Reason to be Cheerful

I’ve been the Bell Tea Guy for more than 5 years now, the last 2 working alongside David Burton, our Coffee Blend Master. We’ve have a lot of fun together but, it has to be said, we really need someone to keep us in order!

That’s all changed now as Amy Reason has come to join us in the tasting rooms. Amy is our new Assistant Tea and Coffee Taster and will be working with both of us, honing her tasting skills, developing her own direct relationships with our growers to source the best tea and coffee from around the world, and then helping us create the perfect blends back here at the ranch. No doubt keeping David and myself in order needs to be high on her agenda as well!

Amy’s very passionate about tea and coffee, and it was her determination to land the role that really impressed us. She’s already challenging us and throwing new ideas into the arena. It’s great to have her on our team – someone with a fresh perspective - and I’m really looking forward to working with her.

Crooks Road Opening and our new tasting rooms

We moved into our brand spanking new purpose-built facility at Crooks Road in December and it’s great to be here.

As well as bringing all of our Auckland based commercial functions under one-roof we are now able bring the tea and coffee parts of our business closer together.

It’s just so good to have a facility that we are all proud of and to be able to invite visitors to. We had a great turnout for the opening and ran tea and coffee tasting sessions for as many visitors who were interested in slurping and spitting with us.

The new tea and coffee tasting rooms are side-by-side and designed to flow together to give the feel of a bigger space. In reality they are separated by glass with positive air-flow pressure to ensure that the coffee aroma stays within the coffee room and doesn’t affect the tea-tasting which is more aroma sensitive.

Many industry friends and colleagues around the world said it couldn’t be done and we should separate the two completely, but we went ahead and did it anyway and it has paid off! (big nod to the architects and designers here for bringing alive our vision)

We have a good balance of natural light and “natural-light” illumination to ensure as even and consistent tasting conditions as possible.

Its also good to have more storage space for our library of tea and coffee samples.

The tasting rooms look out onto our new staff café which is a real hub of/for the business. This makes it easy for us to pull unsuspecting colleagues into our tasting rooms to try out our new tea and coffee blends!