Bayswater Tea Co.

It is suddenly clear that my favorite time of year, fall, is quickly approaching if not fully upon us already. The change brings with it thoughts of all things warm and comforting, braises, long simmered stews and soups, and warm comforting drinks such as hot apple cider, hot chocolate, and tea.

Long before we knew much of anything about wine, we drank tea, a habit we maintain. Luckily, good lose tea is not as hard to come by here as in other places we’ve lived. (We used to have to order our tea from the Upton Tea Company in New England, www.uptontea.com/shopcart/home.asp, which has a great tea selection and good customer service. It’s just hard to smell the tea through the mail.) There are a few stores here in Vancouver where we purchase tea, but the one we buy from most often is the Bayswater Tea Co. (www.bayswatertea.com) on West Broadway.

A few weeks ago I sat down for a chat (over some tea of course) with the owner, Sabrina Fass, to find out more about her, tea, and the store. I was very interested in what would motivate such a young person to spend all her time around tea, something many of us associate with visits to Grannie or the stuffiness of high tea at places like the Empress Hotel in Victoria.

She first discovered her passion for tea in Germany. She was there for a year studying joinery. Like any student, caffeine was a necessity, but she didn’t want to buy an expensive coffee pot that she wouldn’t be able to bring back home, so she bought a stove-top kettle for tea instead. She quickly discovered that there’s more to tea than the boxes on supermarket shelves that we are most familiar with here. (Although that has changed. The next time you’re in a grocery store, check out the tea selection! It’s a far cry from the lonely three or four brands of orange pekoe available when I was a child.) She explored the wide variety of high quality teas available at the local tea stores there and fell in love. And so what started as an economic decision became a passion for her.

When she came back from Germany she found it more difficult to enter carpentry than she expected, as her training there didn’t count towards her papers here. She briefly thought about starting her own company, but research proved that to be prohibitively expensive. One day she and a friend who was an amateur herbalist were chatting, and the idea to open a store specializing in teas and herbs came to her. Her challenge to her friend “we’re 23 years old, what do we have t lose but money.” That conversation was the beginning of a store called Herbal Bliss, located at 10^th and Alma. According to Fass, starting that store was a trial by fire. It was difficult in the beginning, but they eventually got the hang of running their own business, and by the time the end of their 5 year lease was approaching, she was ready for more.

As it turned out, her friend wanted to go in a different direction with her life, and about that time there were changes in the regulations governing sales of herbs in the province, leaving just Sabrina and the tea side of the operation. So she set out to do more research, investigating the demographics of various neighborhoods, trying to find one that would suit the kind of store she wanted to run, and the Bayswater Tea Co. on W. Broadway was born.

It’s been just over three years since the store opened and she still loves it. She not only loves tea, she also truly enjoys helping customers discover tea. Like any good tea store, customers are encouraged to smell teas before buying them. No prepackaged cartons here. And with over 250 teas in the store, there really is something for everyone, from black teas to rooibos (which incidentally, is one of her favorites) and everything in between. The staff do tastings so they know the products they are selling. And all of them care as much as she does about matching teas with individual palates.

For personal consumption Fass tends to rotate teas, drinking black in the morning and rooibos in the afternoon/evening. As she put it “each tea brings something different to your body so it’s good to cycle. It’s like saying broccoli is good for you, but are you going to only eat broccoli?”

I was struck by what she said about why tea is so relaxing. It’s about the time commitment: you have to take some time out of your day to make tea. You have to take the time to boil the water, pour it in the pot, and wait as it steeps. You can’t just push a button on a machine and out comes tea. (Maybe that’s why I find French press coffee more relaxing and decadent, it too requires monitoring and attention. Cappuccino, by contrast, which also takes time and effort, involves turbulence and violent action which may reinforce the energetic and vigorous effect of coffee.) Speaking of which, I think hear the kettle boiling…