"Good tea should be for everyone, so I do the tasting and the explaining, and write it all down in plain English, unpacking any jargon along the way."
Valerie, Founder and Tea Sommelier
About Team Tea
Good tea, chosen and explained by a Tea Sommelier
WHY 'TEAM' TEA?
From a distant hillside to your kitchen table, we are all part of one community, one team, of tea
The "Team" in Team Tea isn't just me. A single cup passes through more skilled hands than you might imagine: the people who grow it, tend it, pick it and make it, often on the other side of the world, long before it reaches my kettle or yours. And then there is you, the person who brews it and enjoys it at the end of that long chain. It's why looking after the people at the growing end matters to me as much as the tea itself.
How I went from engineer to Tea Sommelier
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2013 · Oxford
I left Formula 1 engineering for an MBA at the University of Oxford and fell for the messy, addictive business of building things from scratch. I loved the work. I just hadn't found the thing I truly cared about.
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Late 2017 · THE REVELATION
I booked a two-day introduction to tea at the UK Tea Academy, mostly because I can never resist learning something new. It was a revelation. I thought I knew tea. What I didn't know was far more interesting than I'd imagined.
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2018 · THE START OF Team Tea
Freshly qualified as a Tea Sommelier, I started Team Tea to build a bridge from the teabag most of us grew up with to the world of speciality tea, explained so that anyone can enjoy it, with any jargon unpacked along the way.
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Today
You'll usually find me at Oxfordshire markets, with my dog Elvis supervising from under the table, and some of my teas now live at the Ashmolean Museum.
26 GREAT TASTE AWARDS
OVER 43% ORGANIC
CHOSEN BY A TEA SOMMELIER
My teas have won 26 Great Taste Awards, so I’m fairly confident they’re good
What matters to me
Where our teas come from
Our teas are grown all over the world, brought in through specialist importers. It’s always a conversation: sometimes I go looking for a particular tea, garden, or region; sometimes they come to me, excited about a new garden. 43% of the range is organic-certified, and every importer I work with is a member of the Ethical Tea Partnership, which works to improve life and conditions for the people who grow and pick our tea.
Helping you find your favourite
Taste is personal. "Good" and “right for you” aren’t the same thing. My favourite might not be yours, and that’s completely fine; if you don’t enjoy a tea, that doesn’t make it a bad tea, just not your tea.
The more you taste, the clearer your sense of what you love becomes, and once you understand what’s in the cup, you start to spot the patterns and predict what you’ll enjoy next. That’s really what Team Tea is for: not to tell you what’s best, but to help you find what’s best for you.
Treading lightly
I try to run Team Tea gently: tea sourced ethically, leftover leaf on the compost, and behind the scenes, solar, ground-source heat, and a fair bit more I won’t bore you with here. Here’s the honest version, including the bits still on my to-do list.
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