Cloudwalker Tea

Suspending Animation (Solstice)

Solstice.
Light holds. Then lets go.
A cup. A table.
What remains, when the work is already done.

Tea Clinic Returns — This Friday at JagaSilk
10AM • $25 • First come, first served

Two identical cakes, two very different lives:
one resting in Taiwan’s warm natural storage,
the other aging quietly here on the cool West Coast.

What does temperature ask of a tea?
What does humidity return?
And where, between these two climates, does flavour reveal its truest self?

Erick Smithe (Cloudwalker Tea) and Jared Nyberg (JagaSilk) guide a comparative tasting and discussion on the forces that shape pu-erh over time.

Tea Clinic Returns — This Friday at JagaSilk
10AM • $25 • First come, first served

Two identical cakes, two very different lives:
one resting in Taiwan’s warm natural storage,
the other aging quietly here on the cool West Coast.

What does temperature ask of a tea?
What does humidity return?
And where, between these two climates, does flavour reveal its truest self?

Erick Smithe (Cloudwalker Tea) and Jared Nyberg (JagaSilk) guide a comparative tasting and discussion on the forces that shape puerh over time.

Like rainbows slipping out of cloud after rain,
this tea lifts a fog,
shifts the veil.
Never quite certain
whether the gaze moves around it
or through it.

What becomes unmistakable is aliveness.
Here, or where — it does not matter;
light on glass, steam,
a small flame stepping forward inside all this light.
Tea becomes a lens, letting attention settle
until what is true can be seen.
Each cup holds a fragmentary eternity —
still, and still moving.
Consciousness is king; the leaves are only its messengers

Early tea today — before daylight, before thoughts arranged themselves.

The leaves opened slowly, releasing that familiar ember glow.
Something in me opened with it.
Not dramatically — just enough to feel a thread catch again.

There’s tea as a commodity, and then there’s tea as a small turning of the inner wheel.
I follow the latter.
It’s the only path that’s ever made sense.

Here’s to quiet beginnings, even on winter mornings.

⸻

The steam rose with that quiet, amber shimmer — the kind old leaves give when they’re ready to speak.

Today the session felt carved from another layer of time.
The colour deepened, the aromas moved in slow, deliberate spirals,
and the cup carried a softness edged with something ancient.

There are moments when tea reveals a facet you didn’t know it held —
a glint, a pulse, a brief opening in the grain of the world.
No theatre. No posture.
Only the leaf coming forward as itself.

These leaves have travelled farther than I ever will.
Their language isn’t learned — it’s remembered.
And when it surfaces, it feels less like tasting and more like being met.

I follow those moments.
That shimmer in the steam, that quiet intelligence in the brew.
The things that can’t be staged, copied, or taught —
only encountered.

The wrapper in tatters, the leaves steeped to silence.
What remains is the charge — an ancient current etched into the marrow.

A rare wild cake surfaced — worn paper, old scent, carrying the unmistakable gravity of ancient leaf. Broken open slowly, fragment by fragment, the years loosening themselves as they fell.

The brew thickened. Darkened. Quieted.
Each infusion drawing something deeper forward, then pressing it inward again — a refining fire, a contraction of spirit.

By the final cup, taste had dissolved into presence.
Not flavour, not story — but the residue of the mountain itself, settling like ash, like gold dust, somewhere behind the ribs.

Jagasilk X Cloudwalker
Nov 14 2025 10:00AM - $25

Assessing Different Pu-Erh Storage Techniques
Erick Smithe of Cloudwalker Tea and Jared Nyberg of JagaSilk explore the effects of storage on tea flavour and aromatics. Attendees will compare extractions of the same tea cake that has been stored differently. Taiwanese natural storage VS the same tea cake stored at ambient temperatures on the West Coast. What role does temperature and humidity play? Nyberg will bring his empirical perspective while the Smithe approach is to deliver the experience — with interpretation left to the individual.

Tickets available through: Jagasilk.com and cloudwalkertea.com

“Between night and day, the sky breaks open — a stillness before the pour.”

At dawn, the clouds speak in silence.
Old leaves wait on the tray, holding their own storms of memory.
The first crack of the tea knife opens more than a cake — it opens time.
In the space between sky and cup, something timeless stirs.

Cycles of flame and ash,
burning ever brighter
into their inevitable ecstasy.

Ash from the brazier is not discarded — it becomes the bed upon which the next fire is lit. Burning to ash, building again, each cycle feeding the next. Until at last there is no ash and no fire, only silence.