Ales Jurina, one of the two founders of Dobrá Čajovna (“Good Tearoom”) in Czech visited Burlington this week. Of all the people that have taught me about the way of tea, I think that Ales has affected me the most. He is a kind soul and a true tea devotee. Along with his partner and fellow tea master Jirka Simsa, Ales brought tea culture out of Asia and into the Czech Republic. From there his spirit of travel and tea adventure has influenced hundreds of tea pilgrims, tea houses, and importers since 1992. There are over thirty Dobra teahouses across the US and eastern Europe and many others which have been influenced by Dobra’s Bohemian example. If you’d like to read more about the story of Dobra Tea, there’s a good summary on their main site.

I had the privilege of traveling in China with Ales and a group of other devoteas in 2012, when I was the manager of the Burlington tearoom. We spent five weeks traveling by plane, train, bus, boat, and car from the mountains of Fèngqìng in Yúnnán province across the Tea Belt to the lakes of Hángzhōu in Zhèjiāng. Although we all traveled together for most of the trip (in a very bohemian, tea pilgrim style), there were several points where we split up into small groups of two to three people and went exploring for many days entirely on our own. Often this involved arranging transportation to other towns and cities, finding lodging and meals, and looking for tea when our grasp of Mandarin was very poor. And yet, these excursions proved to be some of the most amazing parts of the journey, and Ales says that that is all part of the plan. I didn’t write down his exact words but he said something like, “When together as a group, you experience travel on the surface, but you don’t get to really know the culture until you travel by yourself.”

This was Ales’s first visit to the Burlington tearoom (the first Dobra in the US) since it opened in 2003. In the intervening time there have been four owners, several renovations, and a large increase in tea knowledge in the West. With his typical calm and humble style, he shared tea with the group, answered questions about tea culture, and showed several videos from tea travels in Japan, China, and one of the annual tearoom gatherings in Prague.

One of the questions asked was, for me, a very important reminder of what tea culture can mean; Ales was asked what Tea meant to him. He explained that while some people in the tea world are primarily focused on possessing tea knowledge and being seen as Masters, he felt that was missing the point. When the first Dobra tearoom opened in Prague they were mainly trying to introduce quality tea to their changing country, but over the years the (now hundreds of) tearooms of the Czech Republic have evolved, becoming gathering places and a social touchstone of the culture. “For me,” Ales explained, “tea is about sharing.”