On October 26, 2022, The UK Tea Academy hosted its first Leafies Awards Ceremony in partnership with Fortnum & Mason at their flagship store on Piccadilly in London. The gathering of entrants, prize winners, and judges was a wonderfully joyous occasion, with congratulations and awards presented to the various winners and then time to mingle and catch up with valued tea friends who had travelled from Sri Lanka, India, Japan, Taiwan, Myanmar, South Korea, Holland, Italy, Spain, England, Scotland, and Wales to London especially for the event.
REASONS FOR ANOTHER TEA COMPETITION
UK Tea Academy [UKTA] was launched as a tea-training organization in 2015, and as co-founder and directorJennifer Wood explains, “We had been running the UKTA for several years, and a number of people had asked us to run an afternoon tea award competition. But that would have involved assessing the food, the service, the ambience, etc., and would not have been about the actual tea, so the idea really didn’t appeal. It would also have been a big distraction from the core educational work of UKTA.” Then a couple of years ago, a tea lover in Australia approached UKTA asking why there weren’t any tea awards in the UK. Jennifer had, for a while, been thinking about organizing a competition for carefully crafted, loose-leaf teas, and when
