Imbibe 75 Person to Watch: Anna Ye

If someone asked you to name a nation famous for its tea, you probably wouldn’t start with Vietnam. Yet every year, smugglers move thousands of pounds of quality Vietnamese teas into China and Taiwan, where they fetch top dollar as relabeled lots from those more renowned regions. Tea educator Anna Ye wanted the world to recognize Vietnam for its own contributions to the tea canon, rather than counterfeit commodities sold under the table.

She launched Anna Ye Tea, a company exclusively devoted to small-batch Vietnamese teas, many of which rarely make it to the global market.

So in November of 2021, she launched Anna Ye Tea, a company exclusively devoted to small-batch Vietnamese teas, many of which rarely make it to the global market. Her Misty Highland Green, for instance, is made from elder tea trees that grow naturally in forests tended by local H’mong families. They process leaves the traditional way, by hand in a wok over a wood fire, which adds a subtle sultry smokiness to the brew. At nearby factories that cater to foreign tastes, that smokiness is seen as a defect. Ye views it as an extension of the region’s terroir, where tea is a cultural practice as much as an industry, and well worth preserving. “I think it speaks to the culture,” she says. “To strip that away is to strip away part of the life of the tea at origin.”

In 2022, Ye spoke at a Vietnamese tea trade show about marketing Vietnamese tea on its own terms. “The specialty market in Vietnam is dictated by large international buyers,” she explains, who regard the country as a source of inexpensive land and labor. But “ethnic minority communities in Vietnam have been growing and making tea for hundreds of years,” she continues, “and their cultural backgrounds and heritage are often left behind. If we look 20 years into the future, what kind of agency does that leave Vietnamese tea producers?”

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