One thing that I find interesting about nearly all of the portrayals I’ve seen of Lu Yu, the 8th century Chinese writer of the Cha Jing (茶經, “Classic of Tea”), is that they are so consistent in style. He is almost always seated and shown with a teapot to one side of him on an [...]
Weekend before last, at the Second Annual Northwest Tea Festival, Marcus of Teahouse Kuan Yin gave me a very unusual fang cha pu’er to try. (“Fang Cha” are single cup or mug sized, square, flat pu’er cakes.) I was told that this curious little square block of tea was made with a coffee bean in [...]
I had gotten quite weary of reading so many flavor and character analogies between wine and tea, and began building up a determination to avoid them myself. It seemed to me that people were often just taking the short cut of borrowing language from the wine industry instead of taking the trouble to develop their [...]
After a discussion about the reliability of a story about tea leaves being dried in a Chinese factory by driving leaded-gasoline-fueled trucks over them, thus contaminating them with lead, I decided to find out the source of the information. I easily found the same quotation of a statement made by William Hubbard, the former deputy [...]
