The Story Behind Our Tea Tasting Spoons
Every tea taster remembers their first, pukka tasting spoon. Not the kind you find in a kitchen drawer, but the one you receive after years of training. You must earn it. You’ll taste thousands of cups of tea; sometimes with milk, sometimes without; sometimes fully sighted, sometimes blindfolded; sometimes at home and sometimes in the country where it’s grown. Our spoons are part of who we are as tasters and a quiet reminder of the standards we’ve been taught to keep. Not only that, they are a big part of why Two Spoons exists at all.
The Ceremony No One Talks About
There is a small, understated ceremony when you receive your first tasting spoon. A speech from the boss, an applause, a quick check to see if they’ve got the engraving right and then a sigh of relief. You feel the weight in your hand, like a wizard with a new wand, and then get right back to it because you want to try it out.
The spoon itself is silver plated, not because we enjoy polishing them but because silver gives a clean, neutral surface so you taste the tea and nothing else. It is also tough enough to survive a career’s worth of energetic slurping, which matters more than you think.
As for mine, a slight twist in the tail. The engraver was left handed, the layout of the lettering suiting them rather than me. After 5 years of training, every time I taste, I see my name. Upside down.
Why We’re Literally “A Couple of Spoons”
Given how important our spoons were to us, it seemed only natural to name our business after the tools of our trade. It’s a long time ago now, but I am pretty sure it came to us in The Queens Head in Chesham (in fact a lot of our ideas originated there). So that’s what happened, two spoons with two spoons formed Two Spoons. Simple really, just like us.
What Five Years of Training Really Teaches You
No piece on tea tasting would be honest without a nod to the spittoon. It is the least glamorous object in the tasting room, but also the most indispensable. When you’re working through hundreds of cups a day, you simply cannot swallow everything. Every taster develops a grudging respect for it. Trainees usually get the job of washing it at the end of the session, a small reminder that tasting is a craft you learn the hard way.
Professional tasting is repetitive. You spend long days at the counter tasting hundreds of cups and learning to spot nuances in flavour that most people wouldn’t notice. You learn how origins behave across the seasons, how weather changes affect the leaf and how different teas combine to deliver more than the sum of their parts.
A Real Example from the Tasting Room
When I was posted to Pakistan, we installed a blend drum for mixing different teas. Getting it right took weeks. The drum was huge, processing 1 tonne a cycle (equivalent to 250,000 cups) so we had to get it right. To do this the internal vanes had to be adjusted by the engineering team. We ran drum samples straight into the tasting room, tasted them, adjusted the drum, then tasted again. Repeat. Repeat again. Only when the blend came out consistently did we trust it.
That experience (and many others in Karachi) stayed with me because it showed how tasting skill could inform and support our engineering team.
How This Expertise Shows Up in Your Cup
We are so proud of our award-winning English Breakfast style teas, Bucks and Bungalow Blends. Both use ingredients we have selected for their specific attributes – a result of origin, manufacture and seasonality. Through our spoons each blend carries the imprint of our training. If you want to taste that work for yourself, Bucks and Bungalow are where it shows up best.