News

In this area you will find information about our meetings held in 2018.

March -  Tea Tasting Evening

On Thursday 22nd March our speaker for the night was Anna Stasinska who travelled over from the Old Brickyard Tea Garden, Scalford, Melton Mowbray. Anna gave us a fascinating talk on the origins of tea and we were able to sample five different varieties of specialist teas.

There are three billion cups of tea drunk throughout the world each day. Anna told us that tea pickers only pick the bud and the top two leaves off each tea bush on each occasion and the taste of the tea varies according to the season and the time of day it is picked.  

Did you know that tea bags have plastic fibres in them but many people prefer to use them for convenience rather than using loose leaf tea which has traditionally needs to be used with a tea strainer. In 2017 one of the WI resolutions was to keep microplastic fibres out of our oceans. So it was interesting to find out about tea infusers which are easy to use and are reusable also bleached biodegradable single use tea bags that can be filled with the tea leaves you prefer.

Anna showed us how tea tasters taste tea. This involves sipping the tea to get oxygen in the mouth (which improves the flavour) then slurping the tea before spitting it out!  The teas we tasted included Chamomile, Jasmine, Darjeeling mid season and a blended tea

February

This month we celebrated our birthday but first our meeting started with a talk from Dr John Sutton about the disastrous maiden voyage of the Titanic. Johns talk was fascinating and we learnt that their were two other boats built at the time of the Titanic although each of them was launched at different times one was used as a hospital ship. It was interesting to hear that there was not enough life boats on board for the number of passengers and crew as it was thought they would never be needed. The lifebelts though did there job unfortunately some of those that perished died of hypothermia due to the coldness of the sea not through drowning. This was followed with  refreshments including a piece of our delicious birthday cake made by Jacqui our secretary .

January

Thursday 25th January was our first meeting of 2018. We started our meeting with a quiz that was hosted by our programme organiser Shirley and assisted by Jo. We had some picture rounds asking our teams to name famous faces as well as TV programmes, which had several of us scratching our heads and uttering the face looks familiar but what their name? ...... oh I used to watch this on but I cannot for the life of me remember its name . This was followed by a cheese tasting round accompanied with a glass of wine or Schloer which was the most popular round before the final round asking out teams to involving answers with five letters ending in 'ure'.

what a great start to our programme

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