Sipping Coffee While Watching Tea Harvesting: Camping Coffee Business Booming by Tea Gardens!

Tea or Coffee: Which Would You Choose?

"Only children make choices. Adults want it all."

The Perfect Moment for Longjing

For most green teas such as Longjing, leaves picked before the Qingming Festival are called "pre-Qingming tea," while leaves picked before the Guyu Festival are called "pre-Guyu tea." The saying goes, "Pre-Guyu is premium quality, pre-Qingming is a treasure." This is precisely the best window for picking Longjing tea. The tea fields are bustling with busy pickers, while along the edges of those same fields, people are lining up to buy coffee.

(Wait. Has the topic gone off the rails? "No.")

A Coffee Experience Set Among Tea Gardens

Longwu Town in Xihu District, Hangzhou, is renowned for producing Hangzhou Longjing tea, and its distinctive tea garden landscape draws numerous tourists every year around Qingming Festival who come to experience the charm of nature and the tea-picking and tea-making process.

With so many visitors around, mobile coffee shop owners were certainly not going to miss such an opportunity. To let more people experience the charm of the 24 solar terms, a coffee truck recently parked beside a tea garden in Longwu Town, Xihu District, Hangzhou, and started a camping coffee business. Here, people can enjoy coffee while taking in the tea garden scenery and watching the tea leaves being picked.

Cultural Fusion Creates Unexpected Appeal

Image source: Shared by Xiaohongshu users

In a video released by Hangzhou Daily on March 26, you can feel how many tourists who came for a spring outing were drawn to this "out-of-place" coffee truck. Tea growing in the fields and coffee served at the edge, the collision and fusion of two cultures, made the coffee truck's business exceptionally popular.

Image source: Screenshot from Hangzhou Daily video

After buying their coffee, everyone sat by the tea fields enjoying the tranquility of the countryside. As the breeze blew, they could smell the faint fragrance of fresh tea leaves.

Image source: Screenshot from Hangzhou Daily video

Netizens commented after watching: "One side is life, the other side is also life."

Some netizens asked why a mobile tea house wasn't set up by the tea fields instead of a mobile coffee shop. One netizen's answer was quite witty: "Because tea can be refilled, but it uses water."

More netizens, however, put it plainly: "Mainly because tea is more expensive than coffee." According to their responses, even ordinary Hangzhou Longjing picked during this season costs over 600 yuan per jin (500g). As for better quality, prices vary with the growing area: cheaper lots might run three to four thousand yuan per jin, while the expensive ones, well, we dare not ask.

The Economics and Experience Behind the Choice

Coffee and tea are two different crops, and measuring them purely by price is not entirely fair, yet consumers are still accustomed to gauging value through price. Compared with the pre-Qingming Longjing being harvested in the fields, coffee prices are more acceptable to the average consumer.

Second, consumers want fresh experiences. Drinking tea by the tea fields might be routine, but camping-style coffee by the tea fields is something else entirely. It represents both a collision of tea and coffee cultures, and a coffee truck is one of the currently popular ways to run a coffee business, which pulls people in to check it out.

Image source: Shared by Xiaohongshu users

Another factor is that the "new-style camping" approach aligns with young people's pursuit of outdoor experiences. New-style camping differs from the camping of the past. Compared with traditional outdoor camping, known for being extreme and arduous, new-style camping emphasizes aesthetics while getting closer to nature, all the while staying as close as possible to an urban lifestyle.

Tea fields, plus a coffee truck, plus camping: simple in equipment, yet it satisfies people's pursuit of an ideal life. However out of place it may look, these brief moments of gazing at tea fields while drinking coffee give busy people a little temporary relief.

The Tea Pickers' Perspective

The videographer left a question in the video: "Drinking coffee while watching tea picking, I wonder what the tea-picking aunties think?" To close, here is how netizens imagined it:

Image source: Screenshot from Hangzhou Daily video and Xiaohongshu

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If a cup by the tea fields got you curious about coffee, entry-level specialty beans are the easiest place to begin. FrontStreet Sun-Dried Huakui from Ethiopia carries berry, floral, jackfruit, melon, and honey notes with very low bitterness, a good match for anyone who normally drinks tea; FrontStreet Washed Gudingding Cooperative is a classic Yirgacheffe with jasmine, lemon, and berry that makes a light, tea-like pour-over.

For a softer, sweeter everyday cup, FrontStreet Brazil Cerrado Red Bourbon is a mellow single origin with cream, peanut, and cocoa notes at a friendly price, and FrontStreet Queen's Estate adds a sugarcane-like sweetness and a smooth, thick body. Both travel well in a thermos and brew just as happily outdoors as at home.