Holiday teas coming Very soon – along with an option to “Make your own” Countdown to Christmas kit…. PLUS several new Chinese teas, a small amount of Korean green tea …. and MOST Exciting…… Kateri found a new Ukiyo Travel Tea Tumbler – that is easy to use and mostly stainless steel for durability. We have some in shop now! Watch the video below to see how simple it is to use!
We ended up having 5 sessions with 5-6 guests per session. The teas we sampled were:
Nine Ladies Dancing – Scottish grown tea, limited stock each year. Absolutely every person in attendance really enjoyed this tea. It is a Very smooth black tea with excellent flavor. We WILL get some of this next year for sure! However, if there is enough interest, we Can get some still this year and it has been added to the website for Pre-order HERE. ….. This IS a Luxury tea, at $2.80 per gram – but Oh so special. I am selling it by the gram to make it affordable to anyone to at least try it or gift it to someone who will really appreciate it. We used 4gm for a 12oz pot and got 2 quality steeps out of the leaf.
Sovereign Bud – Heirloom yellow tea – originally an Emperor Tribute tea, the leaf for this tea is said to come from the same bushes that provided leaf for the Chinese Emperor(s). You can purchase small, affordable portions as a gift to yourself, or someone you love!
The following teas are all from The Chinese Tea Company (CTCo) and were all very much enjoyed by most attendees in varying degrees. Keep reading to find out about purchasing any of these. Pre-ordering now will aid my cash flow to bring in a full batch of CTCo teas ASAP – Travtea.net
Tie Guan Yin Red Heart – a very special oolong that comes prepacked in an 8gram bag that we steeped at least 4x and it still had Lots of life in it. We have this one priced on the website at $10.50 per 8gm.
Pricing is already on the site to pre-order any of these 3 as well:
Mo Gan Mountain Snow Buds; Anji Bai Cha, and Anji Bai Cha Aromatic Spiral – All of these were well received, especially the Aromatic Spiral. They are rare, small farm, small batch production from Spring 2024 harvests.
Chinese Tea Company website offers MANY more small farm teas that sound just as delicious as the 4 we tried. I want to put together a large order to save on shipping, and your input can help to make this happen. Pre-order (if you want the full size shown), or deposits toward a smaller portion. [A few customers have already indicated some that they would like to try small portions of, if we get enough interest.] If you comment on this post – others can see what you are interested in and it may help to encourage a group buy.
IMPORTANT INFO: Prices are shown in British pounds on the site – if you add 40% to the price shown that should closely cover the exchange rate and sales tax. There will be very little markup if you are purchasing a full unit as shown – making this more of a co-op purchase. You are still getting a significant savings as you will not be paying for any shipping ($20-30 approx). (I do not yet know how it will be treated for customs.)
If full units are beyond your means or interest – tell me what teas and quantities you DO want; if there is enough interest to bring in a full unit I will take a deposit towards your purchase. [NOTE: if you are not purchasing a full unit, there will be some additional markup to cover handling and packaging, and a small profit)
[Note; if you like ripe puerhs, we also have some Old Tea Tree from CTCo – please try it while we have it – I hope to get more of it as well]
After comments and discussion regarding the lack of a tea calendar this year, I have figured out that I could create a “Do it Yourself” kit option utilizing our existing Trial Size packaging by providing a set of properly sized envelopes that you could pack yourself.
DETAILS:
As I feel the element of surprise is integral to the experience, it would work great as a gift The actual tea packets would be similar to the gold packets in last year’s calendar. Even with selecting the teas yourself, you could still create an element of surprise by putting all the envelopes in a dish or container with no numbers on them and select an envelope at random each day.
1) you would select the 24 teas as “Trial/Travel Sizes” (out of our entire available catalog, it is looking like we will have around 14 special holiday tea flavors), Most of the teas will be around $1.50 each, some might be 1.25, and a few could be more, depending upon which teas you select.
2) the “kit” would consist of 24 outside envelopes to put each one of the tea sleeves into, and optional 24 numbered or logo stickers to seal the envelopes. [numbers, if YOU want to designate the sequence, or just a small logo or decorative sticker if sequence doesn’t matter). Guesstimating the price for the kit would be about $10
The inner tea sleeve will just be our normal Trial Sizes that we always offer, containing 2 teaspoons of tea (for a 16oz mug) with simply the name and water temp and minutes for steeping. No extra tea description or ingredients listing. It would not be colorful or fancy.
WHAT DO YOU THINK??
