Our story
It started with a cup that needed nothing.
Nepal grows some of the finest tea in the world. Almost nobody knows it, because most of it leaves the country without a name on it. Third Peak buys one garden's leaf, keeps its name attached, and brings it here whole.
The tea is from one garden: the Kanchanjangha Tea Estate, in the hills of eastern Nepal below the world's third-highest mountain. It is owned by the families who work it.
We buy from them directly, and the leaf is sealed at the garden days after it is plucked. That began as a flavour decision before it was an ethical one — tea that hasn't waited a year in a warehouse tastes like the season it came from. It became an ethical one when we saw what the alternative pays.
One garden in the foothills of Kanchanjangha.
The garden sits near the Indian border, north of Ilam, on slopes that catch mist most mornings and cold most nights. It is a cooperative: the people who pluck the leaf own the ground it grows on.
Nepal's best tea leaves without its name.
Most tea moves in bulk. It goes to auction, through brokers, into blending tanks, and comes out as a recipe drawn from a dozen gardens, built to taste the same every year. Whatever was particular about it is the first thing removed.
Nepal grows tea the world has barely met. It sits at the right altitude for it, and much of what it produces is still made by hand in small lots. But the bulk route values leaf by grade and weight rather than by the garden it came from, so most of it arrives somewhere without a name attached — and the people who grew it never get to be part of the story.
One garden, named on the tin.
We buy the leaf from Kanchanjangha, seal it there, and print the flush and the year on every tin. If this season tastes different from the last, that is because it is. Scan the code and you get the record: who made it, which part of the garden, what day.
None of that is complicated. It is only unusual — and it is the whole reason this company exists, to get Nepal's tea to the rest of the world with its name still on it.
Three things we don't compromise on.
Every tin is one estate, one flush, one year. If the label says Summit Gold, second flush 2026, that is exactly what is inside.
We buy from the estate itself. No auction, no broker, no blending house — the margin those would take stays with the families who grew the leaf.
Slow growth in cold, thin air concentrates sugar and aroma. It is why the black tea has no bitterness to hide and the green never bites.
From pluck to port.
Two leaves and a bud, picked at dawn before the mountain sun burns off the mist.
Withered, rolled, oxidised and fired on the estate — orthodox methods, small batches.
Packed into foil-lined tins at the garden, locking in the flush before it travels.
Estate to our San Francisco studio, with no auction house or blending tank on the way.
A farmer-owned garden, not a plantation.
Buying direct is what keeps that arrangement standing. The families fund the village school from it and vote on what the land grows next. It is also, quietly, a reason for someone to stay in the hills rather than go looking for work in a city.
I am not the man who almost gave up. I am the man tea brought back.
Sujan Limbu