Getting into The Tea

Why I Created a Personal Curriculum All About Tea

At the end of 2025, I noticed all of the YouTube girlies that I follow were talking about creating a Personal Curriculum for 2026. Some were doing it to counterbalance their own perceived waning attention spans and the pervasive influence of anti-intellectual social media content. Some were doing it because of the growing popularity of being an autodidact (Hello, Ishmael Reed, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou). And others were jumping on the Personal Curriculum bandwagon simply to create some order, purpose, and intentionality to their hobbies and interests. Me personally, I resonated with all of those reasons, so I was like, where do I sign up?

What is a Personal Curriculum?

I can’t define a Personal Curriculum for everybody, because by virtue of the concept itself, it is personal, defined by the individual. However, at its most basic, a personal curriculum is a syllabus with assignments and goals to guide the “student” through a certain learning outcome. The learning outcome is of course, also defined by the student.

From what I have gathered, this 2026 Personal Curriculum trend is open for interpretation and one’s curriculum can be highly organized or it can be rather loosey goosey. It’s a personal curriculum so there are no professors and there are no grades.

Because Personal Curriculums are trending however, there are plenty of people willing to share their opinions on how to create one, or to sell you their Canva Template to set yours up, or to tell you that you’re doing yours wrong.

I say use what you need and throw the rest out. That’s what I did. And it was actually quite nice to see how other people were building their Personal Curriculums to help me create my own. (If anyone is interested in getting a good overview of what a Personal Curriculum can look like, check out this video by ThisStoryAintOver. She is one of my favorite YouTube girlies BTW, who creates content supporting BIPOC authors.)

Why I Built a Personal Curriculum around Tea

To be honest, I fell in love with the idea of having a Personal Curriculum (for all the reasons mentioned above) before I selected the topic of Tea. But once I decided I wanted to have a personal curriculum for 2026, I took a moment to question what I wanted to learn more about. What I wanted to deepen my understanding of. And most importantly, what single subject would allow me to also play around in the subject areas that I’m most drawn to, including books, Black people, magic and folklore, travel, plant medicine and new cultures.

Photo by Prchi Palwe on Unsplash

While I was doing all of this contemplating, I was most often, sipping on a cup of Earl Grey tea with a splash of soy milk. Early Grey tea and its multiple derivations have become a recent obsession, particularly because it is rather hard to come by in my new adopted city in Southern Spain. Over the course of the nearly five years that I’ve lived in Spain, I’ve found only two stores where I can buy robust, loose-leaf Earl Grey tea. For the uninitiated or unaware, Earl Grey is a black tea laced with hints of citrus and its signature ingredient, oil of bergamot.

Because I am a curious child, when I did finally locate a tea emporium that sold an Earl Grey –they actually called their unique blend Lord of the Grey – I asked where they sourced their tea from. I expected the answer to be India or China, so I was shocked when the store proprietor said, Germany. Tea comes from Germany? I thought to myself, which led me down a rabbit of hole of trying to understand how Germany got involved in the tea business.

Once I started investigating the most basic aspects of the tea trade, initially just because I wanted to source some good teas for myself, I realized that there was so much I didn’t know about my new favorite beverage. And FYI, tea is also the world’s most consumed beverage after water.

What I Want To Learn About Tea

Photo by Alice Pasqual on Unsplash

My personal curriculum is built around five main goals.

1. I want to learn the history of the tea trade.

2. I want to learn how to blend my own tea.

3. I want to learn how, when, and why tea became associated with literary culture.

4. I want to find the intersection of tea and Black history, culture, and commerce.

5. I want to learn about tea as a form of medicine. (Specifically in the realm of traditional African-American healing modalities, which takes me back to goal #4)

Sharing My Personal Curriculum Learnings

As mentioned above, there are no grades or graduations for completing the assignments on one’s personal curriculum. But I will be giving myself awards along the way, including fancy new teas, books about tea, and tea themed field trips. I can see taking myself out for a traditional English tea as an appropriate reward for a job well done as well.

If you are a subscriber to this Substack, be warned, I will be sharing some findings and resources here, and I will probably also share the tea on my new Literary Lori YouTube channel. But fundamentally, this is a personal curriculum so the lessons learned are for me. I have a gorgeous green notebook where I am archiving my knowledge, and as a lifelong scrapbooker/collage enthusiast, I will also be collecting any paper-based tea memorabilia that I come across as well.

I am excited.

So, do you have a Personal Curriculum you’re following this year? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Please share in the comments. And if you have any tea resources you think I should know about, please feel free to share those as well.