Friday Afternoon Tea

Let’s first get a couple of things straight. This article is not about a Friday afternoon tea; it’s about Friday Afternoon Tea which recently opened on Stone Way. And the other thing to realize is that many may not consider Friday Afternoon Tea to be a replacement for the Teahouse Kuan Yin which closed it’s doors last year. While Teahouse Kuan Yin had that very “lived in” feel that comes with being in its space literally for decades, Friday Afternoon Tea has more of a “been here since last week in a building that went up a couple years ago” feel.

But before I get too deeply into this, I have a confession to make: I think I’m probably a tea barbarian. I’m strongly inclined toward coffee when it comes to caffeinated beverages, and when I do drink tea, more often than not I’m brewing up a cup of Lipton. It seems fine to me, and having the tea already in a bag solves the problem of corralling all those loose leaves that you have to deal with when buying the fancier stuff.

Knowing these things, I headed over to Friday Afternoon Tea to meet Friday Elliot, proprietor of Friday’s. Friday assured me that she was not a tea snob, and that I could “enjoy my tea however I liked it.” Relaxed, I settled in for a cup and a chat.

Elliot comes from a diverse background that could have led lots of places in addition to Tea Queen. She was raised, in her words, “on a pagan spiritual retreat/commune” in California. Her grandmother “was an herbalist” and she grew up with “plants as medicine.” She moved to Seattle as a kid, and worked for a time at the Queen Mary Tea Room in Ravenna. While all this points strongly in the Tea Queen direction, Elliot also has a long history as a chef at a number of Seattle eateries.

About seven years ago, she began selling teas online, and when a friend asked her to create a “themed tea” (think about combining teas whose names fit the theme), she got into tea blending at her home.  And there she might have remained but for a recent change in Washington State Dept. of Agriculture rules requiring tea blending to be done in commercial kitchens. That precipitated a search for such a space which landed Elliot in her current Stone Way store. While the route to opening day was a bumpy one (a terrible fire at Elliot’s home was followed by a 6-month wait for building permits for the tea shop and a break in just days after it opened), Friday Afternoon Tea is now up and running, and plenty of folks were popping in while I was there.

Friday Afternoon Tea sells a range of tea — from Asian teas to black to Himalayan — to appeal to every tea drinker. Of utmost importance to Elliot is that the tea be “ethically sourced.”  We’ve all heard of the problems in other industries, notably coffee, that have resulted in a range of “fair trade” products. According to Elliot, this problem is as bad, if not worse, in the tea industry. So she expends a lot of effort to make sure that the teas she sells have been obtained from farmers that are given a fair shake. I was intrigued at the range of teas available on the market not just in geographical terms, but also in terms of appearance and aroma. A tea from Kenya looks like a green tea when first poured into a cup, but with the addition of any citrus, it turns purple. I commented that on a not-so-recent trip I took to Mali, absolutely everybody was drinking a Chinese tea with the unusual name of Stairway to Heaven Special Gunpowder. (“Chinese teas have the best names!” says Elliot.)

Tea is not the only thing going on at Friday Afternoon Tea. Events include a weekly kids art day, and Elliot hopes to hold a story time in the near future. Among other plans for events are a writers’ group meeting, and arts and crafts classes. Perhaps inspired by Elliot’s 12-year old son Allyn, a student at Hamilton Middle School, the store sports a shelf of games including what Elliot believes to be the only 5 tea-themed board games.

Elliot offered to brew me up a cup of whatever I liked, and I made my selection based upon the fact that it was a black tea which I could adulterate with milk and sugar and also because of its funny name: Golden Monkey. A tea that might have been right up my alley, Barbarian’s Blend, was not in stock. I was relieved to see her take out a French press for the brewing process. As a coffee drinker, the French press is a familiar, old friend, and I felt empowered by the knowledge that I had all the gear to brew my own loose leaf tea. I normally take milk and sugar (or honey) with my tea. Elliot offered me some dry honey crystals, but with a license to sell dry, bulk goods, she is not able to offer dairy products. This made it hard for me to compare with most of the tea that I have consumed over the years. But it was hot and I was cold, so that was good.

I wanted to do a head to head comparison of a run-of-the-mill bagged tea with some loose leaves from Friday Afternoon Tea. Elliot recommended one of her black tea blends: Friday’s Afternoon. I bought a pouch and hustled home in the waning light only to find that (gasp!) I had no more Lipton. I did finally find a bag of black tea from some company called Taylors which, being a barbarian, I probably pinched from a recent hotel. One advantage of the bagged tea is that you know how much to use for a cup: you use one bag. For the loose tea, I used about twice as much tea as was in the Taylors bag because that seemed, ummm, right. I brewed both teas for 9 minutes as measured by Alexa. (Full disclosure: the Friday’s Afternoon steeped in my French press which still reeked of coffee from the morning.) To each cup, I added a scoop of honey, and a splash of half and half. As an actual scientist, I can say with some authority that it was not a very scientific test.

And the results? The bag tea, Taylors, tasted very much like my average cup of Lipton. The common denominator there is the bag. Conclusion: perhaps what I have been thinking of, for years, as the taste of tea is really the taste of the tea bag. The Friday’s Afternoon, on the other hand, was refreshingly different, like tasting sausage for the first time after a lifetime of eating hotdogs — to make a barbarian comparison. After trying to take the perfect photo of my two cups of tea, they were both decidely luke warm.

Any questions … ask me in the comments. I’ll be up all night!