We’re not exactly a sleepy little tea company these days.

We're tasting different versions of Alpine Berry Herbal tea.

In fact, we’ve always got something brewing (sorry) around here. Recently we mailed out samples of our Açai White Tea to some volunteers we found on Facebook and Twitter, because we want them to tell us if they prefer what’s in our current sachets, or if they like a different sample we sent them, since we’re considering changing the formula. If you’d like to be a part of our tea tastings in the future, stay tuned to our Facebook page and follow our tweets — pretty soon we’ll be trying out new versions of Tropical Goji Green and Orange Sencha, and looking for feedback.

Alpine Berry Herbal Tea — big pieces on the left, and what came out of a current sachet on the right.

This afternoon, Richard was dumping a pile of what looked like potpourri onto a piece of paper — turns out it was actually our Alpine Berry Herbal Tea blend, but a sample with much larger pieces than what typically appears in our sachets. And then he started tasting it against a sachet of Alpine Berry. Typically, when tasting tea you brew it at double strength, so what he ended up with were three cups of tea that had the thick, bright red color of cough syrup. And when we tasted them, boom — they were packed with big berry flavor. (It makes sense — Alpine Berry is air-dried berries and fruits. I’m sitting here eating big pieces of apple out of the larger pieced sample right now. That sounds weird, but they taste good and I’m hungry.)

So, why did he need to taste these against each other? “The bigger pieces would look so pretty in a sachet,” Richard said. “We’ve got the beautiful sachets, so we might as well make use of them.” Well, it turns out that he prefers the taste of the Alpine Berry mix in smaller pieces anyway — the smaller pieces have more surface area, so they lend more flavor to the tea.

Also this afternoon I held a blind taste test with Richard to determine if it really matters if you squeeze your tea bag (or rather, sachet) into your mug after steeping. Stay tuned — we’ll be writing more about that in the near future, including the results of our blind taste test.

Finally, this last weekend the ESPN Winter X Games were held just up the road from us at Buttermilk Mountain. Marketing manager Bess Hammer went on her own extreme adventure, and coincidentally spotted Richard hiking up the Highland Bowl at Highlands Ski Area on Saturday, so they made the hike together. Überfit Richard took pity on Bess and actually carried her snowboard up to the top of the bowl (the summit is 12,382 feet and not exactly an easy hike). At the top, Richard’s friend Kim brought out a thermos and served some steaming Açai White Tea from two leaves and a bud, of course! Here’s a great photo of Richard and Bess once they made it to the top on this beautiful, sunny day.

Richard and Bess at the top of the Highland Bowl — two leaves' next staff meeting location, perhaps?

Richard's pinch of tea versus the little blue scale.

You know what’s nice about tea sachets? Not having to measure anything. I knew very little about tea before getting a job with two leaves and a bud, but it’s a steep learning curve. (Steep. Ha! But pun not intended.) One of the first items in the office I met was the little blue scale that we use to measure out loose tea.

“Aim for about 2.5 grams per cup of tea,” Bess told me on my first day, putting a pinch of tea onto the scale. It turns out, each of our sachets contains about 2.5 grams of tea leaves, herbs, flowers and fruit pieces, depending on which sachet you’re brewing. And since these are substantial, full-leaf teas (not cut up into little pieces to fit in a little paper teabag, that is), you can forget about your grandmother’s tiny teacup. A sachet from two leaves and a bud is for a mug — anywhere between 8 and 16 ounces of tea, depending on your taste preferences.

Recently two leaves founder Richard Rosenfeld mentioned that over the years of fixing mugs of tea, he’s perfected his perfect, 2.5-gram pinch of tea. Perhaps even enough to not have to use the scale at all. You can imagine my reaction: “You’re going to have to prove that for the blog, you know.”

If perfect is 2.5 grams, this pinch was pretty far from perfect.

So, we gather it all together in his office: little blue scale, a couple of sleeves of loose tea, and Richard’s fingers. We spread some tea out on a white piece of paper, and he gathers some up with those perfect pinching fingers. (A note here: Never just dump loose tea straight from the package on to your scale. The point of picking tea up with your fingers from a large pile on a table is because you want a good sampling of all the tea in the bag — whole leaves, broken pieces, buds from the tea plant — for the best flavor.)

Richard places the pinch of tea in the scale and … uh oh. He’s way, way off. Instead of 2.5 grams of tea, he’s managed to put an entire 6.1 grams of tea onto the scale at once. Pretty far from perfect.

But, this is the part of the blog where instead of being amused, I have to be honest. He was measuring Genmai Matcha, a unique loose tea we sell from Japan known as “brown rice tea” because it has puffs of roasted brown rice in it. To be fair, it’s difficult to get an accurate pinch of this tea when your fingers are thrown off by rice, green tea leaves and powdered green tea (that’s the “Matcha”) that turned Richard’s fingers bright green.

So we turned to the bag of loose Assam tea — the tea that Richard drinks every morning, without fail. We dumped it out on a piece of paper, he pinched, we measured … 2.4 grams. Don’t you hate it when somebody is as good at something as they claim to be?

Richard's perfect pinch of Assam.

But here’s the thing about that little blue scale: it’s not the one tasting your tea — you are. If you like the taste of 6.1 grams of Genmai Matcha in a 10 ounce mug of hot water, go for it. The beauty of loose tea is the ability of making it just how you like it, little blue scale and perfect pinches be damned.

One last note: Richard is actually fond of putting 6 or 7 grams of Genmai Matcha into a filter and steeping it for only 10 seconds. Since the Matcha dissolves quickly, that method makes for a mug of tea with big green tea flavor, and less taste of the roasted rice. Me, I like steeping 2.5 to 3 grams of Genmai Matcha for several minutes in an average-sized mug of tea, so I can get that roasty, toasty rice flavor. “Different steeps for different creeps,” Richard says.

That’s Richard — perfect pinch and a way with words.

Jasmine Pearls are green tea leaves, rolled up carefully by hand. Watch them unfurl in your cup!

If I asked you if you’d like a cup of tea, what kind would you want? In your head you’re going through all the varieties of tea you can think of, trying to make a decision. Maybe Earl Grey, Chamomile, some variety of green tea …

But how about Lapsang Souchong? Or Pinhead Gunpowder? Or Silver Needles? Did you think of those?

Silver needles are the young buds of the Camellia sinensis plant, and look like their name.

The world of tea is really, really large. Consider that at two leaves and a bud we have 16 different offerings of tea that come in sachets, but those barely scratch the surface of how many varieties of tea are out there. This is one reason why we recently started offering 15 new teas only  in loose form, known as our “exclusively loose” line of teas.

Genmai Matcha is green tea with roasted rice, and green tea powder (the "Matcha").

These are wildly different teas — from the polarizing smokiness of the aforementioned Lapsang Souchong, to the light and floral flavor of a Jade Oolong. These teas have great stories — Pinhead Gunpowder is a green tea produced in China with leaves that are withered, steamed, neatly rolled and then dried and polished into small round pellets. Hojicha is known as “stem tea” because it’s made only with the stems of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, and not leaves. Genmai Matcha is a Japanese tea made of leaves of green tea, roasted brown rice and powdered green tea. Silver Needles look just like their name, since they’re made from the young buds of the Camellia sinensis plant, and have a fine,  silvery hair on them.

Pinhead gunpowder: looks like ammunition, tastes like tea.

Sure, loose tea can seem a little intimidating — it’s just not as easy as plunking a sachet into a mug and adding water. On the other hand, the process of measuring out a teaspoon per cup, putting it in a filter (or even leaving it floating it loose in your mug), is gratifying, and after a while even becomes ritualistic.

I’d even argue that there’s a certain magic to peering into your cup to watch your Jasmine Pearls unfurl slowly as they steep. Richard points out that in China they’re fond of putting the tea loose into the cup, and then refilling the cup repeatedly with water as they drink, steeping indefinitely.

Dark Oolong: smoky, dark, tasty.

If you want to take a step into exploring any of these teas, now is a good time — we’re offering 20 percent off these exclusively loose teas, while supplies last. You’ll find suggestions on how to prepare each variety on our website, and plenty of accessories like filters and teapots. My own suggestion: try the smoky and rich Dark Oolong the next time you’re having Chinese food. Delicious.