PRIVATE CLIENT SERVICES

BESPOKE BATCHES

With close relationships to the tea gardens, Lalani & Co are able to create unique batches of 2kg upwards for private customers, hotels, and restaurants. Your own unique batch can be your personal tea to drink yourself, or to use as gifts for friends and family. We begin by discussing your preferred origin, colour, and flavour profile, and then work with the gardens to create a bespoke batch for you which will be delivered to your chosen address with a certificate and personalised labelling.


Prices start from £1,500

TEA LIBRARY CREATION

A tea library is the name of a tea collection at a hospitality establishment or private home; the tea equivalent of a wine cellar. Lalani & Co are here to advise you on putting together your tea library, with advice on which teas to drink seasonally, which to enjoy all year, and which to keep for ageing. A comprehensive tea library will include the correct tools and equipment for bringing out the best flavour of each of your teas. We’ll discuss your flavour preferences, personal tastes, and budget. This will be followed by a full tea tasting to select and structure your library to your personal taste. If desired, we can work with our chosen craftspeople to build a physical housing for display and storage of your tea library.


The cost of assembling a personal tea library starts at around £950

COLLECTING & AGEING

The tea market shares many similarities with wine and whisky. A substantial layer of the available products in these markets is made for the mainstream consumer. The top levels of these markets are high-value luxury products and potential passion assets. In the same way that wine and whisky can improve in quality over decades, so too can tea. A tea which ages may increase in flavour quality, depth, length, and complexity. Imagine you're falling through a forest from the canopy to the floor. When a tea is young it might be floral, sappy, leafy, with light spice, or unripe fruit notes. As it ages, the floral notes become richer and then like dried flowers; the fruit notes ripen, then become like dried fruits; the sappy character will become woody, leading to forest floor notes. A long-aged oolong might become exceptionally complex, tasting of dried fruit, walnut, wood, tobacco, and dark chocolate, with a long finish.

Each tea has its own ageing curve. Some teas are best at their youngest and should be drunk when young. Others will peak after a time, requiring a little ageing, and some will age for decades, increasing in quality, rarity, and often value with the passing years. Lalani & Co can assist clients in assembling a library of collectable teas to age for the long term, particularly in the area of aged oolongs and white teas. As a collector private client of Lalani & Co you have access to our collector-grade teas, which we expect to increase in quality over time, which we package with extra security features for long term storage.


As part of the collecting and ageing service we warehouse your holdings on your behalf in secure, climate-controlled warehousing in the UK, controlled for temperature, humidity, and light. Your particular teas will be identified as yours, and we can provide a list of your holdings on request. You can choose to take delivery of your teas to drink or to gift in the future. Alternatively, you may choose to sell them. On request, Lalani & Co can seek a buyer for your teas. We might also offer to purchase aged teas back from you at a future date.


Collecting and ageing serivces minimum purcahe: £500
For more information and enquiries, contact us at info@lalaniandco.com

Important information about collecting and ageing services:

Additional terms and conditions apply for this service which we will send to you on request. As with buying other drinks that age, tea is a natural product which can be affected by a variety of factors. There is always the chance that a tea will not age as expected, or may not age well at all. We want to avoid this so we can all drink excellent aged tea, but there’s always a chance it might happen. Please be aware that this is a risk, and this risk is borne by the client.

While it may be possible to sell your teas in the future once they have aged, perhaps at a higher value, the market for aged teas is a fledgeling and thin market with no guarantee of a future sale. There is very little data on the long term prices of aged teas.

Collecting and ageing services should be approached with the intention of future personal consumption and gifting.

Lalani & Co is not regulated by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) and does not offer any investment or financial advice of any kind.

Nothing that Lalani & Co communicates to the customer should be viewed as investment advice of an kind, and Lalani & Co shall not, irrespective of the nature of the communication, intend to or have actually provided investment advice. Any decisions as to investment or purchase of a Product shall be taken by the Customer having carried out (or otherwise having omitted to carry out) its own, independent due diligence.