Smith Teamaker

Steven Smith co-founded Stash Tea and later built Tazo before selling it to Starbucks — by the time he opened Smith Teamaker in a former Portland blacksmith's shop in 2009, he was already one of the people who had shaped how Americans first encountered specialty tea. He deliberately rejected the title "tea master" in favor of the plainer "teamaker," a small but pointed distinction for a company built on treating blending as an exacting, hands-on craft rather than a mystique.

The house organizes its work around origin, mastery, and imagination, sourcing premium leaf and disclosing its blending process rather than treating recipes as trade secrets. That transparency, paired with small-batch production out of the original Portland space, gives Smith Teamaker a reputation the company itself describes as closer to haute couture than mass-market tea.

Coming from a founder who had already built and sold two major American tea brands before starting a third from scratch, Smith Teamaker reads as the concentrated, craft-scale version of a career spent defining the category.