TEAcher Gifts
With the end of the school year rapidly approaching, my mind is turing to gifts for the teachers in our lives. My son has had the same group of teachers for two years now and I would like to do something really great for them for teacher appreciation week next week. I'm considering either the iced ingenuiTEA or the personaliTEA. Here's my question for you folks: which would you choose and which tea(s) would you get with your choice for a teacher who is not a tea drinker? I have my own ideas, but I thought it would be fun to get yours!
My vote is for the ingenuiTEA starter set. It comes with a few starter teas, a tea brewing vessel, and a really cool book. If they are TOTALLY new to tea drinking, I recommend the flavors gift set. Maybe throw in a sample of another flavored green and perhaps a rooibos if they are sensitive to caffiene. If you want them to become interested in tea, you have to start with what they are familiar with.
Thanks, forky! I've given several of those as gifts in the past and you're right, they're always great as starter sets. I may, in the end, go that route, but each of the starter sets (black, green, flavors, herbal) gives me pause, in some way, for this particular group. And I personally detest rooibos so much that I just can't give it as a gift. 
I know it's my own shortcoming and it's really popular around here ....
I know it's my own shortcoming and it's really popular around here ....
Aw, no worries. It took me several tries to warm up to rooibos, and I was only so persistent because I love drinking tea at night, but my insomnia goes berserk if I have caffeine (even a trace!) after about 6pm or so. I still prefer heavily flavored rooibos.
My vote would be for an ingenuiTEA over a personaliTEA. Some friends of mine recently got their mitts on an ingenuiTEA and literally can't stop playing with it. They even have a COLLECTION of teapots...they just never seemed to use them. Getting a starter set is awfully tempting...an array of teas and a book for the same price as the pot is always nice.
The teas included in the black starter set (Earl Grey Bravo, English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast, and Yunnan Jig) are very consumer-friendly: the first three teas are the most popular in the English-influenced tea world, and Yunnan Jig is simply delicious.
If there's just one tea in the the set that gives you pause (say you liked everything in the herbal set except for the rooibos) then I guess you could order a different sample to replace the one you didn't like. Most of the herbals and all of the flavored samples (black, green, white, and oolong) run $2 each...if you were going to get 4 starter sets, that would just be an extra $8. You'd end up with a nice gift that would cost you a bit less than other alternatives.
Just a thought.
My vote would be for an ingenuiTEA over a personaliTEA. Some friends of mine recently got their mitts on an ingenuiTEA and literally can't stop playing with it. They even have a COLLECTION of teapots...they just never seemed to use them. Getting a starter set is awfully tempting...an array of teas and a book for the same price as the pot is always nice.
The teas included in the black starter set (Earl Grey Bravo, English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast, and Yunnan Jig) are very consumer-friendly: the first three teas are the most popular in the English-influenced tea world, and Yunnan Jig is simply delicious.
If there's just one tea in the the set that gives you pause (say you liked everything in the herbal set except for the rooibos) then I guess you could order a different sample to replace the one you didn't like. Most of the herbals and all of the flavored samples (black, green, white, and oolong) run $2 each...if you were going to get 4 starter sets, that would just be an extra $8. You'd end up with a nice gift that would cost you a bit less than other alternatives.
Just a thought.