While the custom of drinking tea goes back as far as 4,000 years to China’s Shang dynasty, here on Canada’s West Coast, we’re a little late to the tea party. But in the colder, darker months, a hot cup in your hands is a welcome comfort. Whether your tea imbibing skews toward the casual or the fanatic, in the Comox Valley, you can enjoy quality brews from all over the world, sold by people who really care about Camellia sinensis.
Hornby Island Tea
Growing up on a Hornby Island farm, Desiree Lyver saw an opportunity to start a small sustainable farming business. “We were already growing herbs and harvesting fields of wild mint and nettles and lavender,” she says. “I didn’t have a sales plan, but I was just like, ‘Wow, we have an entire wild field of beautiful mint, let’s make tea.’”
She sourced a variety of imported rooibos, black, and green loose-leaf teas to combine with her locally grown herbs, and began bringing her recipes and vision to life. For example, when she wanted to make a decaffeinated chai (usually made with black tea), she turned to rooibos, which is naturally caffeine free, and added herbs, masala, peppers, and her own wild harvested nettles.
After three years, Hornby Island Tea began to get noticed at local farmers’ markets and direct sales began growing. Now Lyver’s teas can be found on shelves in several stores in western Canada, including Thrifty Foods and Edible Island.
Her tea, she says, is meant to nourish and inspire people to take time to enjoy a tea, whether alone or with a friend.That pause in our busy lives, she says, “is what tea offers us.”
Learn more about Hornby Island Tea on their website.
Tea Centre
Suzanne and Marny Tsai were loose-leaf tea importers with a problem. They had an abundance of high-quality, globally sourced tea, but at that time there was little local demand for it. “Back in the early 2000s, no one was buying good tea,” Suzanne says. “Loose leaf was not on the horizon yet.” Compared to mass-produced tea bags, loose leaf had a reputation for being “too fussy,” she says. “No one cared about the quality back then.”
The Tsais opened their Tea Centre in downtown Courtenay in 2002, and began building a loyal customer base for their wide selection of loose-leaf teas. The Tsais watched with excitement as their customers’ tastes evolved. “People started wanting good tea . . . and they wanted to try new types of tea.”
The Tsais were happy to oblige. Their small shop brims with shelves and drawers filled with loose-leaf teas from Taiwan, China, India, Japan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Vietnam. You can find Irish Breakfast alongside Sun Moon Lake, a black tea from central Taiwan, and Silver Needle, a white tea from China’s Fujian province. Their focus is on black, green, white, and rooibos teas, rather than trendy flavoured varieties. As Suzanne explains, “We are interested in plain, high-quality loose-leaf teas, direct from tea farmers. Those are our bread and butter.”
The Denman Island Tea Company
On a trip to Budapest, Brendan Waye became enthralled by the bohemian tea houses that seemed to permeate every city block, each one serving hundreds of types of tea. He was inspired to open his first tea store (Steeps the Urban Teahouse) in Edmonton in 1999 and stocked it with rooibos, black, and green teas, and herbal fruit infusions. “My goal was that everyone who walked in would have a mind-blowing tea experience,” he says.
The timing was not ideal, and customers were nowhere to be found. “People didn’t know what to do with loose-leaf tea,” he says. “I damn near didn’t make it.” A timely and glowing review in the Edmonton Journal by a local restaurant critic changed all of that. All of a sudden, hot tea was cool.
Since then, Waye has become a Certified Tea Sommelier/Specialist and has worked as a consultant to emerging tea cafes. He still loves blending his own teas for The Denman Island Tea company, the company he started in 2017. His life and business partner, Wendy Massey, is the CFO. They supply restaurants and teahouses throughout Western Canada, and, in 2020, they opened their storefront on Kilpatrick Avenue in Courtenay.
Waye’s latest passion project is attempting to grow tea on Denman Island. He’s found a sloped, southwest-facing plot of land on a ridge; he hopes its microclimate will replicate the conditions of the cool, high mountain regions of central China and Japan where a particular strain of small leaf tea plants thrive. He plans to harvest in spring of 2025.
