Our Story
Tea came to this coast from just across the border to the east. The first seeds arrived in 1912, but tea only took hold in the late 1930s, when the state brought in tons of seed to give a wet, steep region with little farmland a living.
Of is a district of Trabzon province, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. The slopes climb straight off the sea before the Kackar range shuts the sky. Rain most of the year, fog most mornings, snow in the winter — close to ideal for Camellia sinensis.
The place
Where the weather
does the work.
Of, in Trabzon province, sits on the eastern Black Sea coast, at 41 degrees north — near the edge of where tea will grow at all. The Kackar mountains rise straight up behind the town and catch everything the sea throws at them.
Snow in winter, cool summers, fog most mornings — a climate that suits the tea plant and very little else. The cold does a gardener’s quiet work here.
- Latitude
- 41° North
- Coast
- Eastern Black Sea
- Behind the town
- The Kackar mountains
- Weather
- Snow in winter, cool summers, fog most mornings
From the gardens
The standard
Two and a half
leaves.
Everything below the second leaf is stalk. It brews thin and it brews bitter, and a harvesting machine cannot tell the difference.
Turkish tea grades this by hand: growers work to a two and a half leaves standard, with scissors, on slopes too steep for a machine. A day’s work fills less than you’d think.
That’s a real part of why hand-picked tea costs what it costs.
A note on the name
The Turkish word for tea is the same word as chai. Both come from the Persian chāy, from the Chinese chá. Every language that received tea over land calls it some version of cha. Every language that received it by sea — English, French, Dutch — calls it tea. Turkey got it over land, from the Caucasus, and named it accordingly.
Who grows it
The people who pick it
own the factory.
The Of Ozcay Agricultural Development Cooperative was founded in 1989 — the first multi-member cooperative to form after Turkey ended its state tea monopoly in 1985 — and pressed its first leaf the following spring. Today it is owned by roughly 2,100 growing families in the hills above Of. Not a plantation and not a trading house — the members own the presses, the withering floors and the ovens, and they split what comes back.
1989
Founded
1st
Multi-member cooperative formed after Turkey’s 1985 tea monopoly ended
~2,100
Member families
100 t
Fresh leaf processed a day, at harvest peak
- Name
- Of Ozcay Agricultural Development Cooperative
- Factory
- Of, Trabzon — operating since 1988
- Led by
- Erdal Saral, General Manager
Current certificates
Validity as printed on each document.
