Assembly Store

Bits and pieces from the North Melbourne Workshop this week 🤎

The Carlton store will be open for the public holiday this Saturday from 8:00-2:00 🤎 The North Melbourne shop will be closed. See you soon for a coffee or tea!

Orange butterscotch latte 🍊🍮 A tasty little treat on the autumn menu at the North Melbourne Workshop

Hello! Here’s our opening hours over the Easter holidays 🩵 Carlton: Thursday 2/04 - open Friday 3/04 - closed Saturday 4/04 - closed Sunday 5/04 - closed Monday 6/04 - closed Tuesday 7/04 - open as usual North Melbourne: Thursday 2/04 - open Friday 3/04 - closed Saturday 4/04 - closed Sunday 5/04 - closed Monday 6/04 - closed Tuesday 7/04 - closed Wednesday 8/04 - closed Thursday 9/04 - open as usual

Accrued collection of portraits sitting and standing in the North Melbourne workshop. Want to join us at TINA? We’re looking for someone to fill a new role in our small, but always ergonomic team. We’d love to find someone who is very interested in drinks, with sales and/or logistics experience. Is this you? There’s more details online. Link in our bio x

This filter is one of those easy-drinking, nothing-too-loud coffees. It’s nice to have first thing in the morning, when it’s too early to say too much, other than “this is delicious”. Think soft milk chocolate, a bit of nuttiness, and some ripe stone fruit sweetness, all wrapped up in a syrupy texture that finishes clean and beautifully balanced. We’re now roasting São Pedro da Canastra in North Melbourne 🤎 Pick some up to brew at home, or find it on Ordermentum for wholesale.

Making the absolute most of the season with our new fig leaf iced matcha! We weren’t totally expecting it to taste like a mango + vanilla weis bar ice cream… but it sort of does. Or something with a waft of coconut. It’s such a good flavour combination! Fig leaf matcha is available here on the bar here in the North Melbourne Workshop (until all the leaves are picked off Sam’s tree and we can’t make any more 🤭)

A bullet train from Kunming (the capital of Yunnan), takes you to Pu’er, a city famous for its fermented teas. We visited our tea growers, who organically farm the jasmine pearls we work with. They also produce Yue Guang Bai (white tea)and Mao Feng (green)for @assemblystoreau . It was really inspiring to see everyone drives electric cars, and lots of industry in the region is built off renewable energy sources, with solar panels dotted on the mountainsides. The climate here is generally spring-like, but this year heavier-than-usual rainfall has affected the harvest and created some challenges. We obviously couldn’t leave without drinking a lot of Pu’er tea from the surrounding mountains, especially Sheng (raw) Pu’er, which ages naturally over time, and Shou (ripe) Pu’er, which goes through quickened wet-pile fermentation. Like Champagne or Bordeaux, Pu’er tea gets its name from the place it comes from. The area is lush and subtropical, with a natural landscape that feels almost ethereal. It’s set at high altitude, around 1300–2000 metres above sea level. Tea is everywhere in the best possible way- many people work with it, and everyone drinks it.

Highlights from Carlton and North Melbourne lately, and drinks galore. Special mention to the newest creation - fig leaf matcha! Come try it (only at North Melbourne)🍀

Last days to drink our summer sour cherry and vanilla shrub at the North Melbourne Workshop 🍒 We’ll be sad when it’s all gone, but blood plum and oolong is next up!

Some moments from our North Melbourne Workshop ❣️We’re a couple of months in and feeling more and more at home here making jazzy seasonal drinks, roasting coffee, packing tea and getting to know the neighbourhood. lovely photos by lovely Phil Huynh

In November, we travelled to China to visit our long-time tea producer partners and fell completely in love with Pu’er City and the surrounding lush mountains in Yunnan. Standout highlights were dancing at the night market with the aunties, a tea house where we drank pu’er aged inside a little tangerine 小青柑 (chrissie shed a tear), the Ancient Tea Horse Road markets, and roadside cups of tea from 300-year-old bushes, with lightly dried rose added in the fourth infusion. The food was another big highlight, and having our hosts show us to so many amazing local spots was the best. Food was fresh, bright and aromatic- shaped by the subtropical climate and Yunnan’s proximity to Laos and Vietnam. The area has incredible mushrooms, heritage corn, regional citrus, and a wide range of seasonal produce, all deeply connected to the same landscape that grows the teas we love 💚 More photos from the trip to come soon. There’s too many good things to share in one post.