The World in a Mug

Bill Waddington knows tea—and he’s sharing his expertise by way of tea blends from across the globe

Words and photos by Jenny Krane

At 20 years old, Bill Waddington was on an international quest. His goal? Find the perfect tea. The Minnesotan spent his formative years sending handwritten letters to tea growers, exporters and brokers. He sent letters to Germany, to India, to China. Inside each note, Waddington asked a simple question: Could he buy a tasty tea leaf grown in a foreign corner of the globe?

“Just like there’s good, prize-winning chocolate and prize-winning olive oil, I figured somewhere in the world there has to be great tea,” Waddington said.

To Waddington’s surprise, the tea growers wrote back. The bonus: They often included pounds of tea leaves with their responses. Thus began Waddington’s love affair with tea.

For over three decades, he collected as much information as he could, testing prize-winning teas from around the world and learning from people who had been in the business for generations.

“I [thought], ‘You know, if other people ever had a chance to try really good tea, it’d knock their socks off,’” Waddington said. That’s how his Minnesota company, TeaSource, was born.

The collection of blends at the St. Anthony location is expansive.

For 19 years, TeaSource has been dedicated to importing, blending, warehousing and selling teas made with ingredients sourced from places like Taiwan, India and Japan. In each of its three Twin Cities locations, the company carries over 200 teas at any given time, depending on season and availability. Each ingredient is hand-picked and sampled by Waddington, then imported to be used in TeaSource’s rich, astringent blends.

“I evaluate between 2,500 and 3,000 teas every single year, and I can taste the difference between every single one of them,” Waddington said. “Tasting tea is like tasting wine. They have just as much differentiation and taste as wines do.”

After the ingredients are imported, the real fun starts when Waddington and his staff collaborate to create custom blends.

“It’s a little bit of trial and error, a little bit of experience, a lot of science and measurements, and then there is also whimsy to it,” Waddington said.

After the taste-tests are over, Waddington’s process gets even more precise: The loose-leaf blends are refined and sold by the ounce, along with hundreds of other teas available in TeaSource stores.

But no matter how intricate the process, Waddington’s fondness of tea is as simple as many love stories: It all started with a letter.