UK Tea Academy
Tea Foundation Online
£175
UK Tea Academy has provided me with Tea Foundation Online for the purposes of writing an honest review.
From now until the end of January 2021, you can use the coupon code OMS20 for 20% off any course from the UK Tea Academy.
UK Tea Academy reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in taking some of their courses. As a life-long learner who’s spent quite a long while with post-secondary courses, I was of course interested in doing an online course! As a person who doesn’t live in the UK time zone, as well as living a busy life, an online and self-paced course was more than appealing to me, so this is my review on UK Tea Academy’s Tea Foundation Online course.
The Tea Foundation Online is a fully digital/online course that doesn’t require any other equipment aside from a device that can access the internet. The course takes approximately 12 hours to complete with 4 modules (so about 3 hours per module). The modules include photographs, charts, and videos to help keep things interesting and engaging, which I enjoyed.
Module 1 is the introduction, talks about the basics of tea, the history, steeping and drinking.
Module 2 begins the talk of tea manufacturing processes, and discusses green and black teas.
Module 3 discusses the manufacturing of white, oolong, yellow, and pu’erh teas. I found this part fascinating because there isn’t a lot of information about there about yellow teas, so I was quite interested to learn more about it.
Module 4 is all about tea grading, flavoured and blended teas (with a touch on one of my favourites – Earl Grey!), flowering teas and also about health benefits behind the chemical compounds from tea.
The tea manufacturing process was really informative, as well as the videos and diagrams of the actual machinery being used as well as the skill and labour used when creating tea by hand. There were certainly details and information that I haven’t come across before. It goes quite in depth into tea manufacturing process in China and Japan, as well as discussing the history of tea estates and tea farms throughout India, and other parts of Asia.
There are short multiple choice quizzes within each module to help reinforce the learning, as well as a longer final test at the end of the course as well to help reinforce the education that you’ve just gone through. A nice touch is a videos from Jane Pettigrew herself (who’s the founder of the UK Tea Academy) at the end of the course and examination, as well as a printable PDF certificate when you’ve completed the course.
I feel like this course is aptly named. Tea Foundation Online gives you a great foundation of knowledge in which to build upon. It was split into bite-sized lessons and modules that allows for easy learning and logical places to stop and start if you’re pacing yourself or only able to carve out short periods of time to do some reading. There’s a lot of information packed into the course which has been informative for me as both a tea enthusiast and tea blogger.
While there was some information that I already knew (which, to be fair, probably isn’t that surprising), I did learn quite a bit about the manufacturing process of tea which really gave me a better appreciation of my favourite drink. With a personal goal to do more learning in general, I’ve been pleasantly enlightened with the information provided through the course and it also give me a greater interest in learning more about the history of tea and the development of the different types of teas – as well as a piqued interest in pu’erh teas after learning more about them.
