Sometimes, I need to stray away from my beloved beer and whisky. Sometimes, that means heading down a dark path that I know very little about.
Sometimes, that means attending the Ottawa Tea Festival.
My experience at the Ottawa Tea Festival actually began a day before, in an acetonic haze off Preston Street.
Since the website for purchasing tickets was a labyrinth of credit card numbers and PayPal accounts, I was forced to rely on picking up the tickets from a nail salon a few blocks from my house. I think I was the first male to walk into that place since it opened a few years ago.
“Hi can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I choked back the chemical-paint fumes and powered through. “I need two tickets to the Tea Fest.”
“Oh,” she laughed. “Of course.”
This seemed to be a thinly veiled way of calling me a whipped boyfriend. I was neither a boyfriend, nor whipped.
And so began the Tea Festival.
The event was held in the Ottawa Convention Centre last weekend, bringing together tea merchants, bakers, chocolatiers, and holistic medicine-purveyors. I was fighting a vicious cold. This combination would fell normal men, but I knuckled under and dizzily forced myself into the room.
The first thing I learned was that people seem to really enjoy tea. I always thought of it as a sub-par replacement for black coffee, but it seemed to take a whole new life among the vendors and convention-goers. To my elation, I wasn’t the only man in the room, which brought a level of calmness to my dreary, pale, shaking body.
There seemed to be a tea for every mood, illness, weather, lifestyle, and sensibility. Fortunately, one of those included nausea and shakiness, so I was kept upright by a number of free samples of herbal tea. It seemed that I had picked the best place to be sick, with the possible exception of a hospital or my own bed.
Whether the herbs did anything I’m not entirely sure, but it was pleasant enough.
This led to a divide between the tea shop owners that I talked to. Many saw the idea of health benefits for tea secondary to the actual tea quality, while others were happy to discuss how teas were full of antioxidants and other things I didn’t entirely understand, but were completely beneficial to my health.
“It’s really easy to make marketing about a cheap tea and then boosting it with health benefit marketing pitches,” said Daniel Tremblay, owner of CHA YI, a tea room in Gatineau. “You need to love the tea first, don’t drink it as a medicine.”
Many of the tea merchants also travelled around the world for their tea, frequently to eastern Asia, to find the top quality tea leaves for their stores.
“People are trying good teas, experimenting with teas, using it in cooking,” said Kimi Uriu, the organizer of the event and owner of KIMICHA Tea. “It’s all very exciting.”
The event featured tea pairings with chocolate and a dazzling number of East Asian dancers and drummers, whose pounding rhythms did not sync well with my nausea.
By 5:30 p.m., the event was winding down and my Tylenol was wearing off, so I called it a day. The entire event felt somewhat underwhelming, considering that it was contained to perhaps two dozen vendors and a stage, and wasn’t entirely worth the $15 entry fee. Sampling was somewhat limited and most of the products on sale were not even slightly discounted. Nonetheless, organizers say they attracted well over 1,000 attendees to the event, so it certainly has a degree of appeal.
Even still, I think I’ll stick to black coffee.
