Like countless other residents of the deep American South, Jason MacDonald and Timothy Gipson, living in Brookhaven, Mississippi, were devastated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. With the tree farm they had established on Jason’s ancestral land, formerly a cattle ranch, flattened by the force of cataclysmic winds, they found themselves in the unenviable position of having to start over. But what could they grow that could withstand such adverse weather? At the time they had no idea that tea would be the answer to this all-important question.
In fact, the most disastrous event in recent memory, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for it put Gipson and Macdonald on a path that brought them to the Camellia sinensis plant – a journey they otherwise might never have taken place.
It came to them during a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, where, having been blown back by the tempest both physically and psychologically, Gipson and MacDonald – a longtime couple and by then married – had decided to take a trip together without a firm itinerary. When they reached Charleston, they were amazed to find a tea plantation. They had previously been unaware that tea could be grown in the Southern United States let alone be thriving on a successful plantation in the manner that they were witnessing.
Still shell-shocked from Katrina, lightning struck in the form of a question: "If they can do this, here, why can’t we do the same thing on our land," they thought?
Researching the tea plant and its characteristics, they learned that Camellia sinensis is a very hardy bush, and can withstand extremes of conditions from snowy winters to summers with heat as high as 100°F. They learned that around 60-80 inches of rainfall was needed and good drainage. They also found out that tea bushes have a remarkable capability to withstand storms as potent as hurricanes – this was a major selling point for MacDonald and Gipson. Having seen their timber farm pummeled by Hurricane Katrina and anticipating that with the global climate crisis likely intensifying, these storms would only increase in frequency, finding a cash crop that could survive under such severe weather was a key element of their decision.
They went to Mississippi State University (MSU), known for agricultural research, but rather than going to the Plant and Soil Sciences Department, they ended up at the Extension School, which made a certain kind of sense given that the school carried out a tea appreciation course at the time. It wasn’t a course run by a botanist or agricultural expert – just a tea enthusiast and academic in another field. There, Gipson and Macdonald proclaimed that they wanted to grow tea The reaction at the extension school at MSU might not have initially inspired confidence in the pair of would-be tea farmers. Still, Gipson and MacDonald had been overcome by an epiphany in Charleston, and they were determined to see their vision through, even though they had no experience in tea cultivation or even tea culture.
“Only until we got into tea did Jason's mother drink tea,” says Gipson. “She did not like tea before then, but I mean she was used to like Lipton and Louisiana, and you know, stuff like that… My mom drank hot tea. I drank hot tea with her here and there, but for the most part – I mean we're Southerners! We know iced tea, our sweet tea.”
Gipson’s words conjure up quite a steep learning curve. Remarkably, they were up to the challenge.
“We did everything we could to educate ourselves on it. So, we could figure out what we needed to know,” says Gipson.
MSU ultimately did come through for them. Through their county agent, they got the university to partner with them. They were connected with a researcher named Dr. Guihong Bi of the Plant Sciences Department, who had been advocating for long for MSU to conduct research into tea. “She noticed the similarities between the tea-growing regions of China and here,” Gipson says, who explains Dr. Bi was excited because it meant she would be able to do research on a local tea grower.
The pair of newbie tea cultivators proceeded lock in step with MSU, not only learning in the process but also benefiting MSU’s academic endeavors through the collaboration as well. “So, we started working with them, helped get them grants and everything,” Gipson explains. “They now have a permanent tea garden at the main campus, and they also have one at the experiment station in Crystal Springs about 30 minutes north of us…and she [Dr. Bi] is constantly doing research; they're doing fertilizer trials right now.”
Gipson and MacDonald also started working with neighboring Louisiana State University (LSU), which had a tea researcher on faculty named Dr. Yan Chen, who was known to United States League of Tea Growers, and had been conducting research on tea cultivation in Louisiana.
They planted six plants in 2012 as an experiment, and despite Dr. Bi’s enthusiasm, because the prevailing view was that tea was not really a viable crop on the US mainland, Gipson and MacDonald decided that if only one survived, they would go forward. Three out of the six survived. Even though that wasn’t a high percentage of success, it was more than they had hoped for, so they started adding tea plants.
That was when they decided to hire tea a consultant named Nigel Melican of Tea Craft, a tea consultancy founded in 1990. Melican had been a research scientist at Unilever when they owned Lipton – exactly the kind of expert whose knowledge and experience Gipson and MacDonald needed to leverage. But being based in Ireland, finding him was not a matter of shaking the trees locally. With no tea cultivation consultants close by, they looked online. Ultimately, found him a Facebook group quite aptly called, “Let’s Grow Tea.”
Before Melican agreed to take a look at the not yet budding (both figuratively and literally) tea farm, he required the owners to test the soil to see if the terroir was suitable for growing tea.
“We needed to do some soil samples, so that he [Melican] had that information when he got here. So, [we] took soil, samples, and everything for him, got those sent off so that we had them when they [Melican and his colleague, Beverly Wainright, founder of The Scottish Tea Factory] were here,” says Gipson.
They were gratified with the results. “Our soil actually sits perfectly. It sits at a 5 [on the pH scale] Our water also, our groundwater, sits at a 5.”
Tea needs acidic soil but not too acidic. Anything under 7 on the pH scale is acidic, but when one gets down to 3, the soil becomes too acidic for growth. For WTN, this writer had previously reported on a European tea plantation with soil pH of 4, but they knew they were on the brink. So, at five, says Gipson: “We just happen to be perfect.”
Tea thrives in arboreal environments because the tree growth helps to make the soil acidic enough for undergrowth that supports Camelia plants and other foliage. Hence, the fact that MacDonald’s ancestral cattle ranch was converted into a timber farm by Gipson and MacDonald, though damaged during Hurricane Katrina, had already helped prepare the soil for the cultivation of tea. Hurricane Katrina might have devastated what had grown above ground – but what lay beneath the surface could not be touched by the calamitous storm.
Gipson and MacDonald tended to the plants. They had planted around 30,000 plants across three acres of land and had to wait around five years for the plants to become mature enough to produce a commercial harvest.
In 2016, some tea was ready to be produced. “But most of that went to the Adopt a Tea Plant people,” says Gipson.
In 2017, The Great Mississippi Tea Company began selling to the public. They produced around eighty pounds of tea that year, and it sold out quickly. “We could have made more…we were hand harvesting and everything that first year…. We just couldn't keep up with the plants. They were, by the end of our season, they were above our heads!” Gipson recalls. “They'd gotten so tall just because we couldn't keep up with how fast they were growing."
From this, the duo learned they needed to add shade, so every other planting after that has shade plants in it.
Shade plants are becoming particularly important as the climate alters bringing a more intense sun. The excess heat has been known to inhibit the production of flavor inducing aromatic compounds in the leaves, and they end up almost ‘burning’ before they are even plucked. The complex flavor containing a variety of notes for which premium teas are known cannot be produced without such essential juices forming inside the leaves.
Climate change is a topic discussed on many plantations and by many tea experts because increasingly, it is having an adverse effect not only on tea growth but also on the quality of the tea being produced. Mississippi already is among America’s hottest states ranking fifth, right after Louisiana. Gipson and MacDonald have had to deal with climate change in the form of drought.
“So, two years ago we were. We had a drought. It was a yearlong drought,” says Gipson.
It remains a bad memory. Overall, that year was the hottest year on record in the United States until that point. Mississippi was far from spared.
“I mean, it was horrible,” Gipson exclaims. “We had to double the amount of water we were putting out in irrigation and everything as well, and even with that, the plants were just surviving.”
Typically, irrigation at tea plantations is used more for life-support than for growth. For tea plants to flourish, they really need rain.
“We had no humidity. I mean, it was rough…We had one whole month where they didn't. We didn't harvest at all, because they just didn't grow. We stayed above a hundred degrees with heat, index…. So, we knew they were gonna [sic.] shut off,” Gipson recalls. “And, then once it cooled off, they came back on. We started harvesting a little bit more, but even with that, we should have done about three times as much that year.”
The shortage of tea in 2023 helped sales the following year. Since many regular customers couldn’t procure their favorite teas, they made sure to buy early the following year.
“Everything flew off the shelves…We were completely out of tea by Christmas,” Gipson says with a smile.
It’s not uncommon for small tea plantations such as GMT Co. and others to get pre-orders so customers don’t miss out.
The growing season at GMT Co. starts in mid-April and runs until October 31st. Then the plants are pruned and readied for dormancy during winter.
Unlike other areas, Gipson and MacDonald’s tea is not picked in flushes. The sun brings quick growth for continuous plucking and their activity is influenced by the plucking method as well.
“Because of the type of harvester that we have, we can re-harvest every seven days,” says Gipson. “So, we just are on a continuous loop.”
Still, that doesn’t mean their spring harvest isn’t named First Flush. “We are doing first, named first flushes so that we have, you know, our black, our green or yellow, and our oolong, all first flush, and then after that they just all go to just the back to their normal names,” says Gipson.
Typically, the first flush teas are lighter in character and more aromatic.
GMT Co. sells four types of tea: black, green, oolong, and yellow. The black tea is by far their most popular, and the kind that Gipson mainly drinks. It is called Black Magnolia, and which has notes of sweet potato, molasses, malt and stone fruit.
“There’s a sweet potato-ness to our black tea… we all in this area have a lot of iron, and we found out that the iron is what attributes to that sweetness,” Gipson says.
Their early teas called Mississippi Queen (green) and Delta Oolong have won international recognition, with the green winning a silver medal at the Global Tea Championships in 2017 and the oolong doing the same in 2018. Since then, they are producing newer varieties of these.
The company also produces some specialty teas such as their chocolate and hazelnut flavoured “Mississippi Mud” tea and Peach tea, both of which use Black Magnolia as a base carrying that sweet potato note but the peach tea also has pecan flavor with a hint of peach.
In 2024, their most interesting tea was probably the limited edition Black Orchid tea containing flavor notes of orchid, lilac and rose along with the characteristic Black Magnolia sweetness. The tea was designed with input from the esteemed Dr. Virginia Utermohlen Lovelace who is affiliated with the Global Tea Institute and has authored books on tea flavors. She gave Gipson and Macdonald insight into a new process using tumbling to damage the leaf releasing more polyphenols than GMT Co.’s standard black tea and applying the withering process of an oolong to release more floral notes, yet oxidized, in the end, like a black tea.
As she did with Louisiana’s Fleur de Lis Tea Company’s green tea, consultant Beverly Wainright designed a new green tea for The Great Mississippi Tea company called “Roasty Toasy Green”, which has a roasted flavor and carries a sharpness than most other greens. Gipson describes it as “like an umami with vegetal notes, and a touch of sweetness, while maintaining a minimal level of bitterness.”
Their oolong tea called Mississippi Belle (bearing similarities to the award-winning Delta Oolong) uses older leaves to give it a rich mouth feel and carries flavor notes of brown sugar, jasmine, and sugar snap peas.
They make a yellow tea, in which one can taste honey and citrus and which carries a slight earthiness.
They also offered a holiday tea in 2024 and an Indian inspired “Chai Clairee’s” tea with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, allspice, cloves, and black peppercorns. What distinguishes their chai tea from others is that they have used 100% Mississippi leaves in the blend.
With the interest shown in their plantation from its inception, Gipson and MacDonald wasted no time in organizing tea tours, which began in 2017.
“Originally it was just the basic tour that we do [did sic.] which was: come, let's go through how we actually do this; go through the nursery. the watering; how we harvest; and then through the process of how each tea gets processed,” Gipson explains.
“And then that tour slowly got a little bit longer, as we added in Oolong, and then added in yellow, because then I had those two to talk about as well.”
The company has expanded its tour offerings substantially with several packages – General Admission tour for an hour, which is bare bones, then an overview tour and tasting for two hours – a silver package, which lasts four hours and is much like what Gipson described – a gold package, which runs from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm, and includes lunch – and a Platinum tour over two days, which involves staying at the estate for a night with various meals included. All tours except the General Admission tour include tea tastings. Prices range from $10 for the General Admission tour to $295 for the Platinum package.
When Gipson and MacDonald cleared the land for tea cultivation, they had initially allotted thirty acres of their property, which in total is around 15,000 acres, most of which is still used for timber. They’ve managed to cultivate seven acres and produced around 300 pounds of tea in 2024.
The tea is sold privately through their website, wholesale to eighteen retailers in the USA and to two retailers in Canada. The esteemed luxury store, Fortnum and Mason, London, UK, also carries their teas at their rare tea counter.
They hope to expand operations to a limit of around twenty acres and are in the process of adding a gift shop to their small tea shop and expand sales to other parts of the world.
When Timmy and Jason first showed up at MSU, they had no expectation of even growing a single tea plant let alone tens of thousands. Having once drawn inspiration from Charleston Tea Plantation, which was originally a Lipton plantation that two of the employees bought and developed whereas they were really the first in the deep South to start a plantation from scratch, they are now the elder statesman of the region.
With Longleaf Tea Company located just an hour away and Pearl River Tea Company also located in the state as well as Fleur de Lis Tea Plantation in Louisiana, the region is fast becoming for tea what Napa Valley is for wine. Gipson and MacDonald hope that this transformation will ultimately be their legacy. If they manage to do this, perhaps, nobody will ever believe that at one time their property was home to cowboys rustling cattle – something out of a scene from the TV show, Yellowstone. Like Huckleberry Finn’s fictional journey down the Mississippi river, through Gipson and MacDonald, the ancestors of the co-owners of The Great Mississippi Tea Company will have made an awe-inspiring journey, themselves.
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