also a Throat Soother Tea made of Silver Needle white tea, and a combination of orange peel, mulberry leaf, stevia, honeysuckle, mint and chamomile, which is said to reduce inflammation and relax the throat.

Another critical problem Papp sees in China's tea industry is a lack of education.

"There is no good system to educate people about tea. It's way too complicated; it's way too scattered.

"If you look at Chinese websites about tea, there is much mixed, scattered, and different information," Papp says, in fluent Chinese.

"We take in and organize all this information and put it in a simple and easy way that anyone can understand."

He then turns to play an animated comical video the company made on the basics about tea - from origins and varieties to effects and properties.

The tea laboratory also serves as an educational platform that tries to make tea time fun. Every Sunday afternoon, the space offers a DIY custom tea blending workshop costing 99 yuan a person in which people can learn about various types of tea, herbs, and spices and how they make or break a good tea. Students can also taste a wide variety of flavors and make their own teas.

Recently, Papp has changed his business model. His aim used to be to create tea products and give tea drinking a cafe-esque ambience.

Now his focus is on creating tea, making blends, sourcing tea from around the world and providing tea education and tea classes.

This is a blend of business-to-customer and business-to-business models as it sells Papp's Tea both to customers through its online stores and two brick-and-mortar stores and to food and beverage outlets, and health-oriented businesses.

Papp's Tea vaunts itself on being an expert in 100 percent natural blending.

"I would say about 90 percent of all the tea blends you see from the West are flavored," Papp says. "Any fruit tea you've ever tried is probably flavored."

Even though some teas are endowed with "all natural flavoring", it is flavoring nevertheless, which means "they undergo a very man-made process of soaking their teas in flavored oils developed in flavoring factories".

Papp's Tea does not add any type of man-made flavoring to blends, and all authentic flavors are found only in nature, he says.

Papp's interest in China developed from college where he majored in political science.

In 2006 he took a break from college to set up a company with two friends, importing fair-trade coffee beans and teas to the US.

Since then he has traveled the world visiting tea farms in many different countries, including China, India and Nepal, nurturing his knowledge and passion for tea.

His very first experience in China was in 2006 during a business trip to Wuyuan county in Jiangxi province, which is widely regarded as the country's most important tea center.

"I just fell in love with the new culture, the experience of going to the tea fields, seeing the production and processing, and drinking the tea."

When he finished visiting tea farms he returned to school to graduate.

"I love tea and I love traveling. So once I graduated I came to China to combine the two."