About us
The story of Good Tea begins in 1996, when, as a freshly converted tea lover during my travels to Asia, I began to meet with vendors and producers, who gave me the opportunity to take a look behind the scene, thereby igniting my passion for tea. Thanks many years spent primarily in Hong Kong and China, over the course of time my business contacts became friends and family friends, and thus all of our our tea trade has been built upon mutual trust and long-term relationships. My greatest reward is not my business success, but rather the friendship of people such as Wingchi Ip, the Chen brothers from the Ying Kee Tea House, Lily Yu and many others.
I started importing tea into Europe in 2001, and it took a few years before I was able to establish the company Good Tea, s.r.o. (Ltd.) in 2006, with the aim of offering the best available teas, first of all to my friends, and then to tea-lovers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and finally to the world.
Twenty years later, the mission of Good Tea has in no way changed. We still bring high-quality teas to customers at the best possible prices. Some of our customers have been with us from the very beginning, and their devotion is greatly appreciated.
I have never placed much emphasis on advertising, since the good reputation of our teas has always spread organically from person to person. People throughout Europe have gradually joined Good Tea as loyal customers, and their numbers are continuing to grow. Watching customers come back to us again and again for quality tea brings me joy and makes me feel that we have set out on the right path.
We offer our customers a broad spectrum of teas, from teas that are widely available to teas considered to be very rare. Through direct supply, we are able to share our excellent teas with minimal surcharges. We have a large quantity of teas in our store in Prague, and we import aged teas from our store in Hong Kong several times a year. We place great emphasis on correct ageing of all of our archive teas. The correct ageing of teas is one of our key areas of expertise.
Whenever possible, we buy directly from tea growers, both to support traditional farming, and to procure the highest-quality, best-tasting teas. We love family-run businesses, small production facilities, and producers who produce teas according to recipes that are decades or centuries old.
Thanks to our friends in the tea world in China, Hong Kong and other locations, we have access to teas produced in and for local communities, teas which they themselves had never intended for export. The quality of these locally produced teas always exceeds our expectations. Of course, these locally produced teas always fetch a higher price, because of the greater care in handling and the astounding taste and quality of the final products. Good Tea's aim is to ensure that the very best teas are made available to the largest number of people.
Taste for yourselves!
Sincerely,
Radoslav Polášek
Good Tea founder
What is the origin story for tea?
There is little dispute that tea originated in China, but the story surrounding its origins --- or at least the Story that the Chinese like to tell --- is a bit more fantastical. And why not? A beverage of such prominence deserves a larger-than-life tale after all. According to folklore, tea was discovered several thousand years ago by a know-it-all named Shennong (神農 Shen Nong), who not only invented crazy useful things for his people (like agricultural equipment and the Chinese calendar), but was also a father of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Shenning might or might not have been a real figure in history, but it does not hurt to believe in his existence --- if not his near-supernatural abilities...
Getting serious
In the early days, “tea” was made by mixing tea leaves with ingredients like onions, dates, and ginger. It was also consumed for its perceived health benefits rather than for enjoyment.
It wasn’t until the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) that tea consumption became more sophisticated activity and specialized teaware was developed to accompany the refined drink. In the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) tea drinking and tea making standards continued to evolve and improve, paving the way for modern tea culture.
The Beverage that changed the World
It wasn't so long ago that tea was such an obsession for the world that it actually led to history-making wars. There was the Boston Tea Party - a massive protest by American colonists against the British government's 1773 Tea Act. The Act imposed a high tax on teas sent from Britain to what were then known as the American colonies, and people were outraged. Protesters boarded trade ships at the Boston Harbor and tossed hundreds of chests of tea into the ocean. That was a lot of money's worth of tea at the time, and the British Parliament reacted by passing even more punitive laws. The American colonists responded with even more protests, leading ultimately to the American Revolution in 1775. And we all know how that ended. It's therefore no exaggeration to say that tea was partly responsible for the birth of the United States of America!