While drinking tea is one of humanity’s longest-standing habits (thousands of years at last count), how the world enjoys tea has changed exponentially in the past decades. For three of those decades, The Tea Centre has witnessed the introduction of gift-ready packaging and the accommodation of convenience, adding teabags and gift boxes to our menu. But if the past thirty years have taught us anything, it’s that some acts of service—like scooping loose leaf tea by hand—are timeless.
All the way back in 1993, we took the humble scoop and built out our first boutique Sydney tea shop from there. We added an iconic tea wall to store and scoop our loose leaf from, scales to give shoppers the freedom to choose how many grams of tea they take home, and scouted only the best tea lovers to staff our shop.
Just like our beloved Camellia sinensis plant, The Tea Centre grew from the ground up. To bring it back to basics, here are the reasons why you should visit our shops and enjoy loose leaf tea scooped by hand.
Easier to determine the quality of your tea.
While The Tea Centre doesn’t prescribe to the idea that loose leaf is automatically better or healthier than teabags, there’s no hiding quality when scooping tea by hand. Therefore, some consumers prefer to drink loose leaf tea because it's easier to determine quality.
Boutique merchant tea retailers like The Tea Centre use the same tea grade across loose leaf and teabags. We also ensure that every part of our teabag packaging—from the pyramid silk bag to the outer carton or tin—is either reusable, biodegradable, or recyclable.
However, some commercial teabags will bypass the above process, hiding their use of poor tea grades (dustings or fannings) or quality (poorly blended) inside opaque teabags made using harsh glues and unsustainable materials.
Showcases the best of our tea wall.
Did you know that The Tea Centre has over 150 loose leaf teas in our iconic tea wall at any given time? To put that in perspective, only our top 25 bestselling teas are available in tea bags!
Simply put, there’s a whole world of tea to explore that’s only available in loose leaf form due to seasonality or harvest constraints.
Some unique teas—like the tightly rolled Buddha’s Tears, compressed pu-erh or powdered matcha—are only available (and most beautiful) in their loose leaf form!
Scooping by hand and plucking teas from our tea wall also arms our sippers with more information (appearance, smell, even taste when opting for takeaway tea) before they purchase.
An approachable way to order tea.
Having over 150 teas to choose from can be exciting…but sometimes overwhelming! Luckily, we mitigate this by staffing every Tea Centre store with local experts that can help find the perfect tea for you.
Our knowledgeable guides into the world of tea are the unsung heroes of The Tea Centre. Our wonderful and passionate staff are the hands picking the tins off the wall and scooping your teas in-store! For first-time visitors specifically shopping for loose leaf tea, our staff will walk you through the tea categories on our tea wall, match tea to palate and lifestyle, and offer smell/sight samples.
Once we find the perfect tea for you, our staff then recommend a starting amount (50-100 grams is a good starting point when trying out a new tea!) and scoop your tea by hand into a recyclable paper pouch for you to take home. Or if you don’t have any tins at home to safely store your tea in, The Tea Centre has selected pre-packed gift tins or tea storage containers to shop as well!
It’s loose leaf tea served the traditional way.
Call us nostalgic, but there’s a simple beauty to scooping loose leaf by hand. It’s a personable, interactive and intentional approach that puts the ‘service’ into serving tea.
While many European tea shops still provide loose leaf in this regard (our Swedish co-founder brought the practice to our shores!), it’s still a relatively unknown experience in Australia.
While you can enjoy a similar feeling when visiting the Sunday markets or family-run delicatessen, The Tea Centre is unique in being one of the very few brick-and-mortar retailers still scooping tea in your local arcade or shopping centre.
Despite all the challenges to the art—rental costs, rise of e-commerce, the efficiency of pre-packaged goods, hustle culture and (though we love them) tea bags—The Tea Centre hopes to provide this service for many more years to come.
See our store pages here to find the closest Tea Centre shop to you.