The topic of this month’s Association of Tea Bloggers sponsored Blog Carnival was to describe a memorable outdoor tea drinking experience. I like tea. I also like flora, fauna and the outdoors parts of the world. But I don’t often appreciate or experience them concurrently. So in order to fulfill my agreement to contribute to [...]
After I purchased my Chou Zhou stove from Tea Habitat several months ago the biggest obstacle I faced in learning to use it for tea was finding appropriate charcoal. As Imen of Tea Habitat wrote in this article on the Tea Obsession blog, good charcoal has been hard to get in the United States for [...]
There is good reason why royalty was associated with the finer things in life. Kings and government meant taxes, and if gold couldn’t be had, your locality paid in other forms. If your locality was recognized for horses, you worked to contribute your best horses as a form of tax. The emperors of China were [...]
This is my contribution to the first in a series of tea blog carnivals sponsored by the Association of Tea Bloggers, the theme of which is, “What is your favorite piece of teaware, and why?” While it was a bit of a challenge to choose just one item of tea ware among so many that [...]
Market researchers continue to predict the continued rise of tea consumption in the US. Of course, this will mean that a wider audience will come to experience teas, but there are few predictions about the depth of those experiences. In order to more fully appreciate the hundreds of teas available, here are 10 that will [...]
There are a few places around town that sell Ito En’s bottled teas. So occasionally, amid shelves full of horrid syrrupy-sweet, fruity flavored drinks with a bit of tea in them, I can find a product I’m willing to drink. These particular Ito-en teas are unsweetened, either just tea, or just tea with one additional [...]
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 [...]
