Bird & Blend, 41 Gardner St, Brighton, BN1 1UN
It was my birthday last weekend, and I have now achieved my lifelong dream of attending a Bird & Blend Tea Blending Workshop.
I say “lifelong”, but, you know, it’s possible that I haven’t actually nurtured this ambition since 1974. It has been a dream of mine for a few years, though, certainly for longer than the lifetime of the Tea Fancier website. So that still counts.
Bird & Blend run these tea blending workshops throughout the year in multiple locations. And if you are the sort of person who enjoys talking about tea while drinking copious amounts of the stuff, then I urge you to check it out. And when I say copious amounts of tea, I mean it. Even for me, it was a lot. I was totally buzzing by the end of the evening.
There were a whole bunch of tea samples to try, a tea-based cocktail and mocktail menu, and of course, all the teas on the tea wall. I had a couple of mugs of some black tea and chocolate blends I’d been meaning to try out.
The session we attended was in Brighton’s North Lane. This is the site of Bird & Blend’s very first tea shop, so it felt like it had some cultural significance. I dragged my gentleman friend Andy along, and he doesn’t share my passion for tea but is very open-minded and happily partook of all the tea samples.
It was hosted by Sandi and Lylah, two really delightful Bird & Blend tea professionals. Sandi took us through a rundown of all the different tea types, and there were, I think, 13 different teas to taste, running the gamut of white, green, black, oolong and herbally not-teas.
The matcha section was my favourite bit. We tried three different matcha blends, and Lylah expertly demonstrated how to make them, including the W-shaped whisking business. I mean to have more matcha in my life. I know I like it, but I am weirdly intimidated by it. I have several Bird & Blend matchas in the tea stash, and the session strengthened my resolve to jolly well get on and try them.
There was a lot of cold-brewing and latte-making in evidence, as Sandi and Lylah demonstrated the multiple ways in which Bird & Blend tea leaves can be deployed. This is not something I have a lot of time for normally, preferring straightforward tea infusing with hot water and a splash of vegan milk-alternative where appropriate.
It was actually quite exciting having things that had been steeped in lemonade or made entirely with oat milk. I discovered that making a latte out of Cream Egg tea with coconut milk tastes almost exactly like Bailey’s.
The actual blend-your-own-tea bit of the proceedings at the end was, to be honest, a bit more haphazard than I was expecting. Basically, a bunch of tins containing black tea, rooibos, cocoa nibs, spices, rose petals and the like were laid out for us, and we were given three empty sachets and set loose like small children at a Woolworths pick-and-mix counter.
Successful tea blending is a specialised and rare skill. My attempts of bunging stuff in a bag with no notion of what kinds of ratios I should be employing were highly unlikely to result in nuanced and well-balanced teas. Maybe Bird & Blend do this on purpose. They don’t want us to make anything too nice in case we don’t need them anymore. Nevertheless, I will review the results of my efforts in a separate post.
All in all, the Bird & Blend tea blending workshop was a lot of fun. At £40 a head, it’s not cheap, but you do get two and a half hours’ worth of entertainment and unlimited tea for your money, plus a 10% discount on anything you might want to purchase in the shop afterwards. Sandi and Lylah were both lovely (Bird & Blend do seem to have a policy of employing absolutely lovely people, I’ve found), and I would happily recommend the experience to fellow tea enthusiasts.
