Tea Setup

One of the best parts about this move and moving in with my roommate is discovering a new option for storing my tea and other hot drink stuff. She is a primarily coffee girl who loves tea, I am a primarily tea girl who now also loves coffee, so we balance. She had this amazing cart that I just knew would make an amazing drink station!

Behold! I feel so grown up.

Now, it has taken this over a year to get this awesome. The cart and the way it is organized was one of the first things we set up in the new place, before we even had a couch for our living room. We always envisioned having shelving to display teaware and coffee items, but only had one smaller bookshelf that didn't really "go" with the color of the cart. In a stroke of luck, earlier this spring, some people were moving out of their apartment and put these two heavy duty bookshelves by our dumpster! My roommate and I ran out in the beginning of a hail storm to get the first one and when we saw the movers with the second, we directed them straight to our place. Given the age of my building and how most of my furniture is hand me downs, the old school shelves fit right in!

We still use the little kitchen cart, mostly to store my steeper on so it doesn't mess up the wood of the other cart if it drips, and our honey stash. I LOVE lavender honey and rose honey!

We use the lower shelves as a hodgepodge. I store the teas I am reaching for most often to ice, as I am trying to mostly whittle my collection down to near nothing before I rebuild with less old teas. I also store coffee filters, empty tea canisters of teas I plan to replenish in the fall (hello chai!), and we store coffee, the occasional coffee travel mug, and random teapots that don't really "fit" on our more nicely curated shelves.

We have a Chinese themed shelf, with a lot of red tones, and a brown/black coffee shelf with our most loved coffee preparing devices. A red stovetop espresso maker was in use at the time of this picture, but it usually lives here.

The top of the cart includes my mug of the day, the tea I am brewing, cups, Keurig, kettle, sugar, and the teas I am working on at the moment to finish. The cups are adorable, but really are so small I never personally use them. I have used them when we have guests who all want tea at once.

The bottom of the rack holds 95% of the tea in these baskets. The upper right hand basket holds scales mostly, and a few teabag teas I save to use at school. The middle top shelf are my absolute favorite teas, most of which I am working on finishing because they are getting old, and the companies no longer exist. The teas on the upper and lower left have not been tasted yet. The teas on the bottom right are teas I have tried before and enjoy, the basket in the middle contains tea I have designated as iced.

Ultimately, I would like to reduce the tea to one row, so I can keep extra containers and such on the bottom, and just have higher tea turnover.

These are my favorite shelves. A blue/purple focus, and a green/yellow/aqua focus. These items are a combination of mine and my roommate's. Temporarily, there are also green and yellow tea tins that will ultimately go live in my bedroom once I drink all the tea inside!

These shelves are the remainder of the bunch. Leftover tea tins, tea brewing supplies, my roommate's stash of teabags, as most of the tea she drinks is in teabag form, and our handful of cookbooks.

Overall, I love our setup. I love the teaware being decor, I love having a dedicated brewing space, and storage that for the first time ever actually works for me! The kitchen cart was from IKEA back in the day. They have a similar cart, but it is not the exact same. The new version is a bit slimmer and shorter. That being said, if my roomie moved out tomorrow, the first thing I would do is go buy it! It looks great, fits baskets super well, and is a great size!

Steepster and Tea Organization

Today marks one year on the tea lover's haven, Steepster. I have to say it is one of the more awesome discoveries of the year while also being the most cruel. I have spent a lot on tea, and my stash is nuts thanks to exposure to more high quality brands that are often small and not very well known. In that time, I have completed 423 tasting notes in that year, though admittedly a solid chunk are compiled from other records I have from tea reviews past (mostly Adagio). I am excited to see where this next year takes me.

I am also checking in about my tea pare-down goals I introduced at the end of last summer. At that time, I had 80 samples and 68 tins. The goal was 20 sample sizes and 30 full tins. I currently still have 68 full sized tins, but only have 43 samples. I take this as decent news - it means that knowing I bought a TON of tea, I was drinking it and/or rehoming the things I didn't like at the same speed as I purchased it. And more, I am drinking samples far faster than I am acquiring them. With some mindfulness, I am confident this year will show progress in reducing even more.

In the spirit of the new year, I reorganized some things. I also got my first little teapot. It has a mesh strainer inside it, is a pretty jade green color, and holds two mugs worth of tea. This has revolutionized my tea drinking as I am now able to steep loose leaf tea easily while I am dog sitting (I have been house and dog sitting for the past 3 weeks straight), and able to make a big pot and sit and do other things. Overall it cuts down time brewing.

I redid my cabinets. Right now as they stand, they house nearly all of the tins I have. It is organized in a specific way, and about 2/3 of the way full. The organizational system doesn't work as effectively if it is any more full, so I think what is inside is my real goal for knowing I have just enough.

The bottom shelf are all teas I prefer to make iced - many tins are on their sides. On the right, there are older teas I need to use up first. The pink box in the middle hold all of the tea samples I have tasted and am keeping. The left side holds the iced teas that are newer. The top shelf holds my hot teas. The ones on the right are ones that are full sized that I haven't tasted yet. The ones on the left are ones I have. The ones in the middle are my favorite teas so I can find them easily. The whole top shelf is also organized by having the newer teas in the back in their sections, and the older ones in the front.

I keep a small stash on my countertop of things I am trying to finish. There are usually a couple samples here too. Right now, I have some lavender honey I am trying to finish. Yes, I also have a small excess of honey.

I have an excess that I am trying to cut down on. This small box holds all the teas that I am not going to bother rehoming in a tin - there isn't enough to warrant it, and many are Butiki and are going out of business. These will be consumed long before they go stale. Many of these are night in light-proof packaging, also requiring that they be consumed sooner rather than later.

This is the true overstock. The large box on the left are samples. Since this picture was taken, I received my golden tips subscription so there are more now. The small Adagio box holds samples that I know I enjoy, but that aren't open yet. I really try to make sure teas not living in tins, or open samples exposed to air get priority. The box on the right contains all of the sealed, airtight teas that are waiting for tin space in the cabinet. It is a medium sized box. The giant bag in the middle is a huge amount of Blood Orange tisane from Adagio, one of my favorite iced teas, waiting for tin space.

I am feeling great about the start to this year, tea included.