Last Friday I had the opportunity to experience a very special caked, aged tea that is seldom seen outside of Korea. My friend Eric Glass, of The Fragrant Cup, arranged ahead of time to bring the tea to Phoenix Tea, generously wanting to share the experience with me and Brett Boynton. Eric provided the tea [...]
I bought this white stoneware set from a gentleman on eBay who had had it sitting around for at least a decade and had never used it. I think he said that it had been given to him as a gift while he was working in Japan and he had identified it as Japanese, but [...]
It took a bit of work, but I have identified this tea as third flush Jakseol. When I bought it several weeks ago I was limited in the amount of information at hand, since I am not able to read Korean, but I could tell that it was good quality Korean green tea, grown and [...]
After quite a bit of online searching for olive pit and other types of charcoal to use in my Chou Zhou tea stove, I finally stumbled upon a source locally for good, affordable charcoal. Pal-Do World is a chain of Korean markets, three of which are in this general area. They carry boxes of SaengGeo [...]
Last weekend the Northwest Tea Festival was a little sparse, but in its inaugural year it was about the size I expected it to be. Festival attendance looked pretty good on Saturday while I was there and most of the booths were getting a fair amount of attention. We paid the $5 donation to the [...]
In addition to their own specific form of the tea ceremony, the Koreans have a centuries-old tradition of drinking tisanes prepared with fruits, spices and leaves. One of these, which I discovered in a Korean grocery store, is sujeonggwa (수정과, 水正果), sometimes spelled “soojunggwa” and other ways. It is made from ginger, cinnamon, sugar, dried [...]
