Cusa Tea founder, Jim Lamancusa, discovered his passion for tea while exploring the traditional tea shops of Hong Kong as a study-abroad student. Inspired by southeast Asia during that first trip, he ended up living in the region for over two and a half years. While there, he received a complete education in the craft and culture of tea, visiting tea plantations and shops throughout China and India simply because he loved the experience of a premium cup of tea. Fast forward through fifteen years of dedicated tea drinking to a backpacking trip in the Colorado Rockies. As his friends prepared instant coffee around the fire, he steeped a tea bag he would have to pack out at the end of the trip and thought to himself, “why hasn’t anyone developed a high-quality, instant tea?”
After returning from the mountains, Jim began to experiment with tea and quickly realized that existing production methods for instant beverages damaged tea characteristics, resulting in a final product that didn’t reflect the flavor and nuance of high-quality tea. After nine months of trial and error, he found a completely new brewing and dehydration process that could deliver a perfect cup of premium organic tea in seconds. This new Cold Steep Technology retained all the taste and character of the teas Jim hand selected from specialty organic plantations, and Cusa Tea was born.
