Tea Tasting!

Over the weekend we went to Harney & Sons "tasting room". Harney & Sons is a tea company, with a pretty wide variety of loose tea in all kinds of variety and flavors. At the tasting room, you can get an explanation of all the different sorts of flavors that Harney & Sons carries, and you can ask for recommendations. You can also smell any of the teas you are interested in, and you can even get them to brew you a cup to taste! If you love tea, this is quite a lot of fun. You can also buy every variety Harney & Sons carries, which is nice because then you don't have to pay shipping if your favorite flavor isn't around at any local stores. And for the more exotic flavors, this is quite possible. The tasting room is located just over the CT border in a little town called Hamilton. It's a cute little town that seems like it might be hoping for tourists. I'm not sure what else is out there tho besides the tea place and a glass blowing company. Is that enough to be a tourist destination? I'm not sure, but I did have fun, so if you get out that way, try to stop by!

Here's Midori looking at all the teas you can sample:



And here she is posing with some elegant tea cups:



Midori and Violette were both feeling a little put out that I didn't dress them up nicer for this trip, but what can I say? I just didn't think ahead! They should just feel lucky they are finally getting their "star turn" I suppose, since I haven't photographed them much in the past, and I still have a bunch of photos of them to post tomorrow (looking more in their element in those outfits and a more appropriate background!).

Here's another shot of the interior, with the "wedding tea" display. That tea smelled quite nice, but I didn't buy any... I had already selected too much, and well, I have no weddings coming up!



The tea flavors I eventually selected were "Paris" (which I highly recommend, it's been a long time favorite of mine - it's a black tea with a fruit flavor... I think it has grenadine in it? It probably won't appeal if you don't like sweet tea, but if you do, it's very nice!), "Valentine" (chocolate and rose!), Hot Cinnamon (which is black tea with actual pieces of cinnamon bark - it tastes a lot like a fireball) and "Brigitte's Blend" (which is a mix of ceylon and assam - so much more straightforward than my other choices!). I do like other sorts of tea than black tea, but for this trip I wanted all black tea because I had a lot of green, white and red teas already, but was running out of black.

And if you don't drink tea, you may not really care about all of that, so here is Violette posing in front of the florist next door:



And Midori posing with some cute red flowers in a garden (at a highway rest stop!):