The Tea Journey is one of exploration and experience. It requires Teaheads to soak up sensory and cerebral information in order to make connections and build expertise.
But there is one part of the tea world which causes frustration to many people and puts obstacles on their tea path - lack of information.
Imagine walking into a wine shop and being recommended a bottle. On the nicely branded label it show a name followed by 'Red Wine from Italy'. That's it, no other information. No variety, no year, no description of the area or intricacies of production. You may end up loving the wine and decide to explore more Italian Reds but the next bottle you buy is absolutely disgusting to you.
Without more information about the differences between the two bottles you have no way of understanding the reasons for the differences in flavour. Sure, you can keep on buying and gambling on finding another good Wine but you are wandering lost without any signposts to navigate you.
This is the way a lot of tea is sold and we want to change this by telling all Teaheads to demand more information from their sellers.
At Mei Leaf we created a useful acronym for you to remember. We call it the SCOPE analysis and we give that information for all of our tea. SCOPE covers the key information to ask for when purchasing tea.
S: Season (when it was produced)
C: Cultivar (what variety of the tea plant)
O: Origin (where is it produced)
P: Picking and Processing (how is it made)
E: Elevation (how high was it grown)
In this video I give you the reasons why this knowledge is fundamental to learning and selecting tea for your collection. So go out there and be more demanding of your tea sellers. You can raise the standards and put signposts up for future Teaheads to follow!
