A couple of weeks ago I ordered a charcoal-burning tea stove set from Tea Habitat. I will write more about this later, since I haven’t even had the opportunity to use it yet, but I have to share the complete absurdity of what happened after it arrived at my house. I unwrapped everything and had [...]
Vietnam has a vibrant cafe culture, centered primarily around the tradition of drinking Cafe Sua (Cà phê sữa) – a style of coffee distinctly Vietnamese. Coffee was not always important to the Vietnamese, of course, as coffee beans are not grown very close to that part of Southeast Asia. Coffee and the concept of the [...]
Last Sunday a new exhibit opened at the Fowler Museum at UCLA called, Steeped in History: The Art of Tea. The show looks to be quite a fabulous display of all sorts of tea-related objects and information, spanning several centuries and countries. Sadly, I don’t think I’m going to be able to see it myself [...]
photo by Wally Santana Nearly two weeks ago Typhoon Morakot, which also caused damage on the east coast of China and in the northern Phillipines, produced the worst flooding Taiwan had experienced in a half century. The cost in human suffering is tremendous, not just in the immediate injuries, deaths, loss of loved ones and [...]
Bi Luo Chun (literally “Green Snail Spring”) is one of the teas, alongside Long Jing (“Dragon Well,”) that appears almost universally on “Top Ten Chinese Teas” lists. Grown in Jiang Su Province, it is quite a wonderful tea. Teas Etc’s Bi Lo Chun Reserve is an excellent offering of this very famous tea. From Teas [...]
This past Saturday I had the incredible good fortune to spot this Japanese porcelain tea set in the glass cabinet in the back of an antique store, surrounded by uninteresting white china and Victorian glassware. I rarely see traditional styles of Japanese or Chinese teaware in antique stores, and it seemed even less likely in [...]
Shinobi-Cha is quite an unusual method for preparing high-grade Japanese green teas. Instead of using hot water, it uses ice, which has a profound effect on the character extracted from the tea leaves. Technically, the method is quite simple: place dry tea leaves in a pot cover the tea with ice cubes wait The result [...]
