🌀 April Newsletter

Spring is here; change is in the air; it's time to brew.

Today's newsletter topics:

🌀 PERPETUAL BREW!
🌱 Equinox Updates
📰 Extra, Extra

But first, our April calendar:

Housekeeping:

• We may send you an email once a week, instead of our usual once per month, during Perpetual Brew. Desperate times & all that. Hope that's okay! We'll return to one email a month come May.
• No Tea Talk this month... nor for the next few months. Making space for something for radical & educational. We plan to resume hosting Tea Talks in the fall!

🌀 Perpetual Brew begins April 1st

One month / 30 consecutive days / 180 hours of free tea service in Maria Hernandez Park starts this Wednesday, April 1st at 12pm.

Every single day of April, from 12-6pm, you can get some free tea at The Tea Stand in Maria Hernandez Park (specifically the northwest corner here), rain or shine.

This is Perpetual Brew. Wish us luck. Come say hi. Maybe bring your own mug, or a friend, or some tea to add to the communal teapot.

If you're not local / mobile, we have some great news for you: you can follow along with our April adventures by listening to the Perpetual Brew PODCAST!!!

30 days of free tea, 30 days of free podcast episodes. A collaboration between local audio journalist & friend Mae Nagusky and The Tea Stand.

Listen to the 2-minute trailer below! You can find all future episodes here (or wherever you listen to your podcasts).

Without further ado, let's introduce the Brew Crew – the group of neighbors / artists / good humans who will be taking over The Tea Stand throughout the month of Perpetual Brew.

Here are the Brew Crew members along with the dates they'll be serving tea:

• Paige Kloss: April 3, April 8
• Mattie Brubaker: April 4, April 13, April 20
• Andrea Sofía: April 5, April 16*, April 26
• Noah Sai: April 5, April 24, April 26
• Aimee Tadmore: April 7
• Ziggy Bee: April 10
• Juno Tatarka: April 14*
• Miles Kirsch: every date not listed above!

* indicates that the host will be serving tea for a subset of the full 12-6pm shift

Members of the Brew Crew range from fiber artists & landworkers to illustrators & musicians to photographers & filmmakers!! We're honored to be collaborating & in community with everyone named above.

Come by The Tea Stand and meet these inspiring people, you'll be glad you did :)

(Also – most Brew Crew participants will be contributing to a special issue of our zine, bōcha, which will be dedicated to documenting Perpetual Brew. More on that to come!)

If you'd like to help make this month of magic & madness possible, join our volunteer group chat here! We'll be asking for help bagging tea, designing the zine, and running miscellaneous errands.

Also – simply visiting The Tea Stand goes a long way. Especially on a particularly bleak day of April – of which there will be many – it means so much to be checked on by a neighbor. (Yes, we tea servers get cold & lonely, too!)

Let Perpetual Brew be your excuse to get outside, to talk with strangers, to be a good neighbor in the most accessible of ways. We'll be there, every day of the month, rain or shine, ready to welcome you & serve you some tea.

FREE TEA FOR ALL!

🌱 Happy Spring!

Happy belated spring equinox, my friends! I hope you've enjoyed the first ten days of this wondrous season.

Aside from some of the worst allergies I've experienced in recent memory (at least I think that's what's going on?), I've been overjoyed to actually feel the grips of my handlebars and sunshine on my bare skin. The streets, the bugs, the plants are coming all alive, it's a little scary & absolutely spectacular.

Equinoxes & solstices also serve as milestones for The Tea Stand – in lieu of "quarterly reports," we align some of our programming & communications with the changing of the seasons.

Specifically, every equinox & solstice, we package & deliver "tea boxes" – parcels containing tea and a locally illustrated postcard – to our members (Steepers) as a thanks for their support. More about tea boxes here.

This batch of tea boxes featured some lovely loose leaf teas from The Ridge – a dreamy black tea, a golden flower oolong, and tulsi (holy basil) – and an adorable postcard by no-longer-local artist Olioli Buika (miss you & sending love to Hawaiʻi!).

As the number of tea boxes to package increases with every passing season (truly a blessing, thank you all), the amount of support we need also grows!

We continue to rely on all of the volunteers who consistently show up to help with various tasks (serving tea, guiding meditations, stapling tea tags) to keep The Tea Stand functioning, and tea box week is no different. Much love to Tomi, Aimee, Noah, and Andrea who helped with this batch of boxes.

And a special thank you to the folks at circuit – a nascent bike delivery collective – who delivered 20+ tea boxes all across NYC, from Harlem to Bayside. Having four strangers pull up to my apartment with open arms & empty bike racks, ready to hit the road and deliver some precious cargo, is an experience I'm still processing. Y'all are so inspiring :')

Aside from tea boxes, we also host a virtual livestream around every solstice & equinox. We call them "Town Halls" (more info here).

These Town Halls are open to all members – Sippers & Steepers alike — and serve as opportunities to share seasonal reflections, important events & collaborations, financial updates, and whatever else is going on in the world of The Tea Stand.

Thanks to all those who joined & watched later on! If you'd like to participate in future Town Halls, you can sign up as a member here.

📰 The Tea Stand in the local news(paper)

Last month, local journalist Jacqui Cardenas interviewed me, trusty ole Adin, and a community member named Aidan who has volunteered to help serve tea several times in the past few months (thanks Aidan!).

A couple weeks ago, Jacqui's story about The Tea Stand was published in the Brooklyn Downtown / Greenpoint Star (I'm still not sure what the difference is). And the best part – it's a physical newspaper, and we're on the cover!

Unless you plan on stopping by Quimby's Bookstore to grab one of the few newspaper issues I left behind, you can read the story online here.

Having done like ten of these types of interviews, I feel like I'm just starting to get the hang of them. I'm more prepared for the questions, the important talking points come a bit more naturally, and I feel more comfortable speaking with the interviewers (boundaries come in handy in this regard!!).

It also helps when the journalist is generally a pleasure to speak with, as Jacqui was. And how nice to have other people – Adin & Aidan – sharing their own perspective on The Tea Stand! I'm so deep within this project that sometimes it feels impossible to step back and describe it from a birds-eye view.

Anyways, check out the story, support your local news publications, and send over your best media training tips. I'll need all the help I can get for the Perpetual Brew podcast :)

That's all for now! Thanks to...

Serena, Taylor, Matti, Kate, Mack, and Elizabeth for becoming members.

You, for reading! Hope to see you soon (calendar here).

Keep Steeping,
Miles 🍵