Woodshed Tea

For Woodshed, it’s all about choosing quality teas that are accessible for all people.

Sam DuRegger, owner and founder of Woodshed Tea, may have started with a love for coffee, but it was his passion, knowledge, and community that brought him to tea. At Woodshed Tea, they pride themselves in curating and finding the best responsibly sourced, loose leaf teas.

Sam started out in coffee, working for a coffee manufacturing company in Salt Lake City that won prestigious awards for one of their brewing machines. It was originally developed for coffee but became quite popular in Asian markets for brewing tea.

“And with that we had nobody on the team that really knew tea and so they asked me as the director of business development and marketing to figure this out,” explains Sam. “So, for a good six months, I just immersed myself in tea.”

Sam met with tea producers and importers and experimented with varieties of teas.

“It blew people's minds what it could do for oolong and sencha with reduced brew times, which is huge in the tea business.”

Soon after, Sam and his partner, who was pregnant with twins, decided to move back home to Iowa for a while, ultimately winding up in Oklahoma City.

They came here to Oklahoma only to find many of the teas they had enjoyed were not readily available. So Sam started reaching out to various importers and producers he had worked with to bring those teas here to Oklahoma City.

Retailers, coffee shops, and people in general seemed to appreciate the teas that Woodshed was curating, and so Woodshed decided to open a standing location to showcase their favorite and most popular tea as well as high quality coffee. They started searching for an area of Oklahoma City that was underserved as far as local coffee and tea was concerned, which brought them to a little shop next door to Blue Seven in Nichols Hills.

“We always wanted to put our foot into retail and have a space, but we knew the tea couldn’t carry it alone, so we wanted to do coffee as well from the beginning. From our experience at La Barba Coffee in Salt Lake City, I knew we could do coffee really well.”

Woodshed teas have no preservatives or artificial flavorings, so the flavors that you taste are from the leaves of the tea and natural flavoring. For instance, in Ruby hibiscus, they use some natural grapefruit essential oils to make the flavor pop.

“We are going to stick with about a dozen to sixteen quality tea offerings on our menu. That way we know we love them, and we know the story behind these teas. They are made sustainably and organic; we want to tell the story behind our tea and to find quality teas is really high for us.”

Sam and his partners truly think through every decision and detail in everything they do, from what sustainable plastic cups they use to adding a slight angle in the ceiling to create a woodshed feel. Every decision is made with purpose.

The shop has a tranquil sky-blue color that matches their packaging and provides a calming transition from the fun and eclectic retail space next door. The walls are left clean and uncluttered on purpose, and the sustainable cork tables were designed by Sam especially for the shop.

“The name Woodshed came about from when I was growing up living on a farm and we had this woodshed where we would have to go out and chop wood all summer so that in the winter we would have the heat for our wood-burning stove. It was kind of like, the hard work in the summer, gave us heat and warmth we needed in the winter,” explains Sam. “With our teas we want to showcase the toiling and hard work it takes to bring this great quality product into our shop from the producers and plantation owners, to our baristas. They all really work hard to bring out the best quality in the cup, that really warms the people that come into our shop.”

Hot cups of smoky green teas, lavender rose white tea, and black tea from a European plantation that produces some of the most flavorful black teas in the world all help make up a highly curated menu that offers a vast variety of flavor profiles.

The Matcha is served as an iced latte tea and paired with oat milk. One of their newest offerings is Cheese Topped Tea, capped off with a savory whipped cheesecake cream of their own in-house recipe. This topping paired with Matcha is a highly addictive combination, making it easy to see why this has become a popular beverage trend in Taiwan and Japan.

They, of course, also offer an incredible Earl Grey with Bergamot oil bringing out rich, intense flavors from a familiar classic.

They have a tea from the Azores, and if you concentrate hard enough when you drink it, you can even smell the ocean mist that surrounded it as it grew in a tiny island off of the coast of Portugal. As the weather cools down, be sure to drop by to warm up in the Woodshed!

Find Woodshed Tea at a variety of locations throughout OKC, or their space in Nichols Hills, 7518D North May Avenue.