Two doors, one team
tea.support is the constellation’s connective layer, and it opens two doors. Partners and internal teams come through the Content API and the /account sign-in shared by all 35 THE TEA siblings — the plumbing described on the developer side of this project. Tea drinkers come through the other door: a small roster of specialists who answer a delayed order, a flat brew, or a provenance question in their own words, usually within one to three business days.
Both doors lead to the same team. It verifies sourcing and keeps orders moving from Kunming and the Fujian mountains, and it answers brewing questions across oolong, white and yellow, aged pu-erh, and black tea. The AI sommelier that indexes tea.support’s data is built on the team’s tasting notes and cupping records, not the other way round — it retrieves what has already been written and tasted, so a fast answer still traces back to a specific cup.
Why a support desk, not another catalogue
Most of the constellation answers “what is this tea”; tea.support answers “what do I do now” — track a parcel, verify a lot number, pause a subscription, replace a cracked gaiwan. That is a narrower job than the encyclopedia at thetea.app or the sensory tools at tea.degree, and a different one from the health research on tea.doctor or the sourcing hunts on tea.dog. It exists because even a well-documented product needs a person to write back when something goes wrong, or when a question is too specific for a database field.
Since 2014
The team has worked this way since 2014: a cellar of 1,200+ Chinese teas as reference material, and a plain rule that a reply is not finished until it would make sense read aloud over a shared pot of tea.