Tea

Many years ago, I met a gentleman running a stand under two palm trees on a beach in Mexico who claimed he had developed a palm tea whose taste rivaled the finest Chinese tea. We talked for what seemed like hours about how such a thing could be possible and what was involved with the selection of just the right palm leaves and the finer points of brewing it to perfection.

Apparently he had developed this over quite a long period of time and made note of every success and failure along the way. As he regaled me with his tale of travel and business by the ocean, I became more and more interested in how one man could be so devoted to the singular pursuit of tea. He was a college graduate and had majored in business and minored in Mexican history. He had heard tale of a native drink made from palm trees, and he wanted to replicate that drink. He had tried palm fronds from the northern part of Mexico, but their flavor was too bitter. Along the west coast, they had good flavor but only at certain times of the year and the described 'harvesting season' for ideal flavor was too short. In fact, he had tried to import a much easier to harvest variety from Belize, but the import tariffs were far too high. Finally after searching far and wide he located a place deep in the Mayan jungle that was exactly the right climate, exactly the right kind of palm tree, and found trees exactly the right age growing there! Perfect! Their leaves were perfect for his tea. Unfortunately, he discovered that he had to roast exactly two leaves in the pan at a time to get the right flavor, so it was a lot of work to produce a small amount of tea. The leaves didn't have the right flavor consistency when roasted individually, he told me. He originally had roasted a pan full of leaves to save time but it completely ruined the flavor. He had tried to roast three leaves at once, but the flavor with three was far too bitter.

He contracted the harvest out to the local population - and in that part of Mexico, the populace is spread so thin that "local" can be many miles away. Men would pile onto motorcycles and vans, hanging off any part of the vehicle they could, and work from sunup to sundown collecting these leaves. Up the trees they would climb with machetes and cut just the right amount of fronds so that the tree would still live and produce more. There rose up a rudimentary factory where women would sort the leaves, roast them two at a time in pans at just the right temperature for just the right length of time, cut them into tiny pieces, put them into containers for sale, and label the containers. This tea entrepreneur even had a whole distribution operation, which was sending tea to gas stations around the country. They had even exported a small amount to my home country - most likely to people like myself who had visited his stand - and was nearly ready to export to other countries around the world! Business was picking up and his products would sell out immediately when they were restocked at any store. Now at this point I remembered seeing an empty shelf space for a mysterious tea at the gas station, so I knew he wasn't kidding about it being hard to find.

I was quite skeptical of this tale and the quality of any tea made from any number of palm fronds at first, having never smelled any part of a palm tree that inspired me to steep it in a cup of hot water, but then he offered a free sample taste. Hesitantly, I accepted. Don't drink the water, they always told me, and you need to make tea with water. I figured this water had been boiled - correctly, it turned out - and would therefore be safe to drink. Slowly I raised the cup to my lips and tasted. Stars above, he was speaking the truth! This tea was beyond comparison. I had to have more. He was not outfitted at this small stand to sell the tea by the glass, and maybe that was for the best on that sweltering 88 degree day. I offered to purchase some straight away but alas, he had sold out of the packaged tea and only had samples and business cards at the time. Well I took one of those business cards and placed an order on his surprisingly modern website when I returned home. "Order accepted," the confirmation email read! My tea would be on its way soon!

Months passed and still no shipping confirmation or tea was to be found. I began a search for information about the situation. First, by emailing his address on the business card, then searching for news online. All I could ever find out from repeated inquiries and exhaustively searching the news from that area (which was no small feat as that area does not have much in the way of a news outfit, therefore requiring me to collect news from the surrounding areas!) was that there had been some sort of uprising in the local economy, making exports and indeed the harvesting and manufacture of this product prohibitively expensive to the point where the operation had been forced to close due to unprofitability. I wrote off the idea of ever receiving my order and consigned myself to regular tea, which never held the same appeal after tasting the heavenly delights of that one free sample so long ago. All other teas simply tasted flat and boring in comparison. I feared that I had ruined myself of the enjoyment of tea forever and began to resent ever walking past that stand, ever stopping, ever tasting the sample, ever debating how the two leaves could possibly be different from one or three. I never should have placed that order. What was I thinking? Ordering from some small operation in the jungle, how silly it all sounded!

Last year, however, an unexpected email came. The labor issues had been resolved and they were back to work on the tea! He did not promise to fulfill any of the past orders that had been placed and never delivered, but I didn't care, I wanted more of that tea. It's been a while but it seems that the resumption of shipment to my country is expected in time for the holiday season! Late November, end of December at the latest, he estimated in this email! Oh, how excited I was to receive that email. I, perhaps naively, placed a new order for this tea. I may never receive it but it wasn't a large sum of money lost in that case. I can still hope. I have no desire for the usual holiday gifts and I've been singularly obsessed with the idea of receiving this tea at long last. Most of my friends have grown bored of the story while some of them are nearly as fascinated by the proceedings as I am, and some of them even wish to try it when I finally receive it. Maybe it will arrive by the end of December? Will they wrap it in palm leaves? Is the taste the same? All I know for certain is that this year, all I want for Christmas is my two-frond tea. #lamejoke