By Wallace Baine

For many years, tea culture in Santa Cruz was mostly defined by the distinctive aroma that drifted across Westside neighborhoods when the now-closed Lipton Tea plant was cranking up.

Today, there is another tea culture taking root in Santa Cruz, and it is about as different from the fine products of the Lipton company as it can be, and still be called "tea."

In fact, the words "Tea Culture" are emblazoned on the outside of the Cedar Street tea house known as Chaikhana. Those words give you a sense that what's going on inside is more than just about selling tea. Chaikhana is about, said David Wright, who owns the shop with his wife Marilee, building a community of people around the ritual of drinking tea.

"The tea subculture, it's as random as everything else," Wright said. "There's a core group of people who have gotten something very deep from the tea experience. They are finding out something about themselves through the tea."

There are a handful of tea houses in Santa Cruz County. Many of them, like the popular Asana Tea House in downtown Santa Cruz, are designed on the familiar coffeehouse model, complete with lattes and free Wi-Fi.

Chaikhana is a different environment altogether. It's a small, narrow, delightfully cluttered shop, across the street from The Bagelry, that feels like a place you might encounter in Shanghai, albeit with a California twist. The shop not only offers imported teas and the accompanying accoutrements, it holds classes, tastings and other special events designed to introduce the curious to the Chaikhana way of tea.

On foggy mornings, Wright can walk into Chaikhana and still be surprised by the enveloping aroma of tea.

"They're actually alive," he said, pointing to the bricks of pu-erh tea sitting on the shelves at Chaikhana. "There are micro-organisms present in pu-erh tea that are active and become even more active in moisture."

To Americans, tea is to the beverage market what soccer is to sports, something that the rest of the world reveres that has nevertheless yet to break through against more popular rivals in the States.

But the burgeoning popularity of green tea over the past decade or so has provided a template for tea to make inroads into a coffee-, juice- and soda-centric culture.

Wright sells many different kinds of tea at Chaikhana, but he is most excited about pu-erh POO-ur, or POO-air tea, a very old, robust, fermented leaf from China with a distinctly earthy taste that can change dynamics over time.

"People who normally appreciate wine have the easiest transferal into the world of pu-erh," Wright said, "because it's a vintage product and the changes that it goes through as it ages is translatable to wine people."

Pu-erh tea can be pricey. Chaikhana has a pu-erh tea that sells for $1,500 a brick, but a more common price is about $60 a brick. The shop also sells smaller servings that are more affordable. Unlike tea-bag, however, pu-erh tea leaves can be steeped many times over, up to 50 steepings of a single pot, Wright said.

At Chaikhana, tea drinking is often done in the context of a ritual known as Gong Fu, an ancient practice and preparation method designed to focus the attention of tea drinkers on the here and now. Combined, the tea and the ritual of drinking it can create a community of people who relax and enjoy the tea together.

One such person was Ronn Reinberg, a well-known Santa Cruz theater technician who died in January. Reinberg did not discover pu-erh and Gong Fu until after he had turned 60, said his domestic partner Rivera Sun Cook, who now works at Chaikhana. But once Reinberg did, she said, he became a true believer.

The day he met Wright and was introduced into the world of tea, Reinberg told Cook, "Our whole life is about to change. It's all about the tea."

For the rest of his life, Reinberg spent his days drinking tea as part of fellowship with friends and acquaintances.

"For him, the hook was the community-building aspect, the excuse to sit around for hours and talk to people," Cook said.

Wright, who has made several trips to the Yunnan province of China where his pu-erh comes from, is convinced pu-erh is poised for its moment in the pop-culture sun, similar to what took place with green tea and is now happening with kombucha.

"It's such a cool product," he said. "It's so quirky. It comes in a brick. This pu-erh thing is inevitably going to take off. There's a rumble like it's happening."

Wright said that some people wander into his shop and leave quickly because it's "too foreign and alien an environment." But many come as well who are drawn in by the enchantment of the product itself.

"These tea bricks," he said, holding up a mahogany-brown chunk of dried leaves. "It tastes like the earth. It smells like the earth. This is the earth."