Tea Purchase Gone Bad - What To Do

Hello hello!

The world if tea is huge, which means theres a lot of tea out there thats ready to be purchased. But what happens when you buy a tea that you end up not liking? We’ve all experienced a tea that we ended up not liking, and we’ve learned to never buy it again. But now that you have a tea that you don't like, what can you learn from it? What do you do with it? Let's find out!

What To Do

There are several things you can do with tea you end up not liking. First, you can always regift the tea! This is one of the easiest things you can do with tea, but it mainly depends on the person you’re gifting it too. Earlier last year, a popular tea company was about to sell out on a highly rated black tea blend, and since it was about to sell out (and I thought I was going to miss my opportunity), I ended up buying three ounces of it. When it arrived in the mail, I realized three things. One, I don’t even like black tea. Two, I didn’t even like the black tea that I bought. Three, this tea company re-released this tea blend so I basically bought it on an impulse for nothing. So what did I do with the all of the tea that I had left? Well, I have a tea friend who LOVES black tea, so during a tea exchange, I handed it off to him. Thankfully, he ended up loving it.

Besides regifting bad tea, there are other things you can do with it. Before handing off your tea, I highly recommend brewing it several different ways. With the 3oz of black tea that I bought, I brewed it two different ways, grand-pa style and gong-fu style. Despite that I don't like black tea, I didn’t want to spend money on this tea for nothing, so I experimented with it. More times than not, I’ve had a tea that I hated when brewed gong-fu style, but loved grand-pa style. So if you normally drink tea using one method, try brewing it in a different method.

Lastly, I recommend using your tea as fertilizer for your garden. I’m an active gardener and I often use tea as fertilizer. I often take tea leaves and mix it in the soil with a shovel. Or, I’ll grind up the tea leaves into dust and brush it over the top of my garden. Tea makes for an excellent fertilizer, and if you have a tea that you absolutely hate, and don’t have any friends to gift it off to, then use it in your garden! After all, It came from the Earth so it must be good for it. And if you don’t have a garden, then you’re basically stuck with it. Or use your garbage disposal.

How to Avoid Bad Tea

A lot of times, you don’t have to learn from a large mistake. When buying tea, it’s easy to get lost in the seller's description of it. Or maybe a certain tea was given a good review by a blogger and struck you as interesting. However the case may be, one way you to avoid making a costly mistake is to sample a tea. Many tea companies offer smaller samples of the teas they sell, and more times than not, sample sizes are on the cheaper side. A good example is a lot of puer tea companies. A lot of companies that sell puer will often sell samples, so that way if you want to try a certain puer, you can easily buy a sample without buying an entire beeng.

However, not all tea shops offer sample sizes of their tea, so what can you do now? First and foremost, most tea companies are here to sell a product. So I would highly recommend contacting the tea company their self and request trying a sample size. Most of the time, I’ve never run into any trouble ordering sample sizes from tea companies, especially when you message them.

Taking a Risk

So what do you do if a tea company doesn’t offer a sample size of a tea, and you’re curious to try it anyway? Well, sometimes, the best thing to do is take a risk and buy the tea anyways. Sometimes, the best thing to do is explore and try a new tea. It's not guaranteed that you’re going to like everything that you try, but sometimes exploring and trying new things is the best way to expand your palate. Besides, trying new things is the best way to discover that you like something! Imagine the world of possibilities that could be out there waiting for you, and all you have to do is take that first sip…

“Blissfully Tea Drunk”