Behind the Kettle: Where the Magic Happens

There’s the part of Steep Right Up you see when you walk through the door: the shelves lined with teas and herbs, the kettles brewing, the Tea Fusion Bar pouring up something delicious, and all those little bags of tea waiting to go home with someone.

And then there’s what happens behind the kettle.

Welcome to The Tea Lab.

This is where a whole lot of Steep Right Up begins.

The Tea Lab is our working space; the place where tea leaves, herbs, flowers, roots, spices, fruits, and more make their way out of their individual containers and, sometimes after a fair amount of experimenting, become something entirely new. Sometimes the experiment gets scrapped and never makes it to the shelf.

It isn't a staged little corner created for pretty photographs. It's a real working tea lab. There are scales and scoops, blending trays and measuring cups, ingredient containers, half-finished ideas, notes, labels, bags, and usually at least one thing sitting somewhere because I told myself, I'll put that away in a minute.

Sometimes I even do.

Where the Blending Happens

Our working inventory lives here in the Tea Lab, ready for blending, while excess inventory is stored separately in a cool, dark space until we need it.

And when I say we have ingredients to work with, I mean a lot of ingredients.

Across Steep Right Up, we work with a collection of more than 500 individual elements that can potentially make their way into a blend. That includes pure teas with nothing added, single herbs and botanicals, dried fruits, sweet inclusions, spices, and natural flavor extracts. Some are familiar favorites; others may sit quietly on the shelf until just the right idea comes along.

That's part of what makes the Tea Lab so much fun. Creating a blend isn't simply choosing a tea and adding a flavor. It's having this enormous palette of tastes, aromas, textures, and colors available and figuring out which ones belong together—and, just as importantly, which ones don't.

The Tea Lab is where all of those individual ingredients finally meet.

Some days that means making fresh batches of established Steep Right Up blends. Ingredients are weighed, combined, mixed, and packaged before eventually making their way out to the retail shelves.

Other days, things get a little more interesting.

Those are the days when the Tea Lab becomes exactly what its name suggests…..a lab.

An idea might start with a particular tea base. Or an herb. Or a flavor I can't get out of my head. Sometimes I'm trying to create something very specific; other times I'm simply curious what will happen when a few ingredients meet in the cup.

Then comes the experimenting.

A little more of this……..

A little less of that……….

Nope. Definitely too much of that………

Back to the scale………..

Brew it. Taste it. Change it. Brew it again.

And sometimes, after all of that, the answer is still: absolutely not.

That's part of creating blends too.

Not every experiment becomes something you'll find on the shelves. Some ideas need tweaking. Some get put aside and revisited later. Some lead to an entirely different blend than the one I thought I was creating in the first place.

And every once in a while, everything falls into place, and I take that first sip and think, Yep. That's the one. And BAM, a new favorite of mine is born (this is why I can’t actually tell you which blend is my favorite……I have quite a few favorites!!!)

Those are pretty good Tea Lab days.

And Then It Goes in the Book

Once a blend is exactly where I want it, there's one more very important step: it goes in The Tea Lab recipe book.

Or, more accurately these days, the Tea Lab recipe books.

What started as one book of recipes for our house blends eventually got so full that we had to split it into three. Inside are the formulas that let us recreate the blends you know from one batch to the next; the exact ingredients, proportions, and other notes we need when it's time to make another batch.

Those books are working documents. They're not pristine display pieces sitting decoratively on a shelf. They live in the Tea Lab, get opened while we're working, and have been part of batch after batch of tea.

Once the recipe is established, making a fresh batch becomes a different kind of Tea Lab day. Out come the ingredients, scales, and blending trays. We measure everything according to the formula, but instead of creating one large batch and then portioning it into individual bags, we blend each 2 oz (57 g) bag individually. It takes a little more time, but there's a reason for it: blending in bag-sized batches helps ensure that every bag contains the proper proportion of every ingredient. From the first bag of a batch to the last, we want the blend, and ultimately the cup you brew at home, to be as consistent as possible.

And then comes one of those strangely satisfying stages of the process: rows of freshly blended tea lined up and waiting for their labels.

From there, they're ready to leave the Tea Lab and make their way to the retail shelves and eventually, hopefully, into your teacup.

More Than a Blending Room

The Tea Lab has changed as Steep Right Up has evolved.

The photos you see here capture it at one particular point in its life. Since then, we've moved things around, changed containers, and reorganized the space as the shop and the way we use it have evolved.

Most notably, the Tea Lab is now also home to our Tea Fusion Bar.

So the same room where we create and tweak loose-leaf blends is now where we make tea by the cup: hot tea, iced tea, fruit and cream tea fusions, matcha drinks, and whatever else we've decided to play with.

Which, when you think about it, is rather fitting.

The Tea Fusion Bar is really another form of the experimentation that has always happened back here. Instead of creating a dry loose-leaf blend for the shelves, we're combining teas, flavors, and ingredients to create something you can enjoy right then and there.

The room has evolved, but its purpose really hasn't.

It's still a place to blend, experiment, taste, create, and occasionally make a glorious mess.

So, What Is Behind the Kettle?

That's exactly why I wanted Behind the Kettle to have its own place here in the Journal.

There's a lot more to a tea shop than what eventually lands on the shelf.

Some ideas work, and some don't. New ingredients to explore, blends to create, recipes to tweak, products to test, displays to rearrange, classes to teach, and approximately 4,732 little decisions between “I have an idea…” and “Okay, it's ready.”

Behind the Kettle is where I'll share some of that with you.

You'll get peeks into the Tea Lab and the blending process. I'll take you along as we work on something new. You'll meet some of the people who help make things happen around here. There will be experiments, works in progress, shop projects, probably a few things that don't go according to plan, and stories that normally never make it onto a product page.

Because Steep Right Up isn't just the finished bag of tea sitting on the shelf.

It's everything that happened before that bag got there.

And this is where I'm going to show you some of it.

Welcome to Behind the Kettle.

This is where the magic happens.

Sam & Mel

My biggest cheerleader, steady support, and willing accomplice through all the ideas, experiments, changes, and adventures that have become Steep Right Up. I couldn’t tell the story of what happens Behind the Kettle without including the man who has been beside me through it all.