A tea bar with cigar pairing events is headed for Castleberry Hill. Aromas Premium Teas, the blending business of Sheila Hubbard, is preparing a brick-and-mortar home at 141 Mangum St. SW, the space The Sober Social used to occupy.
Hubbard came to tea through travel. During her years as a flight attendant she made a habit of visiting tea shops in the cities she passed through and writing about them online. In 2023 she began adding cigar pairings to that blogging, and the combination opened doors: a connection with the Sisters of the Leaf Global Movement, which works to bring more women into cigar culture, a session at Chicago Cigar Week where she taught pairing, and a pop-up cigar-and-tea event she hosted for a friend's nonprofit. Those experiences led her to start creating blends of her own.
The search for a storefront ended on New Year's Day, when a meeting at Koncept House pointed her to the Mangum Street address. The room will hold about 30 guests, with six seats at a bar and the rest at tables.
The drink menu is designed to rotate. Each month one blend takes the lead and is worked into the full beverage list, which Hubbard expects to include five or six cold mocktails and a similar number of hot ones. When the month turns, a different blend steps in. The teas are organic and sustainably sourced, with ingredients drawn from 14 countries, and some blends will be made only for the bar.
The blends are organized into series of three to five teas, and each series draws on family history. The first, called the Black Series, takes its stories from the life of Hubbard's great-grandfather Ike Rogers, whom she describes as a Cherokee Freedman, a U.S. Deputy Marshal and a Civil War veteran. Her team matched blends to roughly five documented episodes from his life. The opening feature is a smoky black tea named The Extortionist, after the time the U.S. government charged Rogers with extortion over $30.
Aromas will not sell cigars itself. Instead, the plan is to work with a cigar vendor and host ticketed pairing events, possibly with small amuse-bouche courses alongside. There will be no food menu, though Hubbard is talking with local brands about supplying small bites and snacks.
Her larger goal is to get guests tasting tea on its own terms, with no sugar or sweetener, and paying attention to how the flavors shift when paired with a cigar. Consistency matters to her as well: she wants every cup brewed the same way each time. She also hopes the bar becomes a regular stop for people looking for teas they cannot buy at a grocery store.
Hubbard was targeting a late-March opening and is building out the space with help from her four children.
Original reporting by Emily McGinn for What Now Atlanta.
