Welcome to Solvitur Ambulando, which means “Solve It By Walking.” On this journey, we explore the alchemic potency of walking for sorting through life’s puzzles, exploring our world, and transforming ourselves. Like a good walk, you will encounter distinctive ideas, remarkable people and gorgeous scenery. I hope you will enjoy a beautiful walk today. And if you like what you read and hear, please I love tea. I love the taste, the ritual, the somatic experience of drinking tea. My favorite teas – Keemun Mao Feng Imperial, Nandi Hills, Russian Caravan, and especially Christmas Morning (the greatest tea in the history of teas in this universe or any other universe) — come from Louisville Tea Company. Two of the owners, Sophia and Sarah Boese, always greet me warmly and point out new teas I might enjoy. I wanted to learn more about tea, the tea business and what makes tea so special, so I asked them to sit down with me. We enjoyed a lovely conversation over a cup of tea. Throughout the transcript below, Sophia’s words are in italics; Sarah’s words are in plain text; and my words are in bold. This was a fun, spunky, engaging discussion. I loved it and I learned a great deal about one of my passions in life – tea. Enjoy! Photographs by the amazing Megan Resch. Let's hit the most important question first. Give me your honest view: can you really live a good, ethical, worthwhile, decent, law-abiding life without tea? I mean, objectively, yes. I do think my life is better with tea in it, for a lot of reasons. I enjoy tea. I enjoy the way it affects me, caffeine-wise, and the rituals of making it. I don't know, just the cultural experience of having tea. It's a really fun way to interact with other cultures too. I really like learning more about how the Japanese drink tea and how the Chinese drink tea and being able to integrate that into my day-to-day life. And then also bringing some of their practices into my life outside of tea, which is really nice. There are so many different traditions. And there are even contradicting traditions within different countries. For example, if I recall correctly, with tea sets in China, having an odd number is considered good luck, whereas an even number of cups is bad luck. But you'll see different things in different places. You mentioned incorporating tea and non-tea elements from different cultures into your life. Can you share a couple of them? My favorite one is actually the Japanese culture of preparing their tea. They sit down and have a full moment with their tea. And I like to integrate that into other parts of my life – I'm going to fully embrace this one thing for this time period and give it the respect that it deserves. A lot of people who are getting into loose leaf tea for the first time think it's intimidating, so much work and a lot of steps. But that's part of why I like it – having multiple steps to it. You can take your time to breathe and only focus on it and nothing else. I totally agree. Half the fun is the ritual of it. All the steps. Waiting for the water. Waiting for the water. Actually measuring your tea. That's exactly right. Are there any other instances you can point to? I'm not the biggest fan of meditation. I feel like drinking tea and the ritual is my version of meditation. You can actually clear your mind and just focus on it. Yeah, have a think moment of it. I do love the feeling of having a warm cup of tea in your hands. It's very relaxing. Sipping that warm tea, feeling it in your belly before you go to bed. It's very comforting. And I know this is a big thing in Chinese and Japanese culture – whenever you break a teacup, and then you're involved with repairing it, you’re involved with the glass, with the gold. It's kintsugi. An author I enjoy, Tom White, wrote about these sorts of repairs, kintsugi, recently. Mending ceramics with veins of gold. I've also seen it used in jewelry. The idea is that the repair makes the item even more beautiful than it was before. The mentality that something broken can become so much more beautiful. It's a really nice mentality to carry throughout life. But in Korean culture, drinking from a cracked or chipped cup is actually bad luck. It's letting bad spirits into your life and you're not supposed to do that. I've had people ask me before to make sure I don't use anything that might have a crack in it. And I'll say, “Yes, absolutely, we'll respect that. Whatever makes you more comfortable.” Why do you drink tea? It’s always been a big part of my life. My whole family drinks tea. So I was born into it. But why I still drink tea – first of all, the caffeine. It is amazing. I do love caffeine. But also it just gives me something to drink. I like having different drinks all around. Water gets boring sometimes. So having fun beverages around is really good. I would call you a beverage girl. Yeah, absolutely. Growing up, my mom always liked unsweet iced tea with lemon, everywhere we went. As a teenager, Sophia was already into tea. Nicolette [Spears, Sophia’s sister and Sarah’s cousin, and another partial owner of the shop] was already very into tea. They're the ones that first got me to taste it and realize that tea doesn't need to have stuff added to it. Tea can be really tasty on its own. As a teenager, I also drank a lot of coffee and energy drinks. My caffeine tolerance was very different than it is now. Now, as a 25 year old, I cannot have caffeine after 6pm. And honestly, my black tea cut off is around 4pm. Also, I like the wide variety of tea. We normally have 160 to 200 different kinds of tea in the shop. So when people tell me they don’t like tea, with so many different types, I know there's going to be something you enjoy. If you're open to it and willing to give it a try, you'll find something you enjoy, even if it is just a chai latte. It's one thing to enjoy drinking tea, or even appreciate the ritual in making tea, and an entirely different thing to own and run a tea shop. Tell me how Louisville Tea Company got started and why you are involved. My sister Nicolette used to work at a tea shop in Arizona. When she moved to Louisville, she realized there was no tea shop in this area. And then I would come visit and we would be in desperate need of tea. And we're thinking, “there's no tea here!” Sophia would come from Arizona and be tasked to bring tea from the tea shop Nicolette used to work at. We needed tea here. So then Nicolette and Nick [Spears, Nicolette’s husband and a part owner of the shop] decided to open up a tea business. And I really liked that idea. So after I graduated high school, I decided to come and join them. Then Sarah followed suit soon thereafter. The business has been open for 11 years now. Soph officially moved here seven years ago. I've been here for six years now. Now, all four of us own the shop. I don't know why your answers made me think of this, but tell me about the bubble or baba tea phenomenon. Boba. Boba, baba, bubble, whatever. When you're reading this interview, I totally get you. Do you like it? I love boba. Yeah. I think it's really good. We get boba together a lot. We don’t serve boba because we are not set up to make it here. But I'm a big fan., I was a big fan before I came here. As a little kid, my favorite pudding was tapioca. And it still is, which I realize is the old person pudding, but whatever. I always liked it. Pudding is the old people's pudding. Yeah. Boba is like a milk tea. You'll have a dark tea base with milk and sugar, and large tapioca pearls. Normally with brown sugar or something inside them. My kids tell me, “take us to the boba tea place!” Have you ever had it? I have taken sips of theirs. You’re not a fan of the texture? I think it is the texture that bothers me. Yeah. I know a lot of people who don’t like the texture. It’s funny because my boba drinks tend to not even contain tea. I get lemonades with fun things in them because they're tasty. Mine tend to be closer to milkshakes. We definitely love boba and like people who like it. We get stuff that is so different from what we serve here. That's a good point. Boba is really different from what you all serve here. This is a bit of a tangent – but when we first opened, we didn’t have all of this retail. We only had a bunch of tables. Oh, okay. So it was more focused on being somewhere to sit and enjoy tea. We had scones and that was about it. We had a couch here at one point. This lower bar wasn't here, if I remember correctly. But it didn't bring in a whole lot of revenue. We were still new. We didn't have a known customer base. We shifted to carrying a lot more retail and teaware items. We realized no one was fulfilling that niche here. If people wanted those items, they had to buy them online. Today, half of what we are is essentially a gift shop. I will see a lot of regulars only around the holidays because they're buying gifts for people. They're not even tea people themselves. What are your all's favorite teas? I am a big traditional person. I used to be a lot more into flavored teas, but nowadays I feel like I'm mostly doing traditional teas. When you say “traditional,” what does that mean? Black tea? Black teas, white teas, any tea that doesn't have anything added into it. So no fruit or flowers? Traditional teas tend to be only the tea leaves from the plant. The way our menu is organized – the first couple pages are traditional teas. These are the straight tea leaf, nothing else. The following pages are the flavored teas, which includes a wide array of teas. They can have spices added or orange peel, for example. Anything with flavor added into it is on the flavor pages. That's what most people get. Again, there's no wrong way to drink tea. The very first tea from here that I dranks was Bourbon Cream, which is a very rich, cocoa heavy black tea. But nowadays it's a little sweet for my palate. I
