As I was leaving to fly to Las Vegas for World Tea Expo last week I found myself at Sea-Tac Airport in pursuit of a decent cup of tea. Much to my surprise, at the Dilettante Mocha Café I was able to procure a cup of what I am almost positive was Harney and Sons’ [...]
This is a teapot that I bought from Brett of Black Dragon Tea Bar several weeks ago. It was acquired during his most recent tea-related travels in Taiwan. Before seasoning it had a darker, very waxy, shiny surface on the outside, but it mellowed into the dusty surface it has now. It’s quite a photogenic [...]
Teas Etc.’s Plum Blossom Reserve Oolong (Dong Fong Mei Zen), a Bai Hao style oolong from Taiwan, is an exceptional and fabulous tea. It is one of a small number of teas that Teas Etc. has started importing from an award-winning Taiwanese grower. If you’ve tasted any Bai Hao oolong and are capable of calling [...]
A while ago I reviewed a Formosa Shanlinxi high mountain oolong from auraTeas. Not terribly long after that I received a sample of Rishi Tea’s Shan Lin Xi Gao Shan Cha Oolong, and I was quite interested in finding out how different the teas would be from each other. They are both from the Shan [...]
The first day of this month, All Saints Day, the first half of the two-day festival El Dia de los Muertos, I saw a much-needed period of un-allocated time laid at my feet, in between all of the running about, executing tasks and organizing, writing and building. I decided that this allowed me sufficient attentiveness [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Formosa Shanlinxi High Mountain Oolong is the lemoniest oolong I’ve ever tasted. It has a bright, very clean, slightly acidic taste, but it is also quite smooth and silky. As is the case with most lightly oxidized oolongs, the Shanlinxi Oolong does not start off in the first infusion displaying its full potential, but instead [...]
Before any of the tea samples arrived, I spent some time on the auraTeas website and found it quite nicely laid out and easy to navigate. Searching for particular teas by type or by region is a pretty smooth process. There are a few errors in English throughout the site, but they’re not too distracting. [...]
I had not previously had the opportunity to taste any aged oolongs so I was very curious to try auraTeas‘ Formosa Aged Dongding, 2004. I prepared it in the traditional gongfu method, using a yixing pot and serving pitcher. The pre-brewed scent of this tea is wonderful, rich, sweet and complex and it has a [...]
