Teavana

Teavana is finally open in Towsontown Center. I was wandering around yesterday clothes shopping and saw the little store next to the massive third floor food court and thought it was about time to go in and experience "tea-vana".

Teavana is based in Atlanta and numbers almost 80 locations around the country and seven locations in Mexico. As the fella behind the counter noted, it sells anything you need to make tea. If you have a match, you can even heat it on one of the more expensive tea sets (we're talkin' hundreds of dollars here, complete with teapot, cups and saucers, tray and burner). Most of their tea sets tend to be in the three figure range than not, but most of them are pretty fancy. We're not talking the cheap stuff you'd find at K-Mart.

The place smells lovely, like tea (duh). And you can get some free samples of a few select teas. Their wall of tea canisters behind the counter ranges from white to green, black, oolong and herbal, and so many more. And of course there are their blends, all loose leaf. The cheapest teas are in the neighborhood of $3 per 2 oz, with many priced far higher ($10 or $15 per 2 oz). You can buy buy the 2 oz bag, or by the 1/4-pound or more. They will open each canister for you and flash their tea know-how while waving the canister lid around to get the smell of the tea wafting out to you faster.


After having a few lids waved near my face, I decided to go with one tea that was part of a featured blend, the MatéVana a choclately/coffeeish blend with milk, nuts and herbs in it. This is one of their cheaper teas, at $5.80. For another $5 I bought some self-fill tea bags. The tea tastes, to me, somewhat chocolatey, again due to the chocolate in it. I didn't put any sugar in - yet - since I wanted to taste it straight up. If you want, they have that, too. It looked as if they sold little lumps of crystallized sugar ready to plunk into your tea. I fear that it is also pretty not-cheap.