It’s taking much longer than expected to write the posts about my UK trip and I’m attributing that to the fact that work has been really busy lately. But, the posts will be written and posted – hopefully fairly close together like the haul posts. As with the book haul, I think I held back on my tea buying this time round too. But this is probably because I made one fairly expensive purchase rather than out of any consideration for my overflowing tea cupboard.

The entire haul:

From London – Twinings

Sadly, I didn’t make it to Postcard Teas, but I did manage to visit the Twining’s shop at 216 Strand! I was pretty interested in this because at 300 years old, it’s supposed to be the oldest tea shop in London. So even though we have Twinings in Singapore, I wanted to visit this.

Apart from loose teabags to give to friends, I got these three teas. The two Cold Infuse tisanes can’t be found in Singapore, but my sister and I really enjoyed them the first time we tried it. Since we bring water/tea to work pretty regularly, I decided to get two cans to bring home.

I also got a packet of Golden Rose Hearts, which is a Chinese black tea with rosebuds that’s been pressed into the shape of a heart. I know that I could probably get them here as well, but the staff at Twinnings were very friendly and this sounded pretty cool so I just decided to get a packet and try.

From Edinburgh – Kinnettles Gold from PekoeTea

This is probably the jewel of the tea haul and I walked forty minutes (one way) just to get to Pekoe Tea for this. I’ve never tried Scottish tea before and I am extremely excited to try this one. It’s going to have to wait for a while, as I finish up the Chinese teas I bought previously – I’m trying not to have too many teas open at one go – but when I am ready to try a new tea, this will be the first one.

From York – Hebden Tea

We found this tisane while walking around The Shambles in York. They had a pretty wide array of teas for testing, and my mom fell in love with this after trying it. I’d be interested in experimenting with this tea (Bird & Blend gave me a few ideas) so look out for a “testing different cold brew bases” type of post. Storing this tea is a problem, though; the smell is so strong even when sealed that I can smell it. I’m keeping this away from the other teas for now.

From Manchester – Bird & Blend Tea Co.

I found out about Bird & Blend Tea Co. when looking for Advent Tea Calenders so I was very excited when I realised that they had a store in Manchester. It was so hard to choose what to drink (I was looking for interesting blends, since you can get straight teas direct from source), but I ended choosing their matcha blends. We also got a The Digester Pu’er tea blend for the whole family.

And these are the seven teas that I got from the UK! Having all these around is really motivating me to finish up the teas that are already opened – plus, I think the trip helped with my tea tolerance (somewhat) so with any luck I can start drinking these in July.