Intermediate Tea Program by Tomislav Podreka

I was recently speaking with a friend who was trying to grasp the concept of premium-grade teas and how they could differ so much from "regular" teas. The only way I could make this apparent to him was by taking him back to the bad old days of experimenting with alcohol. If you drink only to get drunk, taste and quality do not matter. But your taste buds should evolve and mature as you do, and the wine you drink today is, for the most part, in no way similar to the wine you once drank, except that it comes from grapes.

With this in mind, a café owner or restaurateur should understand the reason to continuously revisit a tea program. Once a decent program is up and running, customers will develop a taste for more. This is a natural curiosity for the most part and is also spurred along by competition. Why would you open a business without wanting to improve on similar businesses in the area?

Development is the key concept. All parties involved will develop and grow much like a family—by leaning on one another for advice and life lessons and the benefit of experience. As the owner/manager of an establishment, you are the parental figure, your staff are siblings, and your customers are the younger brood and grandchildren. This approach to responsible development has the additional benefit of creating bonds between all parties. Nobody is seen as simply "staff" or "the customer."

So, one step at a time you have a program in place that is moving along, but you would like to expand and improve. First look at what is already working for you—basic "breakfast" blends, flavored tea, herbal infusions, etc. Take Earl Grey as an example. You currently offer it in tea bags, and it is the most popular tea you carry. Your most obvious step would be to upgrade to loose-leaf Earl Grey, but you should ask yourself certain questions first:

• What are pertinent differences between tea bags and loose-leaf tea?

• How do I conveniently make the transition, especially if my business relies on take-out as opposed to seated service?

• How do I ascertain a good loose-leaf tea from a mediocre one?

These seemingly simple questions must be addressed in order to effectively answer them whenever they arise. The first people to query your decision will most likely be your staff. Being able to successfully teach your staff will assure you of a relatively painless educational transition for your customers.

Your best friend during this time should be your vendor(s). Rely on vendors to supply answers. Look around to see what others are doing. And read. Trade magazines will provide insight into popular solutions and innovations, and books will help with basic understanding and history. If time is short, allocate "browsing" to partners and staff who can skim materials and bring relevant information to your attention.

A simple teaching technique for yourself, your staff and customers is to create parallels between tea and wine. Assure everyone involved that they are not learning an entirely different vocabulary of flavors, but that they would simply be identifying the same flavors, just in a different medium. For example, when tasting a hay note in wine, the same note can be found in tea, and it will remind you of hay when you taste it, but the wine and tea do not taste the same. If they can describe a hay profile, then the next step is to ask, "Well, isn’t hay a sweet note?" Voila! You have just established sweetness, something that is not obviously associated by the novice, but is a key profile in many good teas.

Taste is the most obvious of analytical senses and will often be the sense most of your patrons and staff will approach first. What most of these people do not realize is that on the way to the cup they are already enjoying the aroma of the beverage. Whether realized or not, the sense of smell is already insinuating its influence. Start by encouraging your people to savor the aroma. This not only helps everyone establish better sensory evaluation techniques (leading to a better appreciation and understanding of your endeavors to improve), but it also creates an atmosphere of lingering decadence. Just picture a room full of people deeply inhaling the wondrous aroma of tea!

This simple lesson in sensory awareness will add value to the experiences of your customers and will forever embed you in their memories. Imagine also the effect on new customers as they watch established patrons wallowing in the superb appreciation of your product. What better recommendation?

Remember, there is 10 times more memory in the nose than on the palate, and the better the memory, the better the association to your place of business.

Now that you have started to move your community along the road to better tea, you can move past the introduction of a loose-leaf Earl Grey and other basics and start to take the approach that flavored and blended teas (like the majority of "breakfast" teas) are stepping stones to greater tea awareness.

It must be stressed that there is no such thing as a lesser tea, only a preferred tea. This means that when enlightening yourself, your staff and your patrons, never lose sight of what people enjoy, including what you prefer to drink. You will greatly diminish the experience of tea drinking if you force yourself to drink a "better" tea at the expense of your own enjoyment, or, for that matter, project a demeaning attitude toward a customer’s choice. This is a gradual endeavor, and you must take great pains not to make your patrons uncomfortable about what they presently enjoy. The idea is to grow your business, which means the progress is not always obvious.

By all means be a snob, but carry humor and humility with your snobbery!

So the final step from the introduction of your stalwart basic assortment is to be able to make the transition from, say, an Irish Breakfast to a Single-Estate Assam. A simple introduction to Assam is to point out that the original flavor profile for Irish Breakfast is Assam. English Breakfast, on the other hand, had its beginnings in small-leaf, wiry Keemun. These little pieces of history illustrate why a person would bother trying something that is seemingly alien to her.

You can play a simple game with your patrons and staff with flavored tea by selecting an unflavored, unblended tea of the day and asking them to choose which flavored tea it most resembles. This builds better flavor awareness and greater appreciation of the depth of flavor that exists in stand-alone varietal tea.

Be aware that tastes change with seasons, and you can take advantage of this by selling the seasonality—warmer flavors for cold months, lighter flavors for warm months and fresh flavors for spring.

Another aspect to upgrading your service is to upgrade the vessel in which you steep the tea, i.e. the teapot. Try making a simple change to a more elegant style or a pot that more effectively handles the separation of leaf from water, be it a lift-out basket of wire mesh or porcelain or a plunger infuser that does the job without ever leaving the teapot. The effect is the same—the stimulation and appreciation of your patrons.

For those who offer take-out service, try adding basic unfilled paper filters that you can fill with a tea of choice while your patrons watch. This style of service goes a long way in reassuring customers about your claims of freshness and quality.

If you want to step up a little more, take a look at your hot water dispenser. You may want to add a filtration system, if you don’t have one already. Or maybe your quality could be improved by simply increasing the temperature of the water.

For your part, the price difference in adding a few more teas or upgrading your service is nominal—not enough to deter you from making the effort. The return on your investment in time will be apparent not only in tea sales, but in a renewed interest in your business each time something new is brought to your patron’s attention.

When staff members are empowered with a little knowledge, they work more effectively and confidently, and they are more committed to you, hopefully reducing turnover and retraining.

Upgrading a tea program extends itself further than simply tea; it helps with the appreciation for everything you represent in your business. The pride you will develop with knowledge will become infectious and profitable.