Man. It’s been so long since I’ve written about tea here — on what started as a tea review blog, of all things — that coming back and talking about it now feels kind of…prelapsarian. I went to the Toronto Tea Festival for the first time in 2014, and then I went every year after that until 2018, which was the last time I attended until today.
It’s been eight years. Holy crap. In the intervening period, I did rather mundane things like buy my first home, switch jobs, live through a pandemic. You know. The usual. By the time I stopped in 2018, I had figured out what kind of teas I liked, what kind of teas I didn’t like, and where I wanted to buy the first kind from. So the festival’s purpose for me — the joy of discovery — waned over time.
Being back today felt like coming home. Looking over posts from years past, it’s amazing how much larger the crowds felt, even if their size hasn’t changed. Maybe that’s just pandemic brain talking. And while some vendors have stayed the same, like Tao Tea Leaf, Capital Tea, Momo Tea, and Secret Teatime, a lot of new and unfamiliar faces have joined their ranks. One vendor I was particularly interested in was Foggy River Farm, an independent farm in Sunderland that grows all of the herbs for their teas on-site.
It took me a little over an hour to do a circuit of the entire floor, taste samples, and decide on what I wanted to purchase. I went in with an idea of what I wanted to buy, and after sampling everything, I stayed true to my original shopping list.
I got a pretty good haul in the end: peach sencha and grape sencha from Momo Tea; genmaicha, houjicha and an oolong flavoured with grapefruit and orange blossom from Genuine Tea; and three varieties of herbal teas from Foggy River, all of which contain mint.
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