Tea, tea, tea

Todd & Holland, an amazing tea store in Oak Park, and the Indian Tea Board hosted an Indian tea cupping yesterday at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park.

We tasted ten teas, in total: Three teas from Darjeeling, three from Nilgiris and three from Assam and my personal favorite, Wonder Tea (an delicious Darjeeling that we’ve gone through a half-pound of in two months).

All of the teas were amazing, although they were brewed for only four minutes, a little too short for my taste. The highlight of the event was definately James Norwood Pratt. An older, very stately Southern gentleman, he was full of all sorts of fascinating tea trivia.

Amazingly, this whole event, with its ten delicious teas, some of them so rare that they aren’t even available for purchase at Todd & Holland, was free. Janet, Bill Todd’s wife, even passed out little sample bags of one of the teas at the end. Very classy, but I wonder if it was a missed marketing opportunity.