Blog

A few weeks ago our tea bowls, tea tins & tea napkins were picked for the Blog & Buy Sale #springwishlist.  The wish list http://stall.blogandbuysale.com is a curated list of the very best products available online.  The aim of the list is to pull together the ultimate list of creative products sold by independent artists and designers.  As you know we are great advocates of British design & this list just goes to show what a fantastic array of talent there is in the UK & beyond! We wanted to pick a few of our favourite items - so here goes....

We may have seemed quiet for a while but behind the scenes it has been all go at Comins Tea House. Our beautiful twin daughters arrived in August and since then we have been working every day to renovate our Georgian home and bring the previously redundant shop side back to life as our new teahouse. We cant wait to reveal the interior which has been created working with local craftspeople and where possible local materials - a real celebration of the best of British. Over the next few weeks you will see a transformation in our website and blog...

My journey started with a two-train trip out into the beautiful Japanese countryside. After the crowded hubbub of Osaka this was a welcome relief and gave a very different view of life in Japan. I left the train and met up with my wonderful host for the day, and we were soon on the way to her office deep in tea country. From the brief car journey her passion for Japanese tea was clear. On arrival, I was quickly made to feel at home. ‘Do you want to taste some tea?’ was one of the first questions to be asked....

This month we will be sharing the tales of how we sourced our fine teas from around the world. We'll explain how, through a combination of travel, visits to tea gardens and some very inspiring people, we developed our initial collection of loose leaf teas. To coincide with this we would like to hear from you about your own personal tea stories. It could be a weekly cup with your Grandma, a shared drink high up in the Himalayas or an inspirational meeting in a tea room. Anything goes! All entries to be emailed to us on info@cominsteahouse.co.uk by the end of March 2012. We will...

The story of our tea tin began with a visit to an antiques shop in Brussels, Belgium. After browsing the shop and not really being inspired by anything, we were about to leave when we noticed a large wooden cabinet in a corner. It was stacked full of small metal boxes, which in closer inspection were all embossed with numbers on their lids. Intrigued we picked one up and opened it revealing a scrap of paper. It was then the penny dropped. The piece of paper read ‘MARGARETS HOPE’, which we instantly knew as the famous tea estate in Darjeeling,...