For the first couple of years the shop sold a house breakfast blend. It was good, it was consistent, and it was the second-best-selling thing on the site. We stopped making it a few years ago and have not been tempted back.
Consistency is a promise you make to yourself
The point of a blend is that it tastes the same in March and in November, and the same next year. That is genuinely useful for a café with a menu to defend. For us it meant something less comfortable: to keep the profile stable we had to keep buying leaf that fitted the profile, which meant that in a year when a garden produced something unusual and wonderful, the blend had no room for it.
We were, in other words, using our best access to the mountains to iron out exactly the variation we had gone there to find.
What replaced it
A shelf of single lots that change with the season, and a lot more explaining. Customers who used to reorder the same bag four times a year now ask what has come in. That conversation is more work and it is the reason the shop still exists.
The Discovery Set does the job the blend used to do for new customers — six teas, small quantities, no commitment — but it does it by showing the range rather than averaging it out.
The honest downside
Sometimes your favourite tea is gone and there is nothing we can do about it. A small lot is a small lot. We tell people when one is down to its last few pouches, and roughly half of them buy more while they still can. The other half go and find something new, which is arguably the better outcome.