It started with four friends: Bailey, Alicia, Mercedes, and Seth. The name BAMS is an acronym because of course it is — this operation has more infrastructure than it has any right to. What began as me forcing tea upon my closest friends out of pure chaos and zero ulterior motive has somehow, over the course of a year, become an actual recurring thing that people look forward to. I am as surprised as anyone.

After a few months of running the club I told my best friend Esther about it. She mentioned she loves tea. She was immediately added. The name stayed BAMS because we already had a logo, a seal, a website, and a domain name, and I was not starting over. Esther understood.

Don came next — part of the same broader friend group as Alicia, Mercedes, and Seth — followed shortly by Abby. Then James. We are now eight people strong and the name still says BAMS, which is fine. Names are just names. Tea is forever.

Here is a fun fact that I think speaks volumes about the kind of person I am: I did not actually have to purchase tea for the first six months. I already owned it. All of it. Just sitting in my house, waiting. I have had to buy maybe four teas over the entire life of this club and I currently have the next six months planned without needing to acquire a single additional box. This is not a flex. This is a cry for help that I am choosing to reframe as a personality trait.

I do this entirely for free, for my friends, because I love them and I am the kind of person who expresses affection through curated monthly mailings and handwritten letters about tea history and anime references. If you’d like to help offset the cost of postage, packaging, and the occasional tea I actually have to go buy, feel free to buy me a cup of tea. Literally. That is what the money goes toward. You are not donating to a cause. You are feeding an addiction. I just want to be transparent about that.