On a fateful day in the frigid cold of a recent December, Miles Kirsch decided to start pouring out cups of tea — oolong, green and herbal chrysanthemum — in Maria Hernandez Park.
“It was one of the best days of my life,” says the 27-year old Kirsch now. “I served around fifty cups that day, and I had a lot of people hanging out by my side, and I left the day feeling so fulfilled.” Thus, his “Tea Stand” was born, and he’s poured over 4,000 free cups of tea since.
A Westchester native, Kirsch had arrived in Bushwick in 2022, by way of Boston, where he received a bioengineering degree from Northeastern. He was working, after graduating, at BioNTech, a German biotech company that had rose to prominence as the developer of Pfizer’s blockbuster COVID-19 vaccines. The job, he says, was leaving him feeling increasingly disillusioned with the unaffordability and inaccessibility of healthcare in the United States.
“The biotech industry and a larger pharmaceutical industry is plagued by a lot of the same issues that are rampant throughout our world and specifically the US capitalist system being so focused on profit,” says Kirsch. “That was interfering with the accessibility of therapies that we were working on, and I think I just became more and more skeptical of the positive impact that I was having.”
He says he was attracted to Bushwick’s vibrant art scene and its relative affordability, compared to where he was living in Boston. During the pandemic, he had started a website called Audiome, a data site which tracks hip-hop music collaborations, with Adin Vashi, a college friend. But still, he was feeling creatively frustrated and wanted more.
“I had this desire to be outside and talk to people,” he says. He didn’t want to “just follow a linear career path.”
He had first witnessed the power of tea during a solo backpacking trip he took after his high school graduation to North Africa and the Middle East.
“Sharing tea is such a universal joy in most cultures around the world. That’s the first thing that you’re offered when you meet somebody or when you step into somebody’s home,” says Kirsch.
After many months in Brooklyn working for BioNTech behind a screen, Kirsch couldn’t take it anymore. After looking at his savings, he decided to quit his job.
“When I moved to Brooklyn, I was pretty lonely … and just in awe of the spectrum of possibility of the person I could be in New York City because everything exists here,” he says. It was “so inspiring,” he said. “But it’s also really intimidating because you’re forced to ask yourself all these questions of what you value.”
On a walk through Sunset Park on a brisk winter day in 2021, he wished there was someone serving him hot tea in the park. It’s the second most consumed beverage in the world, he says. The idea stuck. Kirsch decided to start pouring.
Kirsch now says he’s trying to fill that void, popping up in parks around Brooklyn, like Maria Hernandez and Herbert Von-King, in nearby Bed-Stuy. He also started pouring cups of tea to people waiting in line for food, clothing and other goods at resource distribution centers run by Collective Focus, a local mutual aid group. He calls these “Distros.” (“Events during which we serve free tea to community members while they wait in line for a food distribution to begin,” his website reads.)
Kirsch calls his work with other small mutual aid groups a “positive feedback loop.” He’s been found serving tea alongside local units like the Nonbinarian Book Bike, Riders for Rights and Fiber Arts for Palestine. Kirsch said one of his favorite of these was pouring out cups of masala chai at performances of Sabina Sethi Unni’s play “Flood Sensor Aunty” throughout various spots in Queens and Long Island. Kirsch says the play spoke to him because it took place at a chai tea shop, and was centered on climate change and flood disaster prevention with a clear takeaway: communities are safer when neighbors know each other.
You can also find him serving tea at an event series called “Steeped in Sound,” a DIY show he puts on with Darren Lee, a local musician and DJ. He sees these as a way to create spaces centered around drinking tea instead of alcohol. Inside his apartment, Kirsch has also begun hosting “Tea Talks,” which he says are guided conversations over tea about personal yet universal topics such as dreams, change or fear.
“Tea talks are where we can really focus on that intimate, meaningful conversation and storytelling… That’s how we really connect with others,” says Kirsch. You can find a calendar of all of these on his website.
October marks a milestone for Kirsch; two years since he quit his job at BioNTech and started pouring out tea for free. Last year, he had started writing a monthly newsletter about his various tea-related exploits. This past April, he registered his tea stand as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
“I see those recaps and the newsletter as an opportunity to be really honest and open and vulnerable about what it’s like to start a nonprofit,” says Kirsch. “It’s about generosity. It’s about facilitating and creating these spaces where people can get to know each other and money just interferes with that and makes the interaction feel transactional,” said Kirsch.
To fund his tea-serving exploits, Kirsch decided this past July to start selling tiered memberships, instead. His monthly tiers go from $3 (“sipper”) to $9 (“steeper”) and perks include stickers, a seasonal tea box with six bags of tea and issues of a bi-annual zine Kirsch is making called bōcha. He says forty people have started paying so far, and over one hundred people have volunteered to operate one of his tea stands.
Personally, Kirsch hopes that running these will serve as an antidote to how he was feeling when he moved to Bushwick, during what he calls the loneliness epidemic, the disintegration of community hubs, and the constant feeling of busyness in the city and, maybe, the country, writ large.
Along with medicinal benefits, like antioxidants that Kirsch says prevent cancer, he says he started pouring tea because he thinks doing that encourages the values he wishes to spread—stillness, hospitality and openness. He calls his tea stands “a public service in response to our lonely, individualistic world.”
Already, Kirsch says he’s in conversation with people interested in setting up versions of his tea stand idea in Boston and in the Bay Area, the latter not an unfamiliar place for Bushwick volunteer groups to find themselves.
“It’s a difficult thing to just talk with strangers—there’s not a lot of opportunities in our modern society and if there are, it feels too scary or intimidating,” he says. He calls his tea stand a “reward for people being open.”
Photos provided by Miles Kirsch.
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