Tea and cacao share deep roots in human history, making January - National Hot Tea Month - the perfect time to spotlight one of our favorite retailers, LizzyKate Tea. We met co-owner Amy at the NW Chocolate Festival in October 2024, where an instant connection formed over our chocolate bars. After the festival, I visited her beautifully curated store, where a color-coded wall of teas transported me to my travels across China, Japan, India, and Europe.
More than just a tea house, LizzyKate Tea is a space for cultural exchange. Their attention to detail shines through everything - from their knowledgeable staff to their event posters featuring authentic cultural motifs, like Portuguese ceramic patterns for their Portuguese tea tastings.
I was particularly charmed by their BKON craft tea brewers, which are no longer manufactured. The owners have become expert fixers of this delicate machine - a reminder that as small business owners, technical skills often prove more valuable than financial ones!
Ever wondered who Lizzy and Kate are? Let's find out!
*********************************************************************************
Q: How do you define the LizzyKate Teas?
A: LizzyKate Tea Shop is a modern tea experience for people visiting the shop in Kirkland, WA. Designed to be colorful and bright, the shop showcases our tea collection in tins that correspond to the tea type (white, black, green, oolong and herbals). Whether visitors are tea connoisseurs or novices, we love to help people explore the world of tea and discover new teas they may not have tried.
We also invested in high-tech tea brewing machines to make the perfect cup of tea quickly. Using a vacuum system, the machines extract flavor and steep the tea faster. We also use them to make concentrations for tea lattes and iced teas.
Q: What is your primary motivation?
A: Tea is the #2 consumed beverage in the world; however, it’s only #7 in the US. We want to introduce people to high quality tea and provide easy ways for them to enjoy it at home or on the go. We hope to see tea’s popularity grow!
Q: What’s your product selection process like?
A: In the beginning we visited large tea trade shows and tasted a lot of teas. As we found suppliers with great tasting teas, we built relationships with them and continued to explore other teas they offer. For every tea in our collection, we’ve taste-tested that type of tea (for example, Earl Grey) from a wide variety of suppliers to find the one we think is the best and will appeal to our customers. We also spend a lot of time researching teaware and food items on B2B websites. And our customers also recommend teas and food items for us to carry.
Q: What are the fun facts you’d love people learn about your shop?
A: New customers often ask about our company name. When we were brainstorming about the name, we noticed a lot of tea companies have masculine names and we wanted a feminine, yet modern name. So we took two classic names, Elizabeth and Katherine, and modernized them to make LizzyKate.
Elizabeth and Katherine are also family names, and we like how the modern combination of these traditional names makes a fun company name for our modern take on the traditional world of tea.
Q: How did you discover KESSHŌ, and what is your favorite KESSHŌ chocolate?
A: We first discovered KESSHŌ at a local Asian grocery store where Amy purchased the Salted Plum chocolate bar. After living in Japan for four years, she’s a fan of umeboshi. Two weeks later she attended the Northwest Chocolate Festival and met Mark and Liang at the KESSHŌ booth. Every chocolate sample she tried there was deliciously unique, and she knew the brand would appeal to LizzyKate customers. Salted Plum is still a favorite as well as the Yuzu and Black Sesame.
*********************************************************************************
Amy has been organizing a number of tea and chocolate pairing event at her beautiful store. If you are in the Seattle area, you should definitely sign up for some classes! And you can also shop her beautiful tea products online at lizzykate.com