[Amethyst Court] Silver Moon Tea Shop

[Calairiel Mynendil Gil'dae]

OOC: This is a fully moderated location. If you have any questions, please pm me! For any business with the Silver Moon Tea Farm, please inquire at the shop and I’ll direct you to a separate thread.

Silver Moon Tea Shop

The teashop was small, but cozy. Nestled gently between the forest and the Stockade, it was a quiet, contemplative sort of a place. The shop itself seemed to defy nature -- due to its cozy atmosphere, most people seemed to think it was bigger inside than out. It wasn't, of course, but such was the nature of the place that nobody wanted to think about it too hard.

Silver Moon Tea was famous within Syl'rosya for the high quality teas served there, as well as the scrumptious delicacies to accompany it. The real draws for its loyal customers, however, were the atmosphere and the almost romantic story of the owners. Syl'rosyan tea, even of such quality as they made at Silver Moon, was easy to come by in Syl'rosya. However, Silver Moon was a teashop of a different sort. Partly a teashop, partly a library, and partly a space for social gathering, it might have seemed conflicted if all of its aspects meshed less perfectly. Due to the perfect atmosphere of the building's main room, though, all these parts came together in a glorious alchemy, creating a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

Silver Moon was not a big teashop. Far from it, in fact, it was almost impossibly small. Had any of the loyal customers been told in dry figures how big the physical space it occupied was, they would simply not have believed it. The building consisted essentially of one large main room, a smaller kitchen, and a small warehouse. The main room was cluttered with even the eight tiny tables that had been crammed into the room long ago and the mismatched chairs, chosen for their comfort rather than their appearance, which sat around the tables and alone against the walls. Bookshelves were lined up along the entire eastern wall, filled with books of all shapes and sizes, on nearly any subject, and in absolutely no coherent order. Anyone who wanted could take whatever book they wished from the bookshelf, provided they do one of two things. They could borrow the book for an afternoon, sit in one of the comfortable armchairs and read it all the way through, or they could take the book and keep it as their own. But no book ever left the store without being replaced by a different book. It was an unwritten and unofficial rule, yet it was one that was rigorously followed, and in this way the library at Silver Moon was constantly changing and never the same from one visit to the next.

Even before the massive bookshelves, however, upon entering Silver Moon the first thing a visitor noticed was the smells. Even the poetic minds and words of the elves failed to adequately describe the smell of Silver Moon . They not only brewed and sold elven tea, hot or cold, in several different varieties, but most of their less-secret blends were available for sale by weight in the form of pre-ground, pre-mixed leaves and spices. The scents of the many tantalizing tea blends mingled peacefully with other smells from the kitchen -- pastries and other delights created by the shop founder's wife.

Yet the atmosphere was only half of the attraction of Silver Moon. Its story was at least as compelling. Mar’culis was the third-generation owner of the shop. His grandfather had started it more than six centuries ago, when he had decided that none of the teas produced by and for other shops were good enough. He'd started his own tea farm then, balancing his teas with just the right amounts of each blended ingredient until they were perfect. He'd passed his recipes on to his daughter Talysia, who in turn had passed them on to Elytheren, who had managed the store for the last fifty patterns.

Unfortunately, Elytheren and his family had recently fallen on hard times. Unable to continue to make ends meet, they had come to an extremely difficult decision. The decision had been made, however -- it was time to sell Silver Moon. The sign in the front window proclaiming the business for sale darkened the heart of many of the shop's most loyal customers. Not for long, however. The one aspect of the sale that was absolutely non-negotiable, regardless of price, was that Elytheren and his family would continue to run the store, much as they always had. Thus reassured, Silver Moon 's customers did not stop coming, but only increased their business, just to get all of the original atmosphere they could before the business was sold, just in case. Silver Moon, it seemed, would be a solid investment indeed for the owner lucky enough to win the deed from its jealous guardians.

Silver Moon Tea Farm

The small farm, sitting to the southwest of the city just barely outside the reach of the wood, was clean and well kept. The plantation itself was fairly good size, 25 acres, allowing for different varieties of teas to be grown in different parts…but all from the hardy elven stock. Syl’rosyan tea was unique as it didn’t require the elevation that most other teas demanded, preferring the wet, diverse climate of the Syl’rosyan wood to the air-starved regions that produced most of the Empire’s other teas. The farm was situated slightly away from the wood, to take advantage of the natural light, while the uneven ground that the farm was situated on – more rolling then anything – was utilized to assist in drainage. All in all, the land was perfectly suited to the use.

A fairly large farmhouse held the essentials for completing the tea-making process. Off to the side of the entrance was the drying room, while further back in the building, large tables are used to roll and cut the leaves to the desired size for loose-leaf production. Fermentation takes place in another room and finally, to the side of the building is the stone ovens where the tea undergoes the final firing. Cooling tables were adjacent to the ovens and canvas bags for final packaging.