Tea with Maren

Tea with Maren

Maren at Monzen, holding up two leaves and a bud and smiling at the camera

Hello friend 🌱

I’m Maren – freelance creative, matcha barista, tour guide, and professional tea nerd. I wear a lot of different hats, but at the end of the day I care about creating authentic connections grounded in sensory experience. We live in an increasingly fast-paced, isolating, and fragmented world, so I use sensory experiences like food and tea to help people slow down, and reconnect with the natural world and each other.

I’ve worked with tea in Japan, China, the US, and the UK, covering its full lifecycle from farming and processing to retail, wholesale, cafes, events, and tastings. I also have a Master’s degree in linguistics from Oxford, and my professional background ranges widely across UX/UI design, edtech, and specialty tea. For my CV and some examples of past work, see here.

Nowadays I’m pursuing flexible, independent creative work that centres my interests in tea, sustainability, social justice, and the natural world – see below for some ongoing projects. Get in touch if you’d like to work on something together – I’m always up for a new adventure!

These days you’ll find me…

Teaching & hosting tea

I founded Leaf & Buds Tea as a means to share my love of tea. I host tea tastings, workshops, and other events, and sell tea and teaware in my online shop. I also develop educational material and tutor the Matcha Power unit with the UK Tea Academy.

Leading food tours

I host food tours with Savouring Bath, sharing stories about Bath’s history, architecture, and heritage while facilitating food and drink tastings with local independent vendors.

Designing websites & creating digital content

I built and maintain the e-commerce platform for specialty tea vendor omcha. I also support several tea brands with social media content creation and copywriting.

Whisking matcha

I prepare hand-whisked matcha drinks at Matcha Thing, a specialty matcha cafe in the centre of Bath.

Follow my work

On Instagram:

Deeply grateful for & inspired by the last few weeks’ tea learning in Hangzhou organised by the incredible @wen.zhuo.liu @liu_tea.art @alicia.jeanne and the China Tea Science Society. This course was so much more than I expected, both in terms of the scope and depth of content and hands-on tea processing experience, but also in engagement with ancient lineages of tea in China. I’ve hugged the Long Jing 43 mother tree, I’ve tried my hand at diancha tea art, I’ve traced the footsteps of figures like Lu Yu and Eisai across temples and mountains whose significance in tea is literally legendary. Some memorable moments from recent whisky tastings in Scotland. I love a peaty whisky, hence my Islay obsession, but this time the focus was Speyside, more on the sweet, caramel, toffee side. Some real highlights in there, including a few once-in-a-lifetime drams at Aberlour. Sunny weather putting me in the mood for kouridashi gyokuro these days… a long time favourite but never presented quite as beautifully as @obubuteafarms tea tour mar-tea-nis 🤤🌿 Balancing the frustration of yet another year in which things fell apart far more than they came together, while still trying to focus on what things are worth celebrating. Watching the ig highlights scroll past, writing my own for work, knowing it’s never anyone’s full story. Contemplating the intersections of derailed potential & possibility, toxic productivity, creative energy, and needed rest. Rediscovering the dreamspace. Feeling left behind, untethered, uncertain. Feeling quiet, calm, delighted by small things, the vastnesses around me. When everything feels impossible, the world at large tearing apart and my own small world not faring much better, I find relief in that contrast. How tiny we all are, and yet we are each other’s whole worlds. Not sure if I feel hopeful, overall, but such encompassing commitments have always been a challenge. Hope grows in small places, in ice crystals on trees and steam in sunlight beams of chill air. Here is a photo of me smiling. It’s Mental Health Awareness Week, so maybe I’ll talk about my own mental health for once. Lots of reminiscing on my teamaking experiences at @obubuteafarms @kyoto_obubu lately - even wrote a blog post about this one ☀️ 🌱 Slowly coming out of hibernation now? It’s been a tough winter (when is it not?) but there are some exciting things going on these days. I’m hosting a few spring tea events over on @leafandbudstea - if you’re in the UK check them out! 🍵 Moments from a rainy day in Tokoname last autumn… truly such a privilege to explore this beautiful place, learning about pottery, peeking through history, meeting artists, finding some incredible pieces that I’ll be using for years and years, with every brew taking me back to this one day. There’s something so enchanting about the look of the leaf after the first brew - all the colours and aromas just beginning to emerge, no expectations yet, just the magic of what might happen in this session ✨
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On my blog:

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Maren holding a bamboo tray of oxidising leaf, picking up a handful and smiling at it

Why tea with Maren?

Tea is the thread connecting so many of my passions, and it has been a constant companion to me throughout my life. I find endless joy and delight in it, it feeds my curiosity and constant learning, and my daily tea practice keeps me grounded in sensory experience and the present moment. Tea is also a global phenomenon, with rich cultural heritage across the world, and engaging with these traditions is a way to expand my own horizons.

Sharing tea with others can be an intensely personal and connective experience. Encountering flavours you’ve never experienced before, or learning about the fraught geopolitical history (and present) of something that can seem so ubiquitous and simple – these are vulnerable things, and deserve to be treated with intention and compassion. Tea sits at the intersection of so many of today’s Big Issues, but in a way that’s easily overlooked. My encounters in this space, and the growth and comfort I’ve found in it, have given me a passion for facilitating other folks’ experience here too.

Hence the name tea with Maren – I guarantee that a cup of tea with me is going to be way more than you expect.