Expand your enjoyment of your tea collection/cupboard by creating your own blends

What I would like to put out for discussion is a way for Steepsterites to talk about their own tea creations. I thought it would be interesting to have a way to ‘search’ for tea and component combos put together by participants on this discussion board. I would love to see what others are using and enjoying.

Perhaps we can evolve or shoot down my idea before implementation. The idea would not be difficult if everyone knew to use the same category as if it was a brand. So, we would need suggestions for names. My thought is “Steepster’s Community Blends”

It did occur to me that I could add this idea to the “New Features” thread, but judging by the blog http://blog.steepster.com/ dated the beginning of last month, there may not be much in the way of updates on Steepster for some time.

Also, from the Guidelines there is the following to think about:
“If you’re a tea company, please do not start new forum topics about your products or promotions. Feel free to post replies where relevant, but anything overly self-promotional will be removed. Also, don’t rate your own teas because of the (obvious) conflict of interest. It’s misleading and everyone will figure it out anyways – you’ll turn away the very customers you’re trying to attract.”

I am not a tea company, but I do sell a couple of my blends. The bottom line is that it IS fun to play with your tea, and just as this whole site illustrates it is fun to see what everyone else is drinking. I drink my own blends and can’t log them, so wouldn’t this be a transparent and non conflicting way to do it? We’d be able to see what combos are done the most often.

I may be out of line with this, but discussing is better than just doing it. Nothing like starting a game that no one wants to play.

We can discuss positives and negatives of this idea. What do you think Steeps?

2 Replies

You can log your own blends, you just should not rate them numerically if you sell them. I was a tea company (well, I guess technically, I still am a tea company since I do have a little bit of tea left), and I have logged my own blends, and I admit that in the beginning I rated my own blends but have since taken my ratings off of the logs of my tea.

For blends that you’ve created, you can either log them under your tea shop name, or you can simply log them under the tea company “custom” which was created for our own blends. That’s what many of us here on steepster have been doing, you can see some of our creations here:

http://steepster.com/teas/custom?letter=C

For the private tea-drinking individual, they can rate their own custom blends, because it is not something they’re doing for profit. It is just not advisable to rate blends that you offer to customers because then it becomes a conflict of interest.

Ah, cool. Still learning my way around. I didn’t know to check ‘Custom’, not as intuitive. Perhaps this thread will instigate some new custom posts. For me, that is particularly interesting to follow. I know what my reading material for this evening will be now.

I have already learned so much since joining here. Even tho I drink several teas every day, the way this site works makes you really think about it. Recording it adds a great deal as well. Thank you LiberTEAS.

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