Erick Smithe is a tea curator, cultural translator, and founder of Cloudwalker Tea. His work approaches traditional Chinese tea not as a lifestyle product, but as a discipline of refinement — sensory, social, and personal.

 

His training unfolded through long-term apprenticeship and direct transmission with senior tea makers and teachers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, working within craft lines that extend into the early nineteenth century. This education was not institutional. It was shaped by proximity, repetition, error, and time.

 

Cloudwalker exists as a living archive of these relationships — a place where rare and aged teas are presented without spectacle or simplification. Each offering is chosen for depth, integrity of origin, and the way it continues to change across years of storage and use.

 

Smithe’s role is not that of marketer or influencer, but of steward. His task is to listen, to select, and to release only what carries real charge.

 

He lives and works in Canada.