Monsoon Tea was founded in Chiang Mai in 2012 by Kenneth Rimdahl and Vorakarn Wongfu, and its Bangkok home opened in 2020 on Soi Sukhumvit 23, in Asok, just as covid struck. The shop is on two floors, filled with tea and with a small kombucha bar, and it hosts events and tea tastings. It is open every day from ten to six. The company's other shops are all in Chiang Mai, so this is the one place in the capital to buy its whole range over a counter.
The company calls its tea Forest Friendly. It buys leaf from completely wild tea plants, or from areas where tea grows among the forest instead of in rows, and it says it pays farmers more for working that way than they could earn by turning the land into a monoculture. In 2025 it launched a biodiversity traceability system for its tea, and its Tea Fauna Project has even had a newly described wasp species named after the founder.
On the shelf, that turns into a range of northern Thai teas you rarely see side by side. The Lahu line covers green, oolong, yellow and black under the same name, next to a Dhara white, a lychee oolong, a jasmine green, an Earl Grey and flavoured chais such as Apple Pie. Almost everything is sold in 50 g bags, with some teas also in tins, which keeps the price of trying a whole flight of them low.