Fear and Loathing In a Tea Shop

This might surprise you, but I regularly visit a tea shop.

Lady Devotea and I run two businesses, and the one that isn’t tea requires meeting with a number of people. As our home town of Adelaide is long and thin, running from North to South, it can be quite a distance from one bit to another. As our home and office is in the very far South, this causes some issues as most of the people I need to meet with for that business are located in the northern suburbs.

To make life easier, I head to this tea shop – I also have a couple in other locations I use on occasion- and set up camp for the day. I meet with a succession of people at hourly intervals.

I, and my guests, drink a lot of tea. Quite often, I go through an entire loyalty card in one day and get a free tea at the end, which is nice.

The people that Lady Devotea meets as part of this business are a different group, and they usually visit her in her office.

So, this is a place I know well. I have my favourite teas that I enjoy there; and some that just don’t suit my palate. As you might imagine, Dear Reader, when you’ve had probably 300 cups of tea in a place with a range of about 120, you get to repeat a lot of teas.

Especially when you consider that of the 120,  probably 30 are unsuitable as they conflict with my allergies, contain something offensive or come from Japan.

I discovered Chun Mee there and it remains one of my favourites. I have at least one pot of their Keemun Mao Feng each time and it never gets boring. They even have a bizarre herbal mix with all sorts of things in it – rhubarb springs to mind – that I enjoy on occasion.

But you get the odd stinker.

Often when Lady Devotea and I are at the Adelaide Central Market, we will pop in there for a tea. Our own teas are available at the Central Market, but sadly only in packet form. On a previous occasion, I had a Buddha’s Tears and Lady D had a Scottish Breakfast.

After draining my own, I tried a little of hers. By then it had oversteeped, and I put the appalling taste down to that very fact.

Wow, that’s a lot of backstory.

We found ourselves at the Central Market and after buying pork, some vegetables and pawpaw (for a tea sorbet, of course) for dinner, we felt we had earned a cuppa.

As talk had turned to Scottish Breakfast at the international Tea Salon hangout only a day earlier, I suggested we have a pot of that.

The description said the tea contained African and Ceylon teas. It didn’t mention how bad the tea was. It started in the mouth with a mild and pleasant biscuit flavour, quickly devolved to a flavour best described as “tasteless, stale tea” before arriving at a distinct naphthalene aftertaste. Yep, mothballs to you.

Of course, you know the rest. This is where I name and shame them, right. Imagine serving ME a bad cup of tea!

But I won’t.

Not just because I have to go in there again, because I don’t. But just because of my own particular set of ethics.

This is an Adelaide-based tea business, like we are. When we visit cafes and restaurants to offer our tea for sale, sometimes we see this company’s product.

And we walk away.

We’re proud of our blends, and of all the things we have in the pipeline. We know that we can offer a different experience to cafes that this other company does. In fact, they have got into teab*gs in the last few years, which is of course disgraceful.

They are quite big and quite successful. And yet their Scottish Breakfast is just bad tea, pure and simple. There staff are not as familiar with their teas as they should be, based on conversations I overhear all the time. They deserve a serve of my biting sarcasm, at least.

But it is too close to home.  Another Adelaide tea merchant. They have over 100 loose leaf teas. They are our comrades in arms in a sense, even though I’m sure they have no such qualms about us.

Perhaps I am misguided about this, but bagging them just seems wrong.