TWG Tea

TWG Tea was founded in 2008 in Singapore as a luxury tea concept built around retail boutiques, tea salons and a professional distribution network; the 1837 on its packaging refers to the year the island became a trading post for tea and spices, not to a founding date. In Dubai it runs a tea salon and boutique on the ground floor of The Dubai Mall, opposite the Waterfall Atrium, and a boutique at Mall of the Emirates, Shop 447 on Level 1.

The shelf works in two formats. Cotton teabags come in boxes of fifteen, all at one price whatever is inside them: English Breakfast, Milk Oolong, Genmaicha, Chamomile, Black Chai. The loose leaf is weighed by the 50 g and spreads much wider, from Gunpowder Supreme at the bottom of the range through Yunnan FOP, French Earl Grey, Imperial Keemun, Royal Darjeeling FTGFOP1, Ti Kuan Yin Superior and Emperor Pu-Erh up to a White Darjeeling. Matcha sits apart in a 40 g sachet.

The Dubai Mall address is a tea salon as well as a shop, with tea gastronomy, patisserie and a takeaway counter, and it stays open until midnight from Monday to Thursday and until 1 am from Friday to Sunday. The Mall of the Emirates boutique keeps ordinary mall hours. The house says its collection runs past a thousand single-estate harvests and blends across more than seventy locations worldwide, so the two Dubai counters are a window onto a much longer list than the one on display.