Swapping Tea with Friends

Did you buy a tea that you just don’t enjoy as much?

Or perhaps you bought too much of a single tea and now you worry that you’ll get tired of it?

I don’t live in a country with a large tea community, and I have very few friends that are tea lovers.

But that doesn’t stop me from being able to swap teas.

It’s quite fun.

Why should you swap teas?

Sometimes I don’t enjoy a certain tea as much, but a friend does. So we both win if I exchange that tea for one that he doesn’t like as much as me.

At least it’s more economical than buying a new one.

This can easily happen for specific types of tea.

For example, I usually drink much more green tea (mainly sencha) as opposed to black tea.

So I tend to have more black tea that I’m not drinking.

That’s when I can exchange it with a friend that drinks much more black tea than me.

Another type of tea that I don’t drink as much is white tea.

But I do want to keep most types of tea in my stash.

That stash keeps getting bigger, unfortunately. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Other times, it’s just a matter of wanting to share and try something new.

We might both have new teas. Instead of drinking the whole package, we can exchange half of them and enjoy two different teas .

Some teas are initially delicious, but for some reason I quickly tire of them.

This happened to me with smoked teas. The flavor is so strong, that after some time I just preferred to go back to lighter tasting teas.

However, I managed to trade them with a friend that had never tasted smoked tea before and liked it.

You can trade other things for tea

I’ve also swapped food and even alcohol for tea.

For example, I once traded teaware that I wasn’t using for tea.

Another time I made a big batch of sweets (I like to cook as a hobby), and then traded half of them for part of a sencha that a friend had brought from Japan.

Right now I don’t have any kamairicha nor tamaryokucha, for example.

I would gladly trade some of the teas I have in order to get some of those.

Online tea swapping

I’ve never tried this, but it sounds fun.

There may be more risk involved since you can’t look and smell the tea directly, but at least you can have a wider variety of tea to choose from.

Have you traded in this manner with anyone?