Kimberley's Kyusu

Hey there Teacups! Happy National Tea Day & of course Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it. I know that I don’t normally post on a Sunday but with it being National Tea Day I wanted to finally do something that I have been wanting to do for a while. So today I want to share the story of My Tea Journey (so far) with you all.

I suppose you could say that my tea journey started when I was a child, because like almost all English children I would drink tea even at a young age. At the start it was weak but as the years went on the tea got stronger. Back then it was tea bags, mostly PG Tips or Yorkshire Tea, which I still have a nostalgic love for and would never turn them down if I was offered a cup.

My loose leaf tea journey however started mid 2014 when I visited T2 Tea Meadowhall for the first time and bought myself my first box of loose leaf. That year for my birthday my fiancé bought me one of their Perfect Steeper’s and some more of their tea (the Perfect Steeper set came with samples). He also got me some of their Creme Brûlée and Caramel Brownie tea (he knew I was a huge dessert tea fan even then). Since then I have had nothing but loose leaf tea and I have never looked back. As a result of that first visit to T2 Meadowhall and receiving those gifts, in April 2015 I started my blog and decided I wanted to immerse myself in the world of tea and everything it had to offer and write about it for as long as I possibly could. I suppose you could say the only reason I started my blog is because of my amazing fiancé introducing me to T2 so he deserves the biggest of thank yous and much more.

This April marks 4 years since I started my blog and looking back it’s probably one of the best decisions I have ever made. I have had so much fun over the years learning about tea and getting to collaborate with so many amazing companies big and small. This year (very recently actually) I actually got to collaborate with T2 and review some of their matchas and their Matcha flask and It kind of felt like everything had come full circle and I still can’t quite believe that my favourite tea company wanted to collaborate with me it’s crazy. I never though even one person would want to read my blog and there is over 563 of you that do this morning my blog hit 30K total views which may have made me a little emotional. For me this has never been about the numbers I would have carried on writing even if nobody was reading because I’m passionate about what I do, but the fact that people actually engage with what I write means the absolute world to me.

Being able to collaborate with so many amazing tea companies from all over the world has enabled me to not only learn so much about tea but its showed me that there are so many delicious teas out there, some of which I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to try before hand. Growing up drinking black tea meant that when I started drinking loose leaf teas I wanted new things, but I still wanted to stay in that black tea box. There’s no way that I would have been brave enough to try anything like Oolong, White tea, Matcha or Pu’erh at the start of my tea journey, but I find myself drinking and enjoying them all on a regular basis now. (The moral of that story is be brave and try all the teas you never know what you might end up loving). Black tea and Black tea blends will always be my absolute favourites and I still reach for them over everything else but there’s a lot more variety in my tea ‘stash/collection’ than there ever was before.

One of my main aims when starting this blog was to use it to find other tea lovers and make friends with them so I had a group of people who I could talk tea with. While it did take a little time, I have honestly found some amazing tea friends over the years and I couldn’t be more thankful for them. They may not live close and most of them I will probably never get to meet but they are there at the drop of a hat whenever I want to get nerdy about tea or when I’m over excited about a new release from one of my favourite companies and I just have to talk about it. I’ve even made friends with a few smaller tea business owners and tea event organisers which I never thought would happen but I really enjoy having an insight into these parts of the tea industry. I hope that within the next few years I can make many more tea friends and I can continue to learn more about the world of tea.

Whether you have been reading my blog since I started or you only started reading my blog yesterday, thank you. The fact that you are all enjoying the content that I create enough to constantly engage with it and keep coming back each and every time I post is mind-blowing. Without you all I wouldn’t have been able to do so many of the things I have done with my blog over the last few years and I can’t put into words how thankful I truly am.

Speak to you all again soon. Happy Steeping – Kimberley