Immortalitea Announces Successful Crowdfunding For Rare Chinese Tea

Leading North American tea retailer Immortalitea announced today the results of their first crowdfunding initiative. In July of this year Immortalitea introduced their customers to a struggling farming cooperative in rural Chunan county, Zhejiang province, China.

Chunan country is the birthplace of the revered Dragon Well Green Tea. Unfortunatley, due to the combined effects of intense commercialization and pollution, true handcrafted Dragon Well tea has become so rare and expensive only the Chinese elite have access to it.

Meanwhile, copycat lesser quality teas using the name Dragon Well abound in Western tea markets. Ralph Kenney, founder of Immortalitea, explained in the company newsletter that a new farming cooperative in Chunan had approached him. The cooperative had obtained permission to harvest an abandoned government owned tea field. Due to remote location, they were able to harvest this tea just once per year and the scale of the operation is such that they can only process the tea by hand using traditional methods.

After sampling the tea, Mr. Kenney decided to use his Immortalitea Insider’s Club to launch a small crowdfunding effort. The company announced today declared the crowdfunding a success.

Said Kenney, “We were able to purchase all of the remaining 2016 harvest from this small cooperative. Most of our purchase went immediately to the participants of our crowdfund. Early feedback form customer is that they loved the tea. We kept a small amount of the tea for sell on our site.”

The members of the cooperative have received their payments as well and happily report they have pooled their money to buy a truck. It’s red.

“I don’t know if we will do this again. “ said Immortalitea’s founder. “I feel good about what we did but it was effort intensive. Let’s see how the harvest goes next year.”

More information about the Dragon Well tea is available at the company website.