So this review is so late that the product is no longer available (rendering the review useless) but I’m writing this in the hope that Bird & Blend Tea Co. will bring back their Tea 101 box. And also because I really, really want to talk about it.

Last year, I made a pretty big tea purchase (I told myself it was to qualify for free shipping) from Bird & Blend for their Matcha Advent calendar. In that purchase was this Tea 101 box, which appealed to me because it’s the first Tea 101 workshop that you can do at home, at a time of your choosing, that I’ve seen.

What’s in the Box?

Everything came is a sturdy Bird & Blend box, which contained:

• Two sheets – one for tasting notes and with a flavour wheel, and one with the links to the youtube video and an introduction
• 6 tins of unlabelled tea + 1 tin of matcha. The tins are unlabelled so you can try and guess what they were, and it’s pretty straightforward – white tea, black tea (orthodox), black tea (CTC), green tea, oolong, and (ripe) puer.
• One tea spoon that’s supposed to be perfect for scooping enough tea for a cup
• Empty Tea bags (in case you don’t have a teapot)
• 10 single-serving teabags with different Bird & Blend Tea flavours.
• There are also two links in this kit. One link was supposed to lead a blogpost but instead lead to a 404 error page, and another link is to an unlisted youtube video.

Thoughts on the Bird & Blend Tea 101 Video

Although the box promises to turn you into a tea master, This video is only fifteen minutes and can only give you an overview of tea.

The video starts with an introduction to the brand and the Tea Box, and then goes through the following teas:

1. White Tea
2. Green tea
3. Matcha
4. Black tea
5. Puer (they didn’t distinguish between ripe and raw but it’s clearly ripe puer that they’re talking about).
6. Oolong.

The last part of video, which was last three minutes or so, was a demonstration on how to conduct a tea tasting.

For the most part, the video provides basic information about each tea category, which I imagine will be helpful to the beginner. I did have a few thoughts/disagreements with the video, namely:

• At the Green Tea section, there was a tip on differentiating between Japanese and Chinese green teas by looking at the name, because if there was a “cha” it would be Japanese as “tea” is “cha” in Japanese. It’s not wrong, but tea is also “Cha” in Chinese (which is where the word originated) and Korean. I would have appreciated a bit more nuance on this because if I didn’t know better, I’d think ‘oh, it’s just in Japan that it’s called “cha”.’)
• Black tea was described as “the remaining parts of the tea plant”, which is something I don’t quite understand. Sure, some black teas might be made of larger leaves, but there are high-quality black teas made from young leaves that could be used for oolong or green or white tea.
• I would also disagree with their statement that black tea is the most caffeinated tea apart from matcha, but that is mostly because the issue of caffeine in tea is such a complicated one! (This one is a personal bugbear, I admit)
• Again, I would disagree that oolongs are made with the biggest tea leaves – that’s a bit too much of a generalisation for me.
• Generally, the video does try to describe the process and taste, which I think is good.
• Their tea brewing demonstration requires a brewing time of four minutes, using a tasting cup. I think it would have been helpful to explain that brewing tea for tasting can be quite different from brewing tea for drinking, because if you’re evaluating a tea (which is what it looks like, since their cup is the Indian-style tea tasting cup), you’ll want to draw out all the negative flaws of a tea as well. If you’re brewing for drinking, you might want to experiment with shorter steeps and then lengthen it according to taste, rather than start with 4 minutes and discover that the tea might be too strong/bitter for you.

Overall Thoughts on the Tea 101 Online Workshop

So I’ve spent the last week slowly trying the teas in the box, and I think they are decent straight teas for a beginner. The ten teabags seem to be more about introducing their range of teas, so if you’re keen to try out the flavoured blends that Bird & Blend has, you’ll enjoy that.

I’m not the hugest fan of their video (see above for the parts I disagree with!) but most of the information that they are giving are the type in other Tea 101 books and I think it would provide a non-overwhelming introduction to tea.

In general, I would always choose an in-person tea class over an online one, mostly because as a beginner, I wouldn’t have made the teas properly and I like to ask questions. But given that we just spent the last year mostly at home because of a pandemic, I can see how a Tea 101 kit like this would have been helpful to people who decided to start exploring the world of tea during a lockdown.

I hope you found this review helpful! If you would like to support my tea habit, please consider buying me a cup of tea on ko-fi!