So there I was, on the way to a local used-book store, and I happened past a kitchen supply place, and noticed the new hand-written sign in the window. "We now have tea," it said. "Hold on a moment," I said to my wife.
Well, it turns out that they do, in fact, now carry tea. Much of it is the flavored sort that is popular among the few hot-tea drinkers here in the South, but I noticed a few boxes in the back that seemed to be individual gardens from Assam and Ceylon. I chatted with the tea man for a while, and got a quarter-pound of the ginger tea (I like that occasionally in the afternoons) and a quarter of the Pettiagalla Ceylon. Then I asked, just in passing, if they had any green pu-erh.
They're just getting started in carrying tea, the man pointed out, so there's only a little bit of pu-erh, and in the green only in the cakes that are, for the moment, out of my price range. But he tossed in a sample tuocha, and a smidgen of ginger pu-erh, and mentioned that over the next year he hopes to build up a line of thirty to fifty pus, green and black. Not bad for a beginning.
So if you're in Nashville looking for tea, there is now a place you can go.
dmh