Yes, we traveled to London to see what the response would be to our Kenyan Hand Rolled Purple and Beliote Black teas, as well as our Bodo Black Assam tea from India. Folks at the trade show loved the taste of our tea and we made loads of contacts.
After the trade show, we wanted to get a sense of the tea scene in London (and potential buyers). We got a lead on two tea shops similar to our tea company - Postcard Teas and Yumchaa. Tim of Postcard Teas is recognized as an expert in fine, loose, Asian teas, and we had two oolongs on the house. Postcard Teas was cozy and intimate, and reminded us of our tea bar, where folks enter as strangers and leave as friends.
Our next stop was Yumchaa (meaning yummy tea), which has several shops around London. Yumchaa was hip and a good place to sit down and catch up on email while drinking tea and eating a pastry. Like Postcard Teas, Yumchaa saw the gap in loose leaf tea in London and grew from market stand to brick and mortar.
Subsequent stops in pubs and restaurants confirmed London is otherwise loaded with tea, albeit in a bag.
Fine tuning our scone and tea service was another goal. Finding an afternoon tea that wouldn't break the daily food budget was harder than one might think. I sought local wisdom from a gal in a thrift (charity shop) store to point me to a solid afternoon tea. From her perspective, if the average bear in London wanted afternoon tea, this meant tea and cake in a cafe with a friend. But, to get the experience I was after, I would need to go to a hotel, or high end department store with a cafe. She suggested I look for vouchers online for the finer hotels.
After much online searching, we had a delicious cream tea at our hotel. We got ideas on how to enhance our scone service, and were pleased to know that we had a leg up on one thing - we don't serve our whites and greens at boiling.
While we never made it into a real grocery store, we were able to pop into a health food store in Pimlico, where the tea was all tea bag options. While tea permeates the London beverage scene, it's not exactly brimming with loose leaf.
Written by Heather Kreilick
