Adventures in tea drinking

We've walked past The Tea Centre in the Canberra Centre many a time, and poked our heads in and been in awe of the range. I pondered the fact that I quite enjoy freshly made tea but we don't have a tea pot.

So out I went and bought us a tea pot - a nice blue Maxwell Williams 6 person teapot with a built in strainer. I was very excited and felt like our house was almost complete not that we could have loose leaf tea :)

Now that we had a teapot, we had to go back to the Tea Centre to get some tea! We had a look at the range of 150+ teas and felt very confused.... They are in large tins and the girl was lovely and got a few down for us to have a smell of. We were still a bit confused though so just went for the English Breakfast because it was safe! I also bought a funky one person infuser so I could have cups of tea on my own.

I excitedly invited our friends David and Kirsty over to have tea with us and to use our new teapot. I brewed it up and boy was it strong!!! It was quite tasty though, and better than teabags of course. It didn't taste exciting though. I also realised that the teapot was too big for if it was just Andrew and I drinking tea!

Since then we've gone and gotten ourselves another 2 person teapot and back to the Tea Centre we went!

On the last trip we got some Assam Hajua which was the salesgirls favourite - golden high-grade tips improve this strong, malty, aromatic tea. We also got a Kenya Marinyn tea - quite strong, earthy leaves are blended with a few golden tips for smoothness. The Hajua is really nice - very tasty, and I've been drinking a fair bit of that. The Marinyn is ok - not too different from a regular cup of tea. It's quite a light colour and has a more delicate flavour I guess.

We went back today as I'm almost out of teabags at work, and decided I'd rather get leaves and another funky one person strainer and have real tea at work. The strainer is ideal - it's teaspoon shaped and spring loaded, so you squeeze the handle, it opens, you scoop up the tea, snap it shut, and voila - ready to go! And because it's teaspoon shaped, you can stir it to help infuse the tea.

Anyway, so we spent a fair while there again browsing and smelling lots of tea. I settled on some Darjeeling Singbulli tea - A strong, late second flush tea with a bubbly character. Sounds interesting! There was also a tea called Glogg that sounded interesting - green tea, cinnamon, orange, almond, ginger, cloves and cardamon. It smelt really tasty, so we got some of that as well.

Just got home after a big day of walking around the shops, and thought we'd sit down to a cup of tea, so I brewed up the Glogg. It smelt really nice still, but I was starting to wonder if it was one of those things that smelt great but didn't taste so great. I was wondering if we should have gotten 50g as opposed to the 100g that we'd gotten for all the others. So..... it tastes interesting. I can't finish the cup. I think it's the cinnamon. Or maybe it's the whole combination? Andrew managed to finish his though and didn't mind it, so I guess we'll eventually get through it! We'll just inflict it onto guests who want to try something interesting.

I think I'll stick to my black teas from now on! But for anyone who's in Canberra and likes tea, I highly recommend going along! We've had the same salesgirl each time and she's been lovely! Very helpful and very friendly.

Edit: There's also stores in Sydney and Brisbane, and you can order online from the website.