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Designed for people with a passion for exploring more creative ways with tea and want to be confident in their knowledge and deliver an exemplary, contemporary tea service. This award develops your skills as a Tea Sommelier and encourages you to use imaginative ways of sharing what you have learnt and your enthusiasm for all that is wonderful about tea.
Guided by a tutor, you will be brewing and tasting a selection of well known teas to reflect the different categories through processing, terroir, and varietal. With the stories behind the teas this is ideal unit to build on previous learning and put skills into practice.
Putting together a professional Afternoon Tea offer involves far more than the food and tea menu. This unit explores the theme, the timing, the costs and competition, training the team, dealing with the customers, the atmosphere of the room, the crockery, flatware and teaware and bringing the whole presentation together.
A practical approach to the way certain teas, paired with particular foods create a third taste. This explores how to choose a tea to complement or contrast with a range of sweet and savoury foods, with advice on which teas to drink with meals and how to achieve desirable taste sensations.
A look at the science behind taste and smell, known as organoleptics. How we can train our taste buds to differentiate the nuances in teas and using the Flavour Wheel express the taste of a tea with more descriptive and imaginative language. The Spider Chart helps describe the visual pattern of a tea as you draw what you taste.
How to embrace new ways with tea beyond brewing it hot and serving it well. This unit demonstrates the different ways to deliver cold brews, iced tea, sparkling tea, matcha shots and coolers. Useful kit and recipes for batch-brewing. Which trends are emerging and how to stay ahead. And how to eat tea – introducing it into baking as well as the everyday and more imaginative meals.
A tutor-guided assessment to cover what you have learnt in the core units and how to apply this knowledge. Through a short role-play presentation with feedback and some multiple choice questions, this will enable you to qualify for the independently-verified Tea Sommelier Hospitality Award. You can use it as an opportunity to see whether the next step of Tea Sommelier Diploma is right for you.
How to mix a fabulous drink has reached a high art. This will ensure you understand the principles of mixology, how to create bitters and combine ingredients to best effect – while exploring tea as a key player. Importantly it will help you develop the skills to create your own signature drink.
Tea has been cutivated in China for thousands of years. It spread into Japan through Buddhist monks and West along the trade routes of the Silk Road eventually reaching Europe by sea through the Dutch and Portuguese. In every region that tea has become established, it has also evolved a culture of tea-drinking, characteristic to that region. This is a fascinating insight to the different approaches to tea, from the reverential Tea Ceremony of Japan to workers’ rights to a Tea Break in Britain. A global tour of tea tradition and the teaware and equipment that has been specifically created to brew it, serve it and often exalt it.
Going back over 4000 years, China was the birthplace of tea cultivation. With a limitless number of teas to choose from, our Chinese Tea tutor brings you a selection of the most famous and desirable teas to taste and explores the background to each one, bringing the astonishing flavours and fascinating culture of Chinese tea-drinking to life.
Japanese teas are rooted in the tradition of green steamed tea production originally from China. Since the 9th century they have developed their own distinctive style and now artisan gardens are pushing boundaries and producing many new teas from different cultivars. Tasting selected high grade teas, our Japanese Tea tutor takes you through the traditional and more modern teas, explaining how they are made in the context of the culture of Japan. Matcha has it’s own focus in the unit, exploring what it is, how it is made and the various ways to serve and drink it.
This science of tea covers the unique combination of compounds in tea and how the leaf has been intensively studied to establish a link between drinking tea and good health. This unit looks at the claims made about the benefits and how western science evaluates the data. But what about the ancient beliefs of tea’s health benefits in Chinese medicine, can they be dismissed as not evidence based? This unit covers what we think we know – and what has yet to be proven beyond doubt. Crucially it is about what claims you are legally allowed to make in the UK and Europe and how you can field questions about the health benefits of tea.
