Happy New Year and I hope that everything continues to be well!
As a reminder, the shop is currently closed for a much-needed post-holiday break and will re-open on Thursday 1/14. Current hours and schedule updates can always be found on the shop website www.infuseteabarny.com.
I cannot thank you enough for the cooperation around the holiday season. As a result of the procedures that had been implemented and communicated, the vast majority who visited my shop enjoyed a fairly smooth and efficient shopping experience. Unfortunately, I did have to ask some to wait outside because of the traffic inside the shop or come back to pick up their orders, but I was able to keep this to a minimum. The implemented policies and procedures remain in effect to ensure the best possible experience in the shop as we continue through the remaining winter months and some of the key points are outlined below. For easy reference, all the details can be found on the shop website www.infuseteabarny.com.
Some teas have been out of stock for the past two weeks, but they will be back in stock in time to order for shipping or pre-orders for pick up before we return. As a reminder, pre-ordering your loose leaf tea order in our online shop www.pleasuresoftea.com is strongly encouraged in order to reduce wait time and the need to potentially wait outside while your order is prepared. Your order is not finalized until you pick up, so there is no need to input your credit card info. This allows flexibility to browse the shop, add more teas, a cup of tea, or some of our goodies to your order.
I thought the beginning of the year would be a good time to reaffirm one of the missions that I have had for the past fourteen years of being in business - to provide quality specialty loose leaf teas and tisanes and to educate how to incorporate them into a healthy, holistic lifestyle. I figured I would also take the opportunity to review a topic I covered several years ago regarding how specialty loose leaf teas compare to commodity teas.
I appreciate your continued support of my small business and I wish you all the best in 2021!
-- Kristine
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The winners of our 9th Annual Holiday Raffle are Jackie Healy and Michelle Feliciano! Congrats to you both :)
Pictured is Jackie and her husband Pat redeeming her certificate with a purchase of new teas.
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New teas have been and will continue to arrive! I have been cupping some of the new arrivals and will be actively working to make them available in the shop and online shop within the next several weeks. I am really excited to announce that I have been able to find a new source for the teas from the PT Harendong Organic Tea Farm on the Indonesian island of Java. See details below under New at the Shop.
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COVID Procedures and Pre-Order Reminder
For those of you who are regular readers of my monthly newsletter, you have become familiar over the past year with my consistent communication of policies and procedures related to the ever-evolving COVID-19 situation. These policies and procedures have been put in place to mitigate potential risk and to be proactive in identifying and addressing issues that would negatively impact your experience in my shop, including extensive wait times during the busiest times. This past year had been challenging to navigate the ever-changing environment, while balancing the needs of running my business well enough to stay afloat and continuing to provide excellent customer service so that you can have access to your teas and tisanes for immune support and stress relief. As you know, my shop is not an off-the-shelf shop; instead, I offer a customer-focused approach where everything is custom prepared to order and I offer the unique option of having any of our 500 teas prepared fresh for you either hot or iced. The benefit to this approach provides the greatest flexibility to personalize your experience and best meet your needs, but the downside is that everything takes time to prepare and there are no shortcuts. Due to the personalized nature of your shop experience, the need for me to change how I operate and the services that are offered, the need to limit the number of people in the shop and follow COVID-19 guidelines, all transactions take much longer to process and I am not able to assist as many people at a time or in a day as I used to. As a result, procedures were implemented several months ago to provide more structure and streamline the operations at the shop, reduce your need to wait in a line outside in the cold, and enable flexibility so that I can keep the traffic moving into and out of the shop, while still being able to maintain the welcoming and educational atmosphere as best as possible.
I continue to monitor the situation and will communicate any relevant changes in future newsletters, on our facebook page Infuse Tea Bar by The Pleasures of Tea, and on the shop and online shop websites. If you missed any of the newsletters or are new to the community, all of my newsletters from 2020 (except the weekly updates during the three months the shop was closed) have been posted on the online shop website for easy reference . Details regarding the new policies and procedures were communicated in October's newsletter, but not all were posted on the shop website. If you would like to read all the details, please click here.
Lastly, a reminder that pre-orders for pick up at the shop are strongly encouraged to reduce lines and wait time outside, especially during cold and inclement weather. The vast majority of my 500+ loose leaf teas and herbal tisanes are available in the online shop. A few more tea ware items have been added, but they are off-the-shelf and do not require the amount of time that pouching up your teas does. As you know, there is a much larger selection of tea ware and accessories available in the shop for you to browse. I continue to ship nationwide and the online shop will make it easy for you to place your pre-orders for pick up at the shop. Details and tips for placing your pre-orders have been communicated over the past several months, so in the interest of space, I am not going to provide all of the details below. I will, however, provide some of the key points. I thank you for your assistance and cooperation in helping me to ensure that I can continue to serve you in the best way possible.
Key Pre-Order Points
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Place your order at www.pleasuresoftea.com. Put the date and approximate time of pick up in the Comments section in the Cart. This does not need to be exact; it just helps me with workflow to ensure your order is ready when you arrive. Select the pick up at shop option - not a shipping option if you plan to pick up at the shop. Pick ups are only during shop hours, so please be sure to request a date and time that the shop is open - hours are posted at the bottom of the home page on both websites.
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Please DO NOT input your credit card info if you plan to pay in cash or browse and/or add items to your order at the shop. Instead, please select the "Pay when picking up order" payment option so everything can be processed as one order.
- As a reminder, the minimum quantity for each tea in the online shop is the standard 2 oz. pouch (unless it is $15/oz or more). If there are a few teas that you would like to order a 1 oz pouch or if there is a tea or functional herb that you couldn't find in the online shop, then please mention the tea and quantity in the Comments section at checkout. Please DO NOT input your credit card info for these orders; instead select the "Pay when picking up order" payment option.
- Please do not email any orders to me. I get about 300 emails a day and am almost always days behind. Orders placed in the online shop will be in a portal for easy viewing and there will be no possibility of any being missed.
- Orders will be filled in the order of requested pick-up date and then in the order that they are received. I do my best to keep up with orders and request that they are placed AT LEAST 24 hours before requested pick up time so that I have enough time to see them. I am rarely alone at the shop and on particularly busy days I don't get a chance to review new orders that have come in. If looking to pick up on the first day that the shop is open (usually Thursday), please plan a pick up after noon in order to allow enough time for the order to be prepared.
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Pre-orders are prioritized! If you do not pre-order and the shop is busy, you may need to wait outside while your order is prepared or you may be asked to pick up your order on another day.
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The remaining policies and procedures and more details about specific pre-order situations that were communicated in October's newsletter have been posted to our shop website for easy reference and can be accessed by clicking here or by accessing the October newsletter that can be found on the online shop.
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Specialty Teas vs. Commodity Teas
I never liked tea growing up - I associated it solely with the boxes of teabags that my mom would bring home from the supermarket. It never tasted good to me and I never liked the idea of having to add an ingredient like sugar to make something taste better. As a result, I assumed that I didn't like tea. It wasn't until the mid-1990's when I accidentally purchased some loose leaf tea that my world was rocked by this magically elixir. I embarked upon my exploration of loose leaf tea and the understanding of why the taste and aromatic experience was so much different than the one I had with teabag teas. The beginning of my professional training fourteen years ago helped to cement the knowledge I had gained up to that point to compare and understand the differences between specialty loose leaf and commodity teas. So let's review the basics and set the groundwork for the exciting discoveries that we will make together in the year ahead!
All true teas come from the Camellia sinensis plant, which is also known as the tea plant. Depending on how the leaves are processed after being harvested, the result will be one of six types of tea - black, green, wulong, white, yellow or dark tea. Everything else that we can infuse into a beverage that does not originate from the tea plant is categorized as a tisane. Examples of tisanes are herbs that include chamomile, mint, rooibos, yerba mate, etc.
The tea that most of us were first acquainted with here in the US was commercially-produced, mass-market tea - usually black tea, but also green tea. This tea is classified as commodity tea and is sold based on what the trade markets deem its value to be, which is usually inexpensive. This tea is grown predominantly using conventional farming methods, which includes the use of pesticides and/or herbicides and is mostly harvested and processed with the use of machines. The focus is on quantity, not quality, and the soil and plants are given little opportunity between harvesting to restore and build up the nutrients that provide flavor and potential health benefits. These teas end up on our supermarket shelves in teabags and in bottled tea beverages. Commodity tea is usually comprised of older leaves of the tea plant which contain less caffeine and fewer antioxidants than specialty teas. Because these teas are not processed as meticulously as specialty teas, they tend to have harsher notes and usually require the addition of a sweetener and/or milk to smooth out the flavor.
The primary focus within the production of specialty teas is quality over quantity. While some specialty teas may be grown using conventional farming methods, many are grown using traditional or organic methods. Most specialty tea crops are rotated, with some areas of the garden not being harvested for a period of time so that the plants can rest and store up more of the nutrients that are so beneficial to us. Most specialty teas are hand-harvested, which is better to control maintaining the quality and lessen degradation of the plucked leaves. The newest growth, comprised of any combination of the first two leaves and the bud, is harvested for all specialty loose leaf teas. These leaves and buds have higher levels of caffeine, theanine (an amino acid that balances the effects of the caffeine), and polyphenols (the class of antioxidants that are so widely studied for their potential health effects). Specialty teas are carefully crafted to create beautiful leaf styles and preserve the unique aromas and tastes of the terroir (taste of place, how the growing conditions influence aroma and taste) where the leaves are grown. Appreciation of specialty teas utilizes the senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste.
I would also like to briefly touch upon organic teas, as this is a topic about which I often get asked. For those of you who still drink tea from teabags, it is recommended that you select the organic option over the non-organic option. When possible, I try to offer certified organic options; however, this is often not necessary with specialty teas and limits the availability of very good and unique teas. As mentioned above, many specialty teas are grown using traditional or organic methods, but they may not be certified organic due to the prohibitive cost to small growers that are associated with this certification. In addition, some variables may exclude some growers from ever having the opportunity to have their teas certified as organic. As an example, one of the growers I know in Hawaii employs natural and biodynamic farming methods (what I view as better than organic methods), but her teas will never qualify to be certified organic because she has goats that freely roam her property. My approach is to have a better understanding about how the teas were grown by learning the terroir and agricultural practices. Regarding the tisanes, I again always try to select certified organic when possible and all of my functional herbs are certified organic due to their application for therapeutic use.
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New at the Shop
Well-crafted organic teas from PT Harendong Organic Tea Farm on the Indonesian island of Java are back in stock! Rolled Black Tea, Large Leaf Green Tea, and the very popular Mid-Oxidized Wulong Tea are now back in stock. They will be available in the shop when we re-open and in the online shop within a week.
Limited supply of our autumn and holiday teas are available, so grab them before they are gone!
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106 Main Street
West Sayville, NY 11796
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500+ Loose Leaf Teas & Herbal Tisanes
Certified - Tea Professional, Tea Sommelier & Tea Health Expert
Student of the Art & Science of Herbalism
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