My spouse and I have pretty much a ridiculous amount of tea and tea infusers. We are Tea People: at our wedding, instead of a signature cocktail, we had a signature tea blend. I’m also an obsessive tea organizer — what’s the point of having all those teas if they’re a jumbled mess?
Here are three tips from a tea organizer, in terms of what has helped us keep our tea tidy:
Rotate your teas
In the summer we put more of the greens, herbals, and fruity stuff out on our tea cabinet and put the spicy holiday blends and chais in an inconvenient cupboard.
You don’t even have to do this seasonally; just pick half your teas at random and change it up every month or whatever.
Put shelves on the walls
Mount shelves on your walls above the electric kettle and other tea accessories. And yeah, we did this in our rented apartment too.
Store the original boxes or labeled canisters full of loose leaf teas on the shelves. Easy to find and cute!
Create a “daily grab” container
This is what I do at my office, but you could do it at home: leave most of the tea in the cabinet and just pull out a few bags of each kind to put in a “daily tea grab” container. (At the office, my daily grab container is just a modular desk supply bin — it doesn’t have to be an official tea product. At home, the tea basket is our former wedding card basket, re-born to new fragrant purpose.)
This way, you only have to wrestle with your crowded cabinet once every few weeks to restock your grab-n-go container.
For me, every two weeks, new bags go into the daily grab, different tins rotate to the front of the shelf, and my tea routine gets some varied flavors!
Now if you need me, I’mma put on this shirt and go have a cuppa.
