A recent trip to Seattle helped me see that there was more to the city than Starbucks.

I want to be honest with you even though it’s embarrassing. I first heard the city name ‘Seattle’ in a Vanilla Ice song. I don’t remember which, but it wasn’t the famous one, and to be fair the song wasn’t about Seattle but it was listed in a callout of US city names in the outro.

Later, a little more than a decade later, I worked for a publishing company that produced BMW magazine, a publication that went out to new BMW owners, and I read a travel story about why Seattle was cool and underappreciated, which made me want to visit. Of course, by then the grunge scene was in full swing and the tech boom about to dawn – there was certainly a magical confluence of creativity and optimism blooming. And so, on my 2005 round-the-world tour, I found myself in town for a few days just popping over the border from my aunt and uncle’s place in Vancouver.

I did all the touristy things: visited the ‘original’ Starbucks store in Pike Place Market for a pumpkin spice latte, rode up to the top of the Space Needle to view Mount Rainier (on a surprisingly clear November day) and went to the zoo and watched squirrels steal snacks from the parked strollers outside the nocturnal house.

Fast forward 20 years and I found myself in town again for a completely different experience. The event was Worldcon and in the intervening years I had become deeply serious about tea. That meant dedicating several days to the convention but also planning excursions to teahouses. I had fortunately met several tea lovers online from the area (thanks MyTeaPal!) and compiled a private Google Map of tea places I could potentially visit.

I will document my experiences at the places I did get to soonish, but I first want to share a conversation I had with Andrew Goodman, Seattle local and coordinator at the Northwest Tea Festival (happening this weekend). I had pitched a story about the Seattle tea scene to Tea Journey but, due to a mix-up in timelines, my feature likely won’t run until later this year, which means I have to excise his contribution… but I didn’t want it to go to waste.

Goodman grew up around New York City but left in 1981 and has resided in Seattle for 30 years. His tea journey began in college in the 1970s when he used to work for McNulty’s and was encouraged to try all the products. Now, having retired from a ‘real job’, he moonlights around town as The Happy Tea Man.

“ My big thing is connecting people around tea, seeing that ‘aha!’ smile when someone tastes a real tea for the first time or when somebody starts a discussion about the importance of terroir,” he says.

The idea for the Northwest Tea Festival began around 20 years ago, a joint effort between Julie, founder of Perennial Tea Room, and tea writer James Norwood Pratt, who noted that Seattle was a tea town. It differed from Las Vegas’ annual World Tea Expo because it was for consumers, not trade.

“ The thing about Seattle is it’s an interesting amalgam. Of course we have a tremendous Asian demographic here – there’s the International District, aka Chinatown, so there’s a big Asian influence. But also, we were fortunate that 30, 40 years ago, a number of tea shops – Blue Willow, Teahouse Kuan Yin – opened in Seattle and there’s really a pretty good audience of younger Caucasian men and women who are also tea lovers. And it became a nice synergy,” says Goodman. “ The tea shops did well. People more and more got into specialty tea.”

We chatted a little about the places I had visited, in particular three venues with very different approaches to tea: Friday Afternoon Tea (“ I would call [Friday Elliott] a Renaissance woman. She’s just a real important, solid citizen, not just in the tea world”); B Fuller’s Mortar & Pestle (“ in among those shelves with the teas with the horehound and hyssop and hibiscus in it [William Sullivan] has got some pretty serious teas there too – he bridges both within that whole steampunk milieu”); and Floating Leaves (“ nobody that I know who speaks English knows as much about cultivars and varieties and roasting and processing and the different mountains of Taiwan [as Shiuwen Tai]”).

“It’s very diverse, and it’s really the ability of a tea shop owner to know their audience and to focus on their audience,” says Goodman. “And the three of them are very successful.”

He also notes a few other stores whose wares belie their expertise: Experience Tea Studio is one (“[Roberta Fuhr] is as serious a tea drinker as you or I, but you wouldn’t know it by going in the store and seeing that she’s got nine different flavoured rooibos teas”); and LizzyKate is another (“ they bridge the gap between flavoured teas and the very serious kind of teas we drink at MyTeaPal”).

It’s the lead-up to the event so the man is busy and I have to let him go, but before I do I ask what he’s most looking forward to at the festival.

“ I love getting together, talking and just reconnecting with vendors from around the country, potters as well as tea vendors. I love the feeling of the festival that it’s like a huge reunion of friends,” says Goodman. “It’s just such a wonderful, positive interaction in a world that’s frankly full right now – I’m sure you would agree – of a lot of unsavoury bullshit. I like to say there’s never a fight at a tea bar.”

Find out more about the Northwest Tea Festival on the Tea Journey podcast.