Our Story

Chapter 01

The Endless GRIND.

I was born in Taiwan and raised in Mainland China. At eighteen, I left for college in the United States, and I arrived believing what most of us were taught: that success is a fierce competition, and you win it by outlasting everyone around you.

At Boston College and later at Columbia University, I chased the same thing every finance student chased. The right internships. The 3 a.m. study sessions. One technical interview after another, all of it pointed at a seat in bulge-bracket banking. The pressure never let up. There was always someone ahead of me, and the only plan I had was to stay awake longer than they did.

So I drank coffee like there was no tomorrow. Spending $30 on four cups a day became my new normal.

It worked the way borrowing always works. I would get a quick spark - sharp, useful, gone fast. An hour later, I would be sitting in a low fog, reading the same paragraph three times, already counting the minutes until the next cup made me feel normal again.

By the time I was twenty-three, I understood what was actually happening. My focus did not belong to me. I was renting it from the coffee shop, and the rent came due every ninety minutes. I would pay it with another cup, get another hour, and crash again on schedule.

I was good at the work. I was also tired in a way sleep did not fix, because the problem was not sleep. The problem was the shape of the energy itself — all spike, no floor. I kept thinking there had to be a way to feel awake without feeling hollow underneath it.

That is the part nobody at the office talked about. We talked about deals and exits, and who got which desk. We did not talk about the fact that half the room was running on the same brittle chemistry I was, and paying for it the same way. I did not have a fix yet. I just had a growing certainty that the cup in my hand was the problem I had been treating as the cure.

The cup in my hand was the problem I had been treating as the cure.

“Four cups a day became my price of admission.”

Chapter 02

What I found in Taiwan.

The search for a way out took me back home.

I thought about my grandfather. He did not drink tea the way I drank coffee — fast, functional, barely tasted. He practiced it. There was a precision to it that felt, at the time, almost like a quiet argument against the way the rest of the world moved.

He measured the leaves to the gram. He did not just boil water and pour; he matched the temperature to the leaf in front of him, and he handed me the right cup at the moment I needed it — not before, not after.

I had sat at that table a hundred times growing up and never really watched what he was doing. Now I watched. Morning was one tea. Midday was another. Late afternoon was a third. He never explained it as a system, because to him it was not a theory. It was just how you got through a day without burning out by noon.

And here is what I noticed, sitting there as an adult who knew the 3 p.m. crash intimately: at his table, the crash never came. I did not get the spark-and-fall I got from coffee. I did not find myself hunting for the next cup. I felt steady. I felt present. Hours would pass and I would still be there, clear-headed, in no hurry.

At the time I assumed it was the calm of the room, or being away from work. It took me a long while to realize the room was not doing it. The tea was.

That was the thing I had been missing in every office in two countries. Not more energy — a different kind. One that arrived gently, stayed longer, and left without a bill. I went looking for how he did it. That search is the reason this brand exists.

The room was not doing it. The tea was.

“My focus did not belong to me. I was renting it from the coffee.”

Chapter 03

The Three Tea.

My grandfather’s day had three cups, and the order was never random.

Morning was a young raw Pu-erh — Sheng. Bright, a little wild, enough to clear the fog without slamming the door open. It is the cup that wakes you up without startling you.

Midday was Da Hong Pao, a rock oolong from the Wuyi cliffs, roasted slowly over charcoal by people who treat roasting as a craft, not a step. It is deeper, rounder, steadier — the cup for the long stretch of real work in the middle of the day, when you need to settle in rather than fire up.

Late afternoon was an aged white tea — Shou Mei, mellowed by years until the edges are gone. It carries you through the back half of the day and hands you to the evening without keeping you up. It lets you come down on your own terms instead of falling.

Three teas. One day. Sheng (Raw), Yan (Rock), Lao (Aged) — 生, 岩, 老. Each one earns its place by where it sits in the day, not only by how it tastes.

I tried, for a while, to do this with the tea you find in a box at the store. It did not work, and the reason matters. The teas that make this protocol work are whole-leaf, properly grown, properly aged, or roasted — the kind that release slowly and keep giving over several steepings. Most bagged tea gives you everything at once and then nothing. That is just coffee again, in a different cup.

So the protocol is not only about which three teas. It is three teas of a quality that behaves a certain way in the cup: steady, layered, and willing to be brewed more than once. That is what I set out to source. Not a flavor. A behavior.

Sheng (Raw), Yan (Rock), Lao (Aged) - each earns its place by where it sits in the day.

Chapter 04

What the dose curve actually does.

Here is the part that took me years — and one good evening at my grandfather’s table — to understand.

Coffee is not the enemy. The problem is the shape of the dose. You take a large amount of caffeine in one fast hit. It spikes high, higher than you need, and because what goes up that fast comes down that fast, it drops you into the slump you then fix with the next cup. Three cups, three spikes, three crashes. You spend the whole day chasing a line that will not hold still.

Good tea, brewed properly, does the opposite. You take the same leaves through several short steepings, and the caffeine arrives in smaller, rolling releases instead of one flood. The line stays lower, flatter, steadier. You are not launched, so you are not dropped. Same active ingredient, a completely different ride.

That is the whole idea. I did not quit caffeine — I changed how it arrives. The morning cup gives me roughly what the morning espresso gave me, just released slowly instead of all at once. There is no cliff to fall off, because there is no spike to fall from.

Now the honest part, the part I will not oversell. I am not going to tell you this tea cures anxiety, fixes your sleep, or rewires your brain. The long-run research on that is thin, and I would rather lose the sale than pretend otherwise. What I will stand behind is what you can feel in a single day: steadier energy, no slump-and-rescue cycle, and a finish to the afternoon that does not cost you the night.

That is not a miracle. It is a better-shaped day. And once you have felt the difference, the old shape is hard to go back to.

The caffeine arrives in smaller, rolling releases instead of one flood.

Chapter 05

Why I built this brand.

In tea, there is a word for the thing I had been chasing without knowing its name: Hui Gan. 回甘. The sweetness that returns — the taste that rises in the back of your throat a few seconds after you swallow a good cup, when you thought the flavor was already gone. It comes back on its own. You do not chase it. You only have to start with something real.

That is the whole philosophy, in two characters: the good thing comes back to you, quietly, after the moment you expected it to end.

I built Hui Gan to bring my grandfather’s table across the ocean. Chinese tea has stayed under the radar in the West for a long time — sold as a wellness accessory or as a cheap commodity, with the actual craft and the actual reason it works left out of the story. I wanted to put the reason back in.

So I made some decisions early and wrote them down where you could read them. The teas are sourced as whole leaf, by harvest, and tested. The price is what it is, and it is less than the coffee habit it replaces. You can cancel in one click, today, without talking to anyone. I would rather earn the next order than trap you in it.

And I will keep saying the honest version of the promise. This is about reclaiming your day by changing how you fuel it — trading the frantic, rented energy for the steady kind that actually belongs to you. A clear head. A calmer afternoon. A morning that does not start with a negotiation with yourself.

That is it. No edge. Three teas, one day, and a finish that comes back to you on its own.

Welcome to the tea table. Welcome to Hui Gan.

"Three Teas, One Day, No Edge."

Hui Gan

Hui gan (回甘) means “the returning sweetness.” It names a specific sensation in Chinese tea tasting: the cup finishes, then thirty seconds to a minute later, sweetness arrives at the back of the throat — not in the cup, in your body’s response to the cup. It happens with high-quality teas where the polyphenol structure is intact. The brand is named for this sensation.

The Company

Hui Gan is the tea brand of Solluvia Co., Ltd. (日雨記有限公司), a Taiwan-registered company. We don't grow the leaf. We buy it — Sheng Pu-erh from Yunnan, Da Hong Pao from Wuyi in Fujian, aged Shou Mei from Fuding. What we own is the strict QC standard that all our partnering tea farms have to clear before releasing the tea to the public.

Mission

We give people who run on caffeine a way to hold their attention across the whole working day instead of spiking and crashing it — built from premium Chinese loose-leaf tea, dosed by design across the day, and verified leaf by leaf.