Another travelling tea box made its way to the Oolong Owl and the Tea Owl’s possession! YUM!
If you are interested in trying a whole bunch of new teas, I highly recommend hooking up with one of these Travelling Tea Boxes. A travelling tea box is a box full of tea that you can sample teas out of and then you add your teas into the box – usually of the same amount of tea you took out. Some of themed like unflavored, black teas or herbals only, others are exclusively set to mail within a country or two, while others stick to a certain size. If you want to get in on a travelling tea box, be sure to check online tea communities like Steepster or Reddit tea exchange. Also look like other spaces for online tea lovers, such as Ravelry (a knitting/crochet community).
This tea box is from Steepster, the “Here’s Hoping Tea box” on its third tour around the US. I was in the first round of this travelling tea box. It’s a small looking box but its filled to the brim with tea. Actually, I couldn’t get the teas back into the same box!
I began unloading the tea. I attempted to put the teas I wanted to try in a corner, but only 1/4 into the box and I’m out of room on my counter… and my choices got buried. One Tea Owl decided to pace himself and nap.
Even more tea! The Tea Owls are starting to panic and get engulfed in tea packages!
Big pile of tea! FINAL COUNT – 109 DIFFERENT TEAS! Majority of them are loose leaf tea blends. Very little teabags in this teabox. Intern Tea Owl looks gassed out here.
When you have a teabox this big, you have to worry about tea smell contamination. I saw this bag and thought it was super smart.
I had a bunch of observations during my first travelling tea box, and here’s a new one.
Do I sample the last serving of a tea that is obviously prized? If you don’t, the box is full of 1 servings of loose leaf. But if you do, well, you just took the last cookie. The Canadian in me politely passed it on. Since I was close to the top of the shipping list, there wasn’t too many single serving loose leaf teas for me.
I was totally keen with sampling these hard to acquire teas though!
Sweet, I can sample some Korean Barely tea without having to buy a big bag of it at my local Korean Market!
After much sorting and multiple boxes, here is my official pile of tea I’ve decided to sample, taking around 2 teaspoons of tea majority of the time tasting 34 teas and 5 tea bags. More scary, I drank that all in just over a week. Yea, Oolong Owl has a huge tea stash, but we obviously drink quite a bit of tea here!
For this teabox, all the teas you sampled and put in are logged online. Some teaboxes will include a notebook of some kind for this task, but keeping it all online helps keep the shipping costs down. I put a notebook next to my pile of tea and wrote down what I tried and how much of it I took out. That way, I could accurately keep track what I drank and make sure I don’t put too much tea when I swap my own teas in.
Oolong Owl Discoveries for this traveling Teabox:
- I need to check out GongFu Tea Shop and Shang Tea – all the samples there were awesome. GongFu Tea Shop had a nice, fruity milk oolong. Their Tour de France black was also very good.
- Handmade Tea is still on my wishlist. Love their teas!
- Harney & Son’s Queen Catherine is an amazing cup of black tea.
- I still dislike yabao pu’er.
- I need Verdant Tea’s Laoshan Black. NEED!
- Having really good teas in a teabox makes me happy and leads me to adding some good teas of my own to swap in. So, now this teabox has 16 more teas and a couple more teabags.
After all that tea drinking, I am not tea’d out. My stomach (?) has been stretched out for mass tea consumption after the World Tea Expo last month. The Tea Owls are another story. That peppy ambitious green owl is spunky happy and I think Intern Tea Owl needs a vacation or prime rib dinner bonus.
I have signed up for a couple other Traveling tea boxes! The shipping can be pricey, but having practically an entire tea shop collection for a week is worth it!
