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E m b r a c i n g t h e e a f teas like blacks brew best at full boil. Steeping times will also vary by tea—you'll want to confirm ideal times and temperatures with your importer—but will generally fall between three and five minutes. Does brewing loose-leaf tea sound like a lot of work? Tea experts advise that compared to the rigors of making coffee, it's relative- ly easy. "Making loose-leaf tea is actually far easier than making espresso," says Heather of The Jasmine Pearl. "I think coffee shops are a really good place for loose-leaf tea because they're al- ready used to taking those extra steps to make a really outstanding cup of coffee." Says Leaf & Bean NOLA's Nicholas Carlisi—a for- mer barista who now co-owns the New Orleans tea company—tea is a much easier category to grasp. "Coffee can be very complicat- ed," he says. "To distinguish subtle flavor characteristics, you have to really know your stuff, whereas telling a white tea from a green tea is pretty easy." l Most coffee businesses with tea on their menu will tell you it accounts for only a minor part of their sales. "Tea represents a relatively small percentage of what we do at Temple," says Eton. "I think one of the prob- lems that coffee companies run into is they say, 'I want to have this great tea program, but it represents such a small percentage of what I do. How do I allocate the funds to be able to do that?'" This, it seems, is one of the most im- portant questions facing specialty-coffee companies when it comes to tea: Why expend energy and resources on a category that is going to bring only modest returns? One answer for why tea is worthwhile for a café may be the aforementioned relatively low cost of investment, as tea equipment is considerably cheaper than coffee equipment, and the leaf itself is a high-margin, low-cost product. Further, while it won't immediate- ly be the highest-selling category on your menu, there is a dedicated customer base that will order from your tea menu. Perhaps the greater answer to why a specialty-tea program is worth investing in is that tea's greatest days for success in America are still ahead of it. On top of data like the aforementioned Tea Association of the USA fi gures revealing steady growth in the category, tea experts will point to several signs of encouragement for tea's increasing presence in U.S. consumers' lives. There's Starbucks' 2013 purchase of tea company Teavana, a sign that the coffee giant sees promise in the tea category. There are the much-hyped Millennials, whose cost-con- scious tendencies and desire to connect to natural products with a story could bode well for tea. Manish of Maya Tea says the industry is one breakout player away from a big boost in the U.S. market. "There's this pressure in the tea industry to fi nd the breakout mainstream player," he says. "If that can happen, it will change how tea is perceived not just at coffee shops but all over America." Maybe tea will explode, maybe it won't. In the meantime, it's still a high-margin item, and it requires a modest investment to develop a tea program on par with your high-quality specialty-coffee offerings. As Charles from Leaf & Bean NOLA puts it, adding a tea program is a natural fi t for cafés that will create not just profi ts but much opportunity for fun and discovery. "You have literally endless amounts of product for people to experiment with," he says. "There's always another tea out there you can add to your menu to bring people in. There are always different tasting notes, fl avors, aromas, and cultural traditions to explore. Every tea has a story." 91 www.baristamagazine.com