Tall-Wraith monoids were introduced in [SW09] to describe the algebraic structure on the set of unstable operations of a suitable generalised cohomology theory. In this paper we begin the study of Tall-Wraith monoids in an algebraic and categorical setting. We show that for V a variety of algebras, applying the free V-algebra functor to a monoid in Set produces a Tall-Wraith monoid. We also study the example of the Tall-Wraith monoid defined by the self set-maps of a finite ring, an example closely related to the original motivation for Tall-Wraith monoids. * The authors acknowledge the support of the EPSRC, grant no.: GR/S76823 /01.