Oh Teavana :(

Seriously. While they’re not helping customers by disseminating inaccurate information, I can’t believe that every store has such ignorant people. Also, everything they sell comes with the instructions printed on it, unlike a lot of other tea from other, smaller vendors. With the ‘net on nearly every device these days, people can Google if in doubt. It’d be nice if we could all take some responsibility for our tea education and stop pointing fingers. All the Teavana pouches I have (and I have quite a few) say 195, too.

A word of advice from a customer to every tea seller with a presence on Steepster: no matter how great the temptation, don’t point fingers. It only reflects poorly on you and will dissuade me from buying from you.

It sounds like it was a verbal miscommunication by the employee. If the labels have the appropriate recommended temp then that’s what really matters. Always go by the what’s on the label. It keeps the company accountable for the product.

Im glad you have had a good Experiences there with your store, Unfortunately every time i go in they dont have what i want and try to sell me something different or More expensive .. It seams whenever i go in for a smaller dollar amount item they never have it …

I do agree with that. Every time I go in there and actually buy something (although, I must admit that I’ve not bought anything from Teavana in a long time, as I have moved on to better tea pursuits), they are always trying to push their rock sugar on me.

That’s funny, because I’ve never had it happen. I use rock sugar, but if I’m not buying it, I’ve never had someone tell me I need it or tell me I should sweeten my teas.

I see what you are saying, and I agree to some extent. Teavana has definitely made tea drinking commonplace, which I respect and appreciate.

I know they are trying to appeal to the masses when sweetening drinks. But my local tea stores only lightenly sweeten their tea samples, and some don’t sweeten them at all (which I was very surprised). I do wish Teavana would lighten up a bit on the sugar.

I think a lot of beginning tea drinkers do add a lot of sugar. I’ve recently been introducing my mom to loose tea, adding a bit less sugar every time I make it for her (which she knows, it’s not a placebo thing haha). It takes a few tries to appreciate lightly sweetened and unsweetened tea if you’ve grown up on Snapple and Arizona and Lipton (though nothing wrong with that, I will freely admit that I still love Snapple!), so Teavana is maybe trying to go for the very beginning tea drinker? It can be overkill, it’d definitely be nice if they offered different sweetness levels and unsweetened samples.

Oh I definitely added sugar to my tea in the beginning, and I’m not looking down on those who do. I just think it’s hard to get people to really appreciate the flavor of tea it’s so over sweetened. Teavana has 4 heavily sugared samples and then an unsweetened monkey picked oolong. After the average customer tries the 4 overly sweet samples, and then they try the unsweetened, they are not going to like it because it’s such a dramatic change.

It seems to me like the samples have gotten sweeter over the years, and I’m sure this is not by accident. It definitely does draw in the Snapple/Arizona crowd, though.

I agree that Teavana just does what they have for their business mode. At the end of the day, they are still better and less ripping-off than most other stores in the mall.

I think what I dislike Teavana and Starbucks the most is not their quality or knowledge level, but they try to hypnotize their customers to believe their tea/coffee is top-notch. And indeed they are very successful in hypnosis and there are many people who readily believe they can get top-notch stuff from the mall or the chain store like Starbucks.

But all in all, I don’t think it’s any ethic problem with Teavana or Starbucks. I believe they are still much better than most other chain stores. Good or bad, always depends on what the benchmark is. If there were no Teavana, many people wouldn’t have been tea drinkers now.

For myself any sugar is too much. But every person has a personal preference. I won’t drink the samples in store because they are way too sweet for me. However there is still less sugar in those samples than in most juices, which makes it a much healthier alternative for my children. Who love Teavana’s teas, so gradually I will reduce the level of rock sugar and they’ll learn to like it with no additives.

“…but hey, they introduce people to loose-leaf. In a way, they are very important for the tea industry…”

Exactly!

“How much sugar would you say is ‘too much’?”

Pfft. I have a sweet tooth. Plus I’m Indian and the only people who rival our thing for sweets are those in the South with their syrupy sweet tea. I use 1-2 tbsp of sugar in my 16oz. mug after I take a few sips of unadulterated tea. I refuse to be made to feel bad about that. =)

@tattooed_tea – MOST juices? Are you just thinking of fruit juice? Most juices have substantially more sugar than Teavana’s samples, simply because of the amount of sugar fruit naturally contains. I suppose (I haven’t checked this, mind) that vegetable juices might have less than half a teaspoon per 8oz cup, but I highly doubt that you could convince most kids to drink carrot juice straight up. And then you also need to consider the amount of sodium in vegetable juices.

I’d really like to know if anybody calling Teavana’s samples “heavily sweetened” drinks fruit juice.

@Nik – My feelings exactly. The anti-sugar thing gets old sometimes.

@Daniel – I only drink fruit juices that are 100% juice – i.e., only fruit and no sugar. And I find fruit juices a little too sweet for me. I used to have more of a sweet tooth, but I’ve toned in back a lot over the years for health reasons.

My original point was that Teavana sweetens their tea MORE than my local tea shops do for their samples. I have nothing against Teavana sweetening their tea, but it makes it hard to distinguish the flavor when all I taste is sugar. I know I am not their target audience, though.

Rachel, 100% fruit juices have a ton of sugar. Feel free to look this up; the amount is actually pretty shocking even to me.

And yes, I’ve had the samples at DAVIDsTEA, and they don’t sweeten the samples. I “get” that they are offering the tea “pure” so that people will drink only the tea and know what it tastes like unsweetened…but I personally put sugar in just about everything besides genmaicha, including the best/top-quality teas I’ve ever had, and I hate DT’s samples. If that had been my introduction to tea, I wouldn’t be drinking tea now.

I agree that with you that fruit juices have natural sugar, but 100% fruit juices have no ADDED sugar – it’s sweet enough as it is. And I don’t drink fruit juices very often, anyway.

And two of my local tea shops do sweeten their teas, but very lightly. As a non-sugar drinker I can still taste the tea. In fact, there’s no place that I know that sweetens quite as much as Teavana does. I know it’s a mall store and the rules are different, though…

“And two of my local tea shops do sweeten their teas, but very lightly.”

Huh, I’d have to wonder why. The smallest amount I’ll use is half a teaspoon in a cup. Below that, the point escapes me because the amount of sugar is so low that it’s not really sweetening anything much anyway. They might as well not bother.

I do this too. I know what level of strenght I like best and it might not be the same level as whoever worked out the guidelines, so I routinely ignore all recommendations unless my own way isn’t working out for me. Then I seek inspiration.

As for sugar… it has no business being anywhere near my tea. At all. How anybody can actually taste the tea when having first loaded it with sugar or milk or other such additives is completely beyond me. I can’t.

I’m the same with the steeping/temp & leaf amounts.

I always add 2-3 perfect teaspoons of leaves to my tea. I like a lot of flavour in mine.

I’m in the same boat as well, however I think The Tea Merchant brought this up as people who got introduced to tea or at least oolong were misinformed by Teavana. But being another former employee it must have been an individuals mistake or a misunderstandings as Teavana trains their employees to to recommend brewing whites and greens at 175, oolongs and blacks at 195 and herbals, rooiboses and mates at 208, pretty safe parameters in my opinion. Through Verdant I have learned to up the temp on some blacks, dark oolongs and certainly pu’er especially when doing seconds long infusions. Still this is one case where I wouldn’t blame Teavana as a company for this error, unless you use the logic that they are so big that they hire people that didn’t know much about tea in the first place and failed to learn (they are tested) and spouted out misinformation, but it could have been that the customers bought an oolong and rooibos or mate in the same trip and they only remembered (or mentioned verbally) the temp for the latter.