Creating Wicor Tea

The last two weeks have brought some interesting and unusual learning into Year 6.  During the British Food Fortnight we decided to look into the world of tea, to understand why it is so important in British culture, and also to learn about its origins.  We have learnt the difference between green and black teas, where tea is grown and how it is processed.  We have also discovered how tea became ingrained into the British culture, although tea consumption has fallen by 19% since 2010 with coffee becoming the drink of choice outside the home with the rise of Starbucks and Costa.

We teamed up with Andrew Gadsden from All About Tea in Southsea (check out his website https://allabouttea.co.uk/  ).  Andrew runs the fantastic tea shop All About Tea where you can go and enjoy a cup of pretty much any type of tea, loose leaf or tea bag, that you can want.  However, behind the scenes there is a vibrant tea factory where Andrew blends many teas and sells to the local area.

On the 19th September, Andrew came into Year 6 at Wicor and all the children taste tested three teas - Assam, Tingamera and Rwanda.  Why did we do this?  We had decided to produce our own Wicor Tea.  Andrew helped the children to describe the teas they were trying and we all took a vote as to which we liked.  This produced a Wicor blend of 50% Tingamera, 25% Assam and 25% Rwanda.  We also started to think about packaging.  This involved deciding upon the types of customers we would want to attract - just Wicor customers or people from Portchester as this would impact on the final design.  Most of us wanted to incorporate the Wicor windmill into the packaging in some form.  Everyone designed their own labels and these were sent to Andrew's graphic designers.






The following week we all went down to All About Tea to start making and packing our Wicor blend.  It was a very exciting day, and started perfectly - with a cup of tea!

After that we all went to the factory unit behind the tea shop.  We learnt how to blend the tea using the correct percentages.  We did this using scales and weighed out the correct amounts of each type of tea.  This was then poured into the large machine which packed the tea into tea bags.  Finally, we were all given 10 bags of Wicor blended tea, a clean lined silver pack and a Wicor label.  The label showed the Wicor Mill and we were all pleased with the result.  We learnt how to pack the bags into the bag, stuck on the label and then heat-sealed the bags.

We will be putting in a large order of the tea bags ready for our launch to Wicor parents, the week beginning the 10th October.  However, we all took home a bag of 10 Wicor tea bags and the feedback from parents has so far been a massive thumbs up!