Transcription of Ellen Kanner and Ray Marcotte for the show Tea Time #230
Lisa: Having lived in Maine for many years and having been a tea drinker for most of my life, it was really wonderful to experience a place called Dobrá Tea when it first opened a few years ago. Today with us we have the owners of Dobrá Tea, this is Ray Marcotte and Ellen Kanner. They own Dobrá Tea on Exchange Street in Portland. Inspired by a visit to a Dobrá Tea in Burlington Ray and Ellen wondered how they might open their own in Maine. Having done everything from farming to teaching yoga to software design, travel photography and film production, Ray and Ellen were up for yet another adventure and opened a tea room in 2011. They moved to their Exchange Street location in 2014. Thanks for bringing Dobrá to Portland.
Ellen: Hello, thank you.
Ray: Thank you.
Ellen: We’re very happy to be here, again
Lisa: The first time that I went to Dobrá, before it was on Exchange Street, I was really struck by how calm it was, how mellow it was. There really was the community feel to it, that you can get in a coffee shop, but it’s a very different vibe to it. Tea has a very different vibe to it. Did that occur to you when you were thinking about opening a tea room versus a coffee shop?
Ellen: Definitely, yeah. It definitely did. I always had wanted to open a café and create that community space. The pace of coffee is kind of grab and go, tea forces you to slow down and take some time for yourself or a friend. Yeah definitely, that was the interest in opening it.
Ray: It was very intentional making the space calm, as you walk in the music is not something that you might be familiar with. You might hear world music, soft furnishings, lots of nice scents from the spices that we’re brewing for the tea. It’s an intentional space to create calmness.
Lisa: There are also a lot of choices, but they’re very tangible choices. When you go to a coffee shop you look behind the person who is serving the coffee and there’s choices on the board. You go to your team room and you can actually pick up and look at and smell and here are actual tea leaves that will be made into tea. There’s really different about that. Is that part of the appeal for you?
Ellen: Yeah definitely. Yeah, obviously the interaction with the tea, that’s one of the reasons when we happened upon the Dobrá in Burlington we were like, “Wow! Look at all these teas.” We’re so limited in the United States to what we can have access to. They have a similar display of tea options and you’re looking through all these little honey combs. We were like, “Wow! This is fascinating, we’ve got to share this.” That interactive piece was a big part of it.
Ray: I don’t think the average person realizes that there’s hundreds of varieties of tea. We have that honeycomb display as you walk into the space, you can see what the different tea leaves look like. Not only different classes of tea, but some that are rolled, some are not rolled, some are smoked, and they all look very unique.
Lisa: Let’s back up a little bit for people who don’t know this. Some of the things we think are tea, are really not tea at all.
Ray: Right.
Lisa: Tea actually comes from a very specific plant, which is a … I’m going to let you talk about that.
Ray: The scientific name is camellia sinensis, or the species variety is camellia sinensis sinensis, which is the small leaf variety. Sinensis is Latin for China, so the China bush. Then camellia sinensis assamica, assamica is Latin for Assam, the region in India, that’s the large leaf variety. There’s hundreds of sub varieties within that. If something is actually tea it has to come from the tea plant, whereas if you drink say chamomile, we call that tea but it’s really a herbal concoction
Ellen: Tisane.
Ray: Or a tisane.
Lisa: I have some limited knowledge of teas, part of my limited knowledge is there’s white teas, there’s black teas, there’s green teas, they’re puer teas, there’s oolong teas. Does some of this also have to do with the way that teas are actually produced?
Ray: Yes. There’s 6 distinct classes of tea. The one that you left out is yellow. They all come from the same plant, what makes them different is the way the teas are processed. Some are heated, some are rolled, some are withered, some are steamed. It all depends on how the tea is, what they do with the tea leaf once they pick it. That’s what makes it become the actual tea.
Ellen: Then you also have factors that come into play even greater than that, which are where the tea is grown, terroir, something that’s very common in wine. Teas is more like wine than coffee, I always say because you have the environment, the sunlight, the soil, you have the location on the planet. All this can factor into the way a tea leaf, how it comes out with flavor, and then the processing.
Ray: You might have a black tea, and say they’re from the same variety of tea plant, but if one’s grown at a really high elevation and one’s growing at a really low elevation, that’s going to change the flavor of tea, even though they’re processed the same way.
Lisa: What would be the difference in processing for example between a green tea, a black tea and a white tea?
Ray: With green tea, the main thing that keeps it green is the heating elements because the tea leaf is filled with enzymes and if you don’t heat the enzymes, that’s the way to keep them green. Then if you have an absence of heat, then the tea leaves will turn black.
Ellen: Oxidation.
Ray: It’s all about oxidation, and oxidation is affected by heat. That’s the very first step in tea production.
Lisa: What would a white tea be?
Ray: White tea is the least processed class of tea. They essentially just let the leaves wither and they dry them, usually in the sun. It’s really very little processing involved in white tea.
Lisa: White tea tends to have less caffeine than a green tea and a lot less caffeine than a black tea. Does this also have to do with the processing.
Ray: There’s a lot of myths actually out there about tea. The level of caffeine in teas, you read on a box, “This tea has 20mg,” “This tea has 70mg.” It really comes down to, the reason a certain tea might have less caffeine than another is because we use hotter water with black tea and we steep it for a longer amount of time, so it’s going to extract more of the caffeine from the tea. It’s not that the tea itself has more caffeine. It’s really about steeping and water temperature, mostly. Except if a tea is just from buds or tips, then it does in fact have more caffeine, because the tip of the tea plant has a higher concentration of caffeine.
Ellen: The greener tea that’s freshly picked will really have a lot more caffeine, even though there’s a perception that it might not, but it does have. When they’re really fresh it’s quite a jolt.
Ray: A green tea can actually be more enlivening than a black tea, most definitely. Especially if it’s freshly picked in the spring.
Lisa: It’s interesting because what you’re talking about is basically opening up an entire enormous world, versus, “Can I have a cup of tea,” and somebody hands you a Lipton bag. Those teas are fairly highly processed. It’s essentially tea leaf dust.
Ray: Yeah, they call it dust in the tea trade. It’s basically the by product of whole leaf tea production. Once they’re done it’s the stuff they sweep off the floor and put into tea bags.
Ellen: They’re fannings.
Ray: They call it fannings or dust.
Lisa: That’s very disturbing.
Ray: Yeah. Most of the world’s tea is actually dust, or bagged tea. It’s like 96%. Whole leaf tea production’s very small.
Lisa: Your team room, Dobrá Tea, even though we think about tea from China, tea from India, we think about drinking tea in Great Britain, Dobrá actually did not come from any of those places.
Ellen: It came from, our business partners are Czech, they’re based in Prague. The Czech culture did not have a tea. This is something that they brought in after the velvet revolution. You couldn’t drink tea, good quality tea in the Czech Republic.
Ray: When it was Czechoslovakia and it was communist.
Ellen: When it was Czechoslovakia. They explored all these teas and they ended up really bringing in tearooms like in Eastern Europe now. The culture was something that was developed in the last 20 years but it’s not inherent in Czech culture.
Ray: Dobrá is a Czech word that means good, so good tea.
Lisa: There is something about tea, we’ve described the actual tea itself and its properties. We’ve described the community aspect of a tea room. There is something that’s very mindful about, that you have to be very mindful in creating a cup of tea, because you’ve already described if you’re going to do a black tea you have to steep it so many minutes, but if you’re going to do a white tea you don’t steep it quite as long. There’s something in the creating of that tea, and also of the drinking of it, where we all have to slow down.
Ray: Yeah. Slowing down, and a lot of people don’t realize that whole leaf tea you can actually re-steep. If you’re not re-steeping it, you’re actually not tasting the entire tea, because you want to re-steep that tea 3 or 4 times depending on the tea. It changes over time. Say it’s a rolled it, it takes a little while for those leaves to open up and release the oils.
Ellen: Yeah, most black tea is steeped once but we have several, one from Korea and another called Jin Jin, which is from Hunan, a province in China, and that one is re-steepable. That’s my favorite, also known as golden buds. Those are 2 black teas that are re-steepable. Most black teas, most aromatized, herbals are not re-steepable, but the greens, white, yellow, oolong and puer are.
Lisa: Why do you think that we have become so interested in tea, in the United States, compared to where we were, I don’t know, say 15 years ago.
Ellen: It’s actually really interesting. I read this factoid about millennials. They’re the first generation to drink more tea than coffee. I think there’s something in our culture where folks just want to slow down and not be so fast paced. With so many different devices out there that can call you at any minute and ask you to do something, tea just forces you to be quiet and take time.
Ray: I think it’s something that can bring you back to an old world culture, because we’re sort of at this 21st century breathing down your neck, everything is at your fingertips all the time. It’s a way to, as Ellen said, slow down, take in the moment.
Lisa: Looking at your backgrounds, you’ve done so many things. You’ve been in academia, that was part of your background.
Ellen: Yeah.
Lisa: You’ve also done farming and yoga, software design, travel photography, film production. You have a broad variety of interests. What you’re describing about tea is that there’s something for everyone there, there’s a historical aspect to tea, there’s a health aspect to tea, there’s a production aspect to tea.
Ellen: Cultural.
Lisa: Cultural, community, there’s so many things about tea that might appeal to you.
Ellen: Yeah.
Lisa: What was the defining moment for you when you said, “You know what? Whatever we’re doing right now we’re going to put that aside.”
Ellen: We were living in Hanover New Hampshire. I was working at Dartmouth, he was working at a small college in Western Mass. We were kind of living this life of him driving down and back for 2 years. We found ourselves in Burlington at this tea room and we were like, “Wow, this is chill. This is great.” We had been looking for something different, and moving back to Maine. I’d been wanting to move back to Portland for a number of years, because I had moved away in 2000. I was working at [inaudible 00:15:16].com in the Press Herald. I helped to start up a couple of websites there.
I really wanted to move back. We kept coming back and we kept traveling here. It was one of those things where everything … We went into the Dobrá in Burlington, everything was like, “Wow, this is it.” Everything fell into place. We were there in a blizzard in 2009, February. We made contact with the owner and by May we were in Prague meeting with our new business partners. 2010 we moved to Portland, early 2011 we opened on April 1st. It just all fell into place. That was it, we knew.
Ray: We were ready for change. We knew it was a big risk, but we took it and everything’s been great ever since.
Ellen: We still do some of those things. I still do web development. It’s still part of our lives, it’s just that the tea room was the magnum opus I guess.
Lisa: The last time I was in your Exchange Street store it was packed. It was wall to wall people. Maybe it was because it was around Thanksgiving, I don’t really know exactly what the day was. People really enjoyed being there. I don’t know that I was surprised because I’ve always liked your store and I’ve always enjoyed going there myself, but the fact that it could attract from off of Exchange Street where pretty much you could go get popcorn, or you could go to a bookstore, you could go to one of the few different coffee places, they chose the tea room. Did that surprise you, that people would be so drawn?
Ellen: I don’t know, I figure, we were really drawn to it initially so we’re like, “I think we’re onto something.”
Ray: Myself I’m pretty sensitive to a space. I walk into a business space and often I find them to be really hard and cold.
Ellen: Music.
Ray: Sort of wanted to make something different, make it softer. I have a background in meditation yoga, bringing in that element. I think everyone needs to calm down in some sense. Coming into that space, we hope you feel that energetically so you’ll be drawn to come back. The interesting thing is that it brings people from really young children with their mothers, teenagers love to hang out there because there’s no alcohol, older people, elderly people. It sort of is a great space for all ages.
Lisa: Do you find that different types of people are drawn to different types of tea? Can you ever think to yourself, “That person looks like she might like a green tea?”
Ellen: No.
Lisa: You can never do that?
Ellen: I don’t think so. No. No, there’s some people that will come in, order a chai every time and we’re like, “Try this.”
Ray: But that’s part of our job, I think is to reeducate the public. Everyone knows about chai, but not everyone knows about tieguanyin or smoolong. Something that’s this amazing oolong that has all these floral accents and tastes incredible. I think it’s our job to broaden people’s horizon with tea.
Ellen: That’s what that honeycomb display on our counter top, I feel that helps in that area. You can see it.
Ray: We give classes.
Ellen: We do classes where they can do 9 tastings. We do first Friday tea tastings as well. We put a tea out for that, or a couple teas. It’s something where we have the opportunity for people to taste teas or explore deeper in a workshop.
Ray: Yeah. I think that education piece is key. Tea has this sort of mystery around it, everyone knows Lipton and ice tea, but there’s a whole other world to explore.
Lisa: What have been your most popular teas?
Ray: I would say when we first opened definitely things that people can pronounce, such as vanilla. But now we have a lot of regulars that again we’ve educated and they’ve explored. We have a little tea tasting sheet that you can check off as you go through the teas. Comment, when you had it, what it tasted like, so you can go through the list. But definitely in the beginning I would say more of the vanilla, earl grey, things we’ve all heard of. Now it’s really diverse.
Ellen: It’s all over the place, yeah.
Ray: It’s sort of all over the place, especially in this new space which I think is much more visible to more people. We have a big connection now with the Press Hotel, that’s really helpful.
Ellen: Yeah, they’re serving our teas at the Press Hotel.
Ray: Yeah, more exposure.
Lisa: What are some of your favorites? What are some of the ones that you as individuals really like?
Ellen: I like the Hunan golden buds, but also the oolongs. They’re very interesting, they have the greatest degree of oxidation so they tend to be more green and floral all the way to a more tobacco flavor, like you might have oolong in a Chinese restaurant. They have quite a range within that. I would say it’s my favorite. I like greens as well, especially in the spring.
Ray: Yeah, I don’t really have a favorite. I base it on the time of day, the season. In the morning I might have maybe a black tea, but sometimes I’ll have a green tea. It depends on how I’m feeling. I really like matcha, which is becoming really popular these days. It’s fine powdered tea where you’re drinking the whole leaf, it’s really good for you, lots of antioxidants, vitamin C.
Lisa: Yeah, matcha is very interesting because it actually requires a little whisk. You can’t put it in a tea ball or in a tea sleeve, there’s a little bit more production.
Ray: Yeah, there’s … It’s called a chasen or a tea whisk; it’s a bamboo whisk. You can use an egg beater type thing but it doesn’t work nearly as well. People have tried to do that.
Ellen: Yeah, we were in Japan. We actually went to see someone who was making these chasen, and the work that goes into them is pretty crazy.
Ray: It’s pretty amazing.
Ellen: They had big ones, they had ones that were 2 feet tall, just as an example, and then they had the smallest ones. It was pretty wild.
Ray: They’re all made out of one piece of bamboo, really fine cuts. Really, really labor intensive to make.
Lisa: Has the fact that green tea and actually now puer and black have received some acclaim as having health benefits, has that helped your business in any way.
Ellen: Definitely.
Ray: Definitely, yeah.
Ellen: Yeah.
Ray: People come in and ask us, “What might this tea be good for? What might that tea be good for?” I think the most studies that have been done are on green tea. The fact that all tea from the tea plant has caffeine, but it also has theanine which is that mind calming amino acid. You get that lift from caffeine but you also get calmed down at the same time, which you don’t get in other caffeinated beverages. Yeah, anything from the tea plant has lots of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals. Really good for you.
Ellen: Yeah. White tea I know there was some … Maybe Dr. Oz or somebody was talking about white tea and I had peak in white tea requests.
Ray: Yeah. Or puer, puer was really big recently. Because puer is known for helping with digestion. Yeah we had this real spike when that was on in the media.
Ellen: Yeah we recommend puer when people come in on a Saturday morning after a hard night, we recommend a puer, that’s good for digestion.
Ray: Fat burning and such, yeah.
Ellen: Yeah.
Ray: Cholesterol, there’s been lots of studies on puer.
Lisa: There’s an interesting thing that has happened with tea, in that it used to be, especially if you’re going to have a thing of Lipton, you put in your 2 packets of Splenda. I never did this but, 2 packets of Splenda and your cream. What you’re describing is, it’s going to be hard, if you’re going to drown the tea itself with lots of stuff it’s going to be hard to actually taste it.
Ellen: Yeah, we don’t suggest any additives to white, yellow, green, puer or oolong. It’s straight up. Black tea, we know people have that tradition from the English, or actually a tradition from the British, in putting milk and sugar. But the reason they did put milk and sugar is because they didn’t have the quality whole leaf tea, they had the fannings and so that …
Ray: They’re trying to cover up that bitterness. But if you have a good full body black tea, you don’t necessarily need milk. Not that you shouldn’t drink it with milk. This happens all the time, people will order a black tea and they want that milk and sugar. They end up not even using it after drinking the tea. That’s happened a number of times.
Ellen: Yeah, many times.
Lisa: I think about myself with the black teas especially, the tannins and the astringent nature of the tea, that’s often why I’ll put a little honey in there. I have to admit I’m not always a purist. But then when I go back and drink a white tea straight up, it’s really amazing. It’s amazing how some of them can be very floral and some of them can be very green.
Ray: Very different.
Lisa: It’s like having a different type of wine, or a different type of coffee. It is that terroir that you’re describing.
Ellen: Yeah. The white tea, which is also know as white peony, that one to me in a cup turns a brown color and it has more of a nutty flavor, which is not at all like it’s white counterparts, yinzhe which is a silver needle. Within the white tea class you have 2 very different teas.
Ray: Yeah. The silver needle is as I mentioned it’s the tip only, those buds only. That in theory would have a higher amount of caffeine because it’s just from the tip of the plant, even though it’s white tea.
Lisa: What about the tea ceremony? This is something that we’ve heard about from eastern cultures. Is this something that you’ve observed or been a part of yourself?
Ellen: Yeah. There’s Japanese tea ceremony, there’s a Gong Fu tea ceremony. We actually have a workshop coming up. One of our employees, Tristan, is actually quite into Gong Fu tea. He has done in the past and he’s going to be doing another one. Gong Fu tea is more about a whole lot of tea and brewing that in quick steeping so that you get a more robust flavor. But there is the traditional ceremony, like the Japanese tea ceremony with the napkin folding and the movement. We experienced that in Japan and we’ve actually had folks, there’s a lady here locally Hiroko, who has come and done it in our old space, but I think it’s too hard for her.
Ray: Yeah, she’s getting older. It affects her knees because there’s a lot of kneeling. Can’t seem to get her back to do the ceremony, but she’s been in a couple of times. We actually had a woman from Waynflete do the Gong Fu Chinese ceremony. But I think she’s moved away.
Ellen: You can order the Gong Fu tea tasting at Interium
Ellen: Yeah, we have that. You can order the Gong Fu.
Ray: You can pick any oolong and have one of our employees perform the ceremony for you.
Ellen: Yeah, it’s a combination of washing bowls, washing cups and the tasting cup and the sniffing cup in hot water. There’s a whole process to it. It’s using tongs.
Ray: Basically sharing with somebody. Gong Fu means you use a lot of tea to a little bit of water so you’re really getting the essence of what the tea tastes like. That’s the real purpose of it, you’re just sharing tea with someone.
Lisa: That’s actually one of my favorite things about having gone to Dobrá, is usually when I’m at Dobrá I’m there with one of my daughters, and my son actually goes there too. He’s 22 so he’s more with his girlfriend. But when I go with my daughters, even the 14 year old who’s been going with me now to tea rooms for many many years, she’ll say, “I would like the silver needle tea,” or, “I would like a white peony,” or, “I’d like a jasmine pearl.” She used to, when she was very young, she would just ask for chamomile. It’s interesting in her mind she’s incorporated this knowledge and incorporated these tastes which are so subtle compared to a lot of what we eat and drink in this world today.
Ray: Right, yeah.
Ellen: Yeah it’s true.
Ray: I don’t know, there must be something … If she’s 14 then she’s digital native, grown up with things at her fingertips, everything is right there.
Ellen: She can probably look it up real easy.
Ray: Maybe she wants to slow down, and experience something really different.
Ellen: Innately, yeah. I know that actually for children and younger folks we always suggest herbals if they don’t want caffeine. The chamomile, lavender, tulsi, peppermint, rooibos is very common. If they like spice and are adventurous then we offer a masala rooibos or something. They all start without … Not many youngsters like caffeine, or look for caffeine that parents don’t want them to have caffeine.
Ray: Right.
Lisa: Yes. I think when we first started I was more than happy to have her have just chamomile.
Ellen: Yeah.
Lisa: She didn’t need to be any more activated than that. I’m excited to go back now. Every time I talk about tea it makes me excited to go back and find out more about a new tea that I can try. I know the people who are listening will want to go to Dobrá Tea. How do they find you?
Ray: We’re located at 89 Exchange Street, which is upper Exchange Street.
Lisa: What about a website?
Ellen: Dobrá Tea, www.dobrateame.com.
Lisa: I appreciate what you’ve done, bringing your tea room to Portland and having experienced it several times, and hoping that I will experience it many more times in the future. It’s good stuff. It’s good what you’re doing. I’m glad that you were in Burlington that night and made the decision that somehow this was going to be your life change.
Ellen: Yeah.
Lisa: This is good. This is good.
Ellen: Thank you.
Lisa: Tea impacts us all in really positive ways. We’ve been speaking with Ray Marcotte and Ellen Kanner who are the owners of Dobrá Tea on Exchange Street in Portland. Thank you for coming in.
Ellen: Thank you.
Ray: Thanks for having us.