tea

by

Matcha!

Ok, so I’m a bit obsessed with matcha just now!  I’ve been mixing matcha with herbs to make some homemade iced tea goodness.  This picture below was a great mix of nettle, peppermint, white matcha & sencha.  I put it all in a 1L water bottle overnight and drank it throughout the day at work and I loved it!

https://instagram.com/p/t2dVdcmJi7

Making matcha is soo easy.  Once you have the powder you can add it to a cold drink and shake it to mix it up.  Or you can mix it up first and then drink it or add it to whatever you’re making.  If you don’t have a whisk you can use a spoon or a spatula to mix it up.  You can use it with all sorts of things and we’ll post more ideas and recipes as time goes on.  Do you have any recipes to share?

making matcha

making matcha

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image from http://www.chinaqualitytea.com/html-en/product-gNfKUpBFIkWm-matcha(Sencha-powder).html

 

We have 20% off our matcha on our website for the rest of the month, so pop over to teageeks.com and get whisking!

by

Kombucha

It’s difficult to say Kombucha, never mind know what it is.  I only heard about it a year or so ago while researching teas online.  Since then I have tasted it, read about it and now finally, I have a brewing kit to make some of my own!  As I’ll be posting pictures of my brewing process and its (hopefully) successes, I thought it might be useful to do a blog post about it, so that people can see my pics then read up about it too.

So, Kombucha is a fermented drink, made up of tea.  It is usually black or green tea used and the tea is fermented using bacteria and yeast (aka SCOBY).  Kombucha is claimed to have many health benefits such as aiding digestion, detoxification, joint care and boosting your immune system, however there is little scientific evidence for this.  While it is considered generally safe, there have also been some concerns.

It seems to have been present in many cultures for centuries, such as Russia and Japan and according to Wikipedia, Kombucha was popular in China in the 50s & 60s with many people making it at home.  It has recently seen a surge in Western culture as more people start to learn about it and brew it at home.

So, keep an eye out for my Kombucha updates both here and on the Facebook and twitter pages.  Here’s a picture below of my brewing kit, right out of the box (I love that it has a colourful muslin cloth with it!).  I hope that you enjoy reading about some more tea adventures!

Kombucha kit

Kombucha kit

Tea quote #15

“The art of tea, whichever way you drink it, or whichever country you are from, has one underlining thread for all of us. It is the cultivation of yourself as you follow the ceremony of preparing your tea, the way in which you make your tea, how and where you drink it, and with whom. Making a cup of tea creates a space for just being.”
― Nicola Salter

by

Loose or bagged tea?

I have wanted to write a post about this issue for a while, but felt I had to do some background reading first.  Now that I have, it’s time for this post.

The idea of selling loose leaf tea is a personal motivation of mine.  I am an environmentally and health conscious person who tries to lessen my impact on the world where possible.  I also understand that the world we live in, it’s not always possible to do this all time but by being mindful and doing what I can is a start.

So, I could easily sell bagged tea and I’m sure people would buy it, however the reasons for only selling loose are more in line with my personal, social and environmental concerns which of course influence the type of business I would like to run.  I’m not in this to ‘make a quick buck’ and my social conscious doesn’t allow me to sell items which I feel are causing harm to people or the environment.  It’s a tricky scenario and it can be difficult to avoid affecting something/someone somewhere, however all you can do is try your best to be as socially conscious as possible.

Anyway, the question today that I want to discuss is loose or bagged?  This isn’t even a new topic, it’s been in discussions for years now, but I still get asked why my tea is not bagged and why it’s just loose tea that I sell, so with that in mind I think it’s still a relevant discussion.

There are 2 main reasons why I think loose is better than bagged.

1. It tastes better because it’s a better quality tea.  When I tell people about my tea shop they always assume that the tea is bagged.  I have to explain that all tea begins as loose and is processed to end up bags.  The leaves are initially whole and then packed into large bags to be sold as whole loose leaf tea.  This has a huge effect on the taste, in my opinion.  The whole leaves represent the top quality tea, and as the remaining leaves are picked, processed and bits fall off, are cut and crushed into smaller pieces etc, the remaining bits (fannings & dust) are collected at the end and put into the lower grade teas and teabags.

2. Bagged teas are wasteful and not environmentally friendly.  Think about the packaging involved just to make one cup of tea.  All the paper, staples, plastic and ink.  Just to wrap up one little teabag in an individual bag and then put those bags in a box and cover it in plastic?  Even the new teabags with loose tea inside are not always what they might appear to be.  There have been a few discussions online (here & here) about this issue and it appears a few tea companies have now decided to take out the ‘biodegradable’ label from the teabag description as it’s misleading.  There was also an article in the Guardian which highlighted the issues involved with composting teabags.

Have you had problems composting or what do you think about teabags?

So there you have it.  Two reasons why we only sell loose leaf tea at teageeks.com and I won’t say that we’ll never use teabags and I am looking to find teabags that you can use at home to make your tea and to make tea for on-the-move, but the search continues for a safe and environmentally friendly option.  Do you know of any?  Let me know!

Read more at wikipedia about the different types of grades of tea here.

by

Business: ideas, ideas, ideas, focus, focus, focus!

As much as I would like to write about the wide range of skills and knowledge I’ve learned since journeying into the world of business, I feel that tackling one topic or one small area at a time would be more beneficial and keep me focussed.  So, this post will be about the actual physical setting up of your business (which does of course encompass a great deal of other areas; marketing, research, website development etc etc) however I’ll give an overview just now and tackle each of those other topics in time.  There’s no point in me writing about everything in one post!

So, when I was looking at actually setting up a business, I was swamped with ideas.  I had too many to be honest and no real idea of what would work and what wouldn’t.  I’m still learning this, by the way!  I had about 3 different types of tea shops that I wanted to open and had even more ideas about how they would look, what they would sell and what type of customer I would have in each of these.  This was entirely unrealistic looking back and if I could turn back time, I would definitely have taken more time to focus on what I really wanted to do and why and worked from there.  I think part of me wanted to please every type of customer and stretch out my ideas to cover everything.  When really, I should have concentrated on what I wanted to sell and how to make that happen.  That’s not to say that it wasn’t a good learning exercise and I’ve eventually got where I am today because of the evolutionary style process I’ve been through, but with a bit of planning and organising I should have perhaps spent less time on ideas that I didn’t pursue.

I now have a yearly plan for each area of the business (marketing, research, admin, finances etc) with my goals for each area at the end of each 6 month period and within each month the tasks which will get me to the 6 month goal.  This sits on my wall and can be updated or changed every 6 months.  This means that my tasks are easy to see and I can see easily what they are contributing towards.  So far, this is working out well for me.

Although it’s great to be creative and come up with a million ideas, only one or a few of them is really going to end up being realised.  So, if you’re starting out with some ideas, then sit down and really ask yourself what you want to achieve and how to get there.  The steps might change over time and your destination might too, but at least you know you’re on the path 🙂