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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

New tea shop coming to Bloomington in January

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While Bloomington features a wide array of shops and restaurants, it lacks a tea shop.

Jessica Messmer and Kayla Maldonado have a solution to this problem, and it is the Cup and Kettle 
Tea Co.

The shop, which they said they hope to open around January, will offer more than 100 different types of loose-leaf tea.

Messmer and Maldonado said they both have a passion for tea and opening a tea shop with each other had been on both of their minds without the other knowing.

“Last year I was getting ready to transition out of a position, and I was thinking about what I wanted to do,” Messmer said. “I thought to myself a tea shop sounded really awesome, and then, the next day as I was driving, Kayla called and asked if I wanted to open up a tea shop with her. So I took that as a sign that we should open a tea shop together.”

Messmer and Maldonado said they want Cup and Kettle Tea Co. to be their customers’ go-to spot for both work and 
conversation.

“We want to keep it interesting,” Maldonado said. “We like the aspect of having a tea shop because we want people to come in and use it as a meeting space to have fun and relax. We just like the idea of having a shop where people can come and hang out.”

Besides a multitude of teas, the tea shop, which doesn’t have a set location yet, will feature a tailored selection of beverage and food items. Also, an arrangement of classes and events will take place on-location.

“We’ll have salads and sandwiches, too, so there will be some things that you can come eat as well as the tea,” Maldonado said.

Messmer said they are hoping to grow their selection of 100 loose-leaf teas to 200 and offer brewing and blending classes.

They said they’ll work to keep both products and their shop as organic as 
possible.

“All of our teas are organic or organically produced, but they don’t quite have the certification because we work with a lot of small farms,” Messmer said. “We also make sure it’s all ethically grown and purchased and that the farmers are receiving ethical wages.”

It’s hard to find a good cup of tea, which is one of the reasons she and Maldonado are opening Cup and Kettle Tea Co., 
Messmer said.

Messmer and Maldonado said they originally envisioned Cup and Kettle Tea Co. starting out as a tea truck, but the company has already grown into a shop.

“But in the end we came up with just wanting to have a tea shop,” Messmer said. “We started that journey, but we’ve had a lot of ups and downs. We’ve learned so much along the way.”

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