A Grand Tea Adventure
On the morning of Wednesday, April 9, the Steeped In Tea girls woke up bright and early for an adventure of epic proportions. That's right -- we headed out to take on an entire grocery store aisle of tea in the Super L Ranch Market at 44th and Van Buren streets.
The aisle was chock-full of fun and interesting teas. The most prevalent kind seemed to be green tea, which filled up almost the entire top shelf. It was really hard to pick one type of tea each ... so we didn't.
Carolina found a beautiful blossoming white tea -- 7-10 blossoms for about $10, which is pretty cheap compared to what can be found in more well-known tea shops. Alex found a lovely green tea, along with an herbal tea called "horny goat weed," which we bought just for the novelty of the name. Molly got some black tea with lichee fruit and a bag of dried rose buds.
A Grand Tea Adventure
Written by Molly Bilker
Pictures by Alex Scoville and Molly Bilker
Filmed by Alex Scoville
Video Editing by Carolina Marquez
"I just spent so much money on tea," Carolina said as we walked out of the ranch market. There was one thing we all agreed on -- it was so worth it.
One of the great things about visiting an Asian market to buy our tea was the price. Even if we felt like we'd spent a lot, a similar amount of tea from a more popular store, such as Teavana, could cost $10 or $20 more, depending on the tea.
We headed back to Carolina's apartment, where we each
picked one tea to brew. We divided up the variety pack of six small containers of tea we'd bought, two for each of us. We opened our large box of Hello Panda cookies.
A few things happened. Carolina's blossoming tea took a while to blossom, which made us all nervous. Her cat, Milo, wandered around the table and knocked down a couple of the tea boxes we'd bought. He also ate some tea leaves that had found their way onto the floor.
Molly decided she'd try to make the dried rose buds and failed horribly. We tried
to steep them in a tea ball first, and that didn't work. Then we tried just dropping
them in the hot water. Surprise! That didn't work either. So, she fell back on her
black lichee tea and tried that again. And then Carolina's tea blossomed.
Other than the failed rose bud experiment, all the teas were pretty delicious. Milo
even picked his own favorite.
One of the best things about the excursion wasn't the grocery store aisle full of teas, it wasn't brewing them, it wasn't drinking the delicious tea, it wasn't even adorable Milo lying on his side and awaiting attention. It was getting to do all of this together.
If one lesson comes out of this for you, remember how much fun it is to make your tea a social experience. Take a page out of our book and make it an excursion with your friends. Make it your own Grand Tea Adventure.