I’m not a tea drinker. I take my coffee black and often, no matter the weather or time of day. It’s a habit formed from time living in Latin America, where I once encountered a toddler with a baby bottle full of coffee. Now I don’t make it through a day without a cup — until I’m sick. When I’m taken under by some ailment or another, I find myself reaching for tea instead of coffee, aiming for something gentle and soothing. Something restorative. That’s how I came to open a box of chamomile lavender tea that had been gifted to my wife; it waited unopened in the pantry with a sticky note still attached: I swear by this blend. I just wanted to feel better.

I can’t say what exactly hooked me. The flavor was full but didn’t overwhelm, and after a few sips, I felt wrapped up by more than the heat of the mug. Even after I recovered from my sickness, I found myself filling the kettle every night once the kids were in bed. The tea had become a necessary postscript to my day, the filling of the mug and the dunking of the bag a ritual of closure. We’ve made it, the first sip said. By the second and third, the couch had claimed me, and my body had all the cues it needed to unwind.

So, yes, it’s true that I drank all the tea that wasn’t mine, but I’m not an animal. I set out to replace the box I’d stolen from my wife. All I had to go on was the tea’s creator, Asheville Tea Company, and though I knew nothing about it, I managed to find a few boxes on a Buy Local endcap at the Ingles grocery store down the road. I bought them all. Then I drank them all. I am not ashamed.

I wasn’t becoming a tea person, exactly. I was becoming a this tea person. The chamomile lavender blend belonged to me, and I to it. I steeped every night, the soft lamps on and the window cracked to let in the sound of the river. I’m not claiming I reached nightly Zen or a nirvana state or anything nearing meditation, but with my tea in hand, I felt profoundly settled.

A few months after discovering this Asheville Tea Company blend, the rains came. We left the Mills River Valley before Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina in earnest. Our road looked like it might soon wash out, and we wanted to be on the safe side — which is to say on the side of the river that didn’t dead-end into national forest. We expected to be gone for a few nights at most, so we stuffed pillows, blankets, hastily packed suitcases, two dogs, and a cat into our cars. On the way out the door, I pocketed a couple tea bags to tide me over. That night, the river overtook the house.

While the Mills River filled my home, the Swannanoa River was lifting the 6,000-square-foot building holding Asheville Tea Company’s tulsi and anise hyssop and chamomile and lavender and flinging it all downstream. Along the way, it scattered thousands of tea bags like seeds, only for them to crop up like wildflowers days later when the waters finally receded.

Jessie Dean (left) started her business with her sister Melissa in 2016 with the hope of making Asheville Tea Company a farm-to-teacup operation. Nine years and one major hurricane later, they’re restarting with the same goal. photograph by Tim Robison

“Asheville Tea Company is gone,” founder and owner Jessie Dean told her sister Melissa the day after the storm. She’d driven close enough to see that the building had vanished, and then she’d wound her way through tangled-up roads to finally reach her sister’s house.

Melissa, the director of sales and marketing at the company, didn’t understand. “Gone?”

“Gone.”

Of course, Jessie meant the building — and everything in it, including the recently purchased tea bag machine — but once the shock of that total loss began to wash away, there was no doubt about the company itself. “I think we question our optimism sometimes,” Jessie says, “but there was never any question about if we would rebuild.”

That’s because Asheville Tea Company has never been about tea alone. When Jessie landed on the idea for the business in 2016, the phrase that had been singing in her head for days was farm to teacup, farm to teacup. In her model, the ingredients would be locally sourced, creating opportunities for sustainable farming practices, shorter supply chains, and freshly curated teas. The aim was to generate a small bit of good and trust that it would spread.

Helene scattered tea bags like seeds, only for them to crop up like wildflowers days later.

“If we can create something that is enriching and beautiful,” Jessie says, “something that is meaningful to people, even in a small way, then we’re playing our role.”

And so, with no inventory or equipment or building, Jessie, Melissa, and team went back to work because they still had what they set out to create in the first place: communities of people looking to make the world a better place. Farmers harvested the next crops, friends in the industry offered up production space, and tea drinkers across the country preordered what they trusted would one day fill their cups.

Our house didn’t wash away, but it will be a long time before we can live in it again. In the weeks after the flood, I ripped out the first floor down to studs and joists to save it from moisture and mold, and we searched for some other place to call home. We grew comfortable with a low-grade chaos as we bounced from house to house and attempted to rebuild our own.

Naturally, I was one of the thousands of people who preordered tea. Amid all the loss and destruction, my nightly cup seemed silly and small. But I missed it. I missed that quiet stretch of time when everything felt in its place, so I sent off an order and waited.

While the author weathered the aftermath of Helene, he took solace in the occasional cup of Asheville Tea Company’s chamomile lavender. photograph by Tim Robison

It was January when the package arrived — well, actually two packages. My wife didn’t know that I had preordered the tea I first stole from her, so she’d preordered it for me, too. It was now 2025, and I was awash in chamomile lavender.

It’s true: That first cup of tea was small. But it was the right kind of small. The kind of small that Jessie Dean set out to create. Some water and some herbs. A handful of minutes. But in the blending and growing and brewing, there was, for me, a kind of magic. I was displaced, our world upside down, but with the mug in my hand and the familiar scents encircling me, I felt, if only for that moment, profoundly settled.

For more information about Asheville Tea Company, visit ashevilleteacompany.com.