Android App Review: Teavana Perfect Tea Touch

Teavana are a tea company based in Atlanta, Georgia. Their Perfect Tea Touch app is, as you'd imagine, all about tea – how to blend it, how to brew it, and where to get it.

So I write these reviews on Monday mornings and I'll be honest, some Monday mornings are more difficult than others. Today I was running empty on most counts, so I just typed 'tea' into the Google Play store and hoped for the best. What I got was the Teavana app, and it's actually pretty neat. (Only if you like tea though. In fact if you don't like tea, this review probably isn't for you. Sorry.)

The app gives you a bit of brief information on the major categories tea comes in, and individual products within them that Teavana makes. You can use it to match and blend different types of tea, and once you've picked your pairing the app will give you instructions on how best to prepare your drink. There's even a timer built in to the app so you know exactly how long you should leave it to brew (instead of an alarm beep it plays soothing music, which is quite nice).The shop menu lets you buy tea online, or tells you the location of Teavana stockists in your area (although apparently there aren't any in Auckland, which is a shame).

As you'd expect from a tea app made by a tea company, the information provided is centred around specific Teavana products. But the information is transferrable – instructions on how to best brew Teavana cacao mint black tea can be applied to any cacao mint black tea, I'm sure. And ultimately an app like this is always going to be a tool to sell more of your own products – we all understand that, and can hardly blame Teavana. What's good about the app is that it isn't relentlessly geared to sell you stuff the way so many are. The focus is more 'hey, tea's pretty nice, right? Incidentally here's a tea we make, if you wanted to try it…'

This is all really nerdy. I know that. And as fun as this app is to play with it's not going to get me to change from the same loose-leaf English Breakfast I've been drinking solidly for the last seven-odd years. But if you're a bit of a tea connoisseur, or you'd like to experiment but feel like you need a bit of guidance, then you could do worse than this app. And is being a tea nerd really any worse than any other upper-middle-class obsession? It's better for you than craft beer, and you can drink a lot more of it than coffee before it starts to keep you awake.