Cigarillo Tea Needle
Our Cigarillo dark wood tea needle will help you carefully open up your pressed tea cakes of aged tea into beautiful individual leaves, ready for infusion. This pick is very beautifully made and is safely stored with a secure screw top.
As with many tea accessories, the traditional tea needle is going to be the best way to carefully pick apart your Pu Erh tea cakes. A delicate process that our go-to brute-force instruments like knives just can't hack, picking apart a pressed tea cake of aged, fermented tea without pulverizing the leaves is best done with a tea needle. (While the brute force approach may be quicker, and therefore tempting, it is best to pick your tea cakes apart carefully so that leaves remain whole for rich, complex infusions.) Just as we may tell someone beginning to prepare matcha at home that their one must-have accessory is a bamboo matcha whisk (or, chasen), the must-have Pu Erh accessory is absolutely a tea needle.
For best results, only pick out the leaves you need for your current infusion.
Cigarillo Tea Needle
How to Brew
About Saratoga Tea & Honey Co.
Our passion for teas...
We are delighted to be able to share one of the largest and most varied collections of single origin traditional teas on the East Coast with our communi·tea. Personally curated by owner Hayley, these teas come to us from small farms and collectives and represent the best of their terroirs and production styles. While wondering our shelves in-person or online, you will discover familiar favorites like English Breakfast and Long Jing (Dragonwell) alongside rare teas like Shan Lin Xi and herbal tisanes blended for mindfulness, inflammation, and much more.
& bees...
Raw honey is one of nature's most marvelous gifts. Not only is honey a marvel of energy-giving carbohydrates fortified with antioxidants, minerals and beneficial enzymes - making it the healthiest natural sugar - honey comes in a rainbow of flavors and varieties with something for everyone to appreciate and enjoy. From dark, robust honeys like Buckwheat and Chestnut to light or amber honeys like Tupelo or Orange Blossom, the subtle and sometimes not so subtle flavor differences between varietal honeys lend themselves to extraordinary flavor combinations and experimentation in the kitchen, on the charcuterie board, or in your favorite cup of tea.
all started with our Queen Bee!
A trained chef, Hayley's vision for Saratoga Tea & Honey Co. has been her entire lifetime in the making. Though she was still drinking espresso at the time, the Tea & Honey seeds were planted in the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants with training and appreciation for food and beverage as not just sustenance, but experience and hospitality. Her time spent as a chef-instructor at Jacques Pépin's French Culinary Institute introduced her first to matcha (and its ability to enhance sustained and steady focus), then to the subtleties of single-origin traditional teas like high mountain Taiwanese oolong. As a celebrated and awarded taster and master of culinary arts, in 2015 Hayley opened the doors to Saratoga Tea & Honey Co. Since then, she has cultivated a communi·tea for discovering rare and exciting teas, extraordinary raw honeys & unique gifts produced by small farmers and artisans from around the world.