We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Colin Hudon a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Colin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I’ve loved tea since I was a teenager. I minored in Asian Religious Studies in university then studied various eastern traditions through my 20’s, especially Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Kashmir Saivism. I decided in my late twenties to travel in Asia to learn more about tea and these traditions where I found a living tradition and teacher in Taiwan. I came back to Los Angeles and opened a tea house that focused on tea ceremonies. I also went to school at this point for 7 years for Chinese medicine. The problem I wanted to address is a lack of awareness, consciousness and connection for people. I wanted to help folks connect more deeply with themselves, eachother and the natural world. These practices and healing modalities I found to be very effective.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Living tea shares traditional rituals and practice related to the world of rare teas by providing intentional, guided products, experiences and education. Our common goal is to gather, with tea giving us a natural facilitator to create a community.

As a brand, we provide unique, and often rare, quality products (tea, tea ware, focused kits), guidance on practices (informational blog posts, videos, classes), and opportunities to experience tea & its rituals (virtual events, focused kits, subscriptions, etc.)

There are a lot of “biochemical health benefits” to tea as well as the medicinal tinctures and mushrooms we carry, although ultimately tea is a mindfulness path. The deeper benefit is living a more conscious, connected life.

We are set apart because we offer a lot of education and experience. Our teas are also very hard to come by in the western world.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We spent a full year renovating a 140 year old building in the mountain town of Telluride, Colorado to create a traditional teahouse. We were supposed to open on March 15th, 2020. On March 13th, the town shut down with Covid. We weren’t able to get open until the Summer of 2022. We had to get very creative in order to keep the space which we had just invested so much heart (and money) into. Our resilience came through in the many steps taken during that time to develop infrastructure, pivot, refocus, raise money, host retreats, create wellness products, develop new supply chains and stay in business.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

Rachel Maley, our direct of operations and ecommerce, found me. I’ve always done my best to be authentic in the way we present the brand. She reached out through instagram telling me how much she loved the brand and inquiring about work. It turned out that she has been the greatest blessing to the business, so much so that we moved the base of ecommerce operations to Chicago where Rachel lives.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.livingtea.net/ www.mountaingatetelluride.com
• Instagram: @livingtea/ @mountain.gate
• Facebook: Living Tea
• Youtube: Living Tea
• Yelp: Mountain Gate Telluride

Image Credits
We’ll email the photos and provide credits where necessary. I wasn’t able to pull the photos I wanted from our drive as it only let’s you upload from the harddrive, so we are going to email a folder.