Legend has it, Asian princesses used an essence derived from the green tea leaves grown on the Korean island of Jeju to preserve their ageless beauty. Turns out, those princesses were definitely on to something. Today’s beauty products companies are capitalizing on the super-antioxidant polyphenols found in tea to make both skin and hair care lines.
This cleverly upcycled teapot-to-birdhouse. Visit Etsy for a selection of repurposed kettles, teapots and teaware.
Fu Brick Dark Tea, also known by its visually descriptive name of Golden Flower Dark Tea, is a relatively unknown fungi tea in China that is awaiting one clever and energetic entrepreneur to bring it into mainstream awareness in the West.
Forest Hill Tea Garden features wild grown teas produced from an abandoned tea plantation that spans 100 acres, part of a forest that extends to the Holy Adam’s Peak rain forest reserve.
Red teas in China are experiencing a Renaissance. One of the most sought after of the high-end red teas is Jin Jun Mei – a fully oxidized tea created in 2006. It is made wholly of tea buds picked in early spring…
Wuyi Star – China’s biggest supplier of Wuyi Rock Tea – has reimagined the technique as a way of introducing tea drinkers to subtle flavors in the cup.
Daniel Hong’s whimsical online profile picture has him adorning a Charlie Chaplin hat with an oversized black cardboard moustache.Chinese millennials don’t usually do whimsical, so I thought I might soon be meeting an over-the-top eccentric…
A rose by any other name may smell like tea. These delicate rose varieties were originally named because their fragrance resembled tea.
Intrigued by the notion of creating a scent kit I was not prepared to launch a serious effort until I had fully retired and written the first version of my first book on tea. It was then I began to grasp the various processes that yield the different aromas in tea. And I had sourced some of the aromas for my presentations.
We can’t all live in this Yellow Submarine, but you can brighten up your dad’s morning tea with this cheerful little submersible. It submerges loose tea leaves to the bottom of the cup or mug, creating a perfect little ocean of fragrant wakeup.
If you are wondering if tea can help you sleep better, the quick answer is yes so long as the tea is caffeine free.
The question is old and simple: Does drinking green tea directly create weight loss? The answer is not at all simple and it hasn’t changed.
Tea helps your brain maintain efficiency by altering the physical structures of its networks of connections, a finding that opens up a promising new horizon in the investigation of tea and wellness.
Long before cut, tear and curl (CTC) dominated tea processing in the West, India exported sizeable quantities of handmade orthodox tea to an appreciative world market.
Small factories at small gardens cultivated the art of rolling and twisting and shaping tea. Artisan tea is labor intensive and tea masters are more selective about the leaves they accept.
“The indentured migrant laborer community of the tea plantations in Assam and North Bengal in India, has always intrigued,” writes Dr. Sunayana Sarkar. “Their history has also appalled, at times,” adds Sarkar, a professor of structural geology and geotechnics and a gifted musician.
Given that the Indian tea industry is struggling, Craigmore Tea Estate’s profitability offers important insights. The estate produces orthodox green and black tea, with the former exported and the latter sent to the auctions. Over the years, the balance has tilted to favor more green tea production to meet the demand.
In pu-erhs, the dynamic elements are microbial and have the most impact on lipids. The most promising avenues of research and application for standard tea types is cancer prevention and treatment. For pu-erhs, it is cardiovascular health.
Tea is a lifetime drink and as our life moves on and times change, so do our preferences and needs. Tea offers every age group dimensions of value and enjoyment that move with the rhythms of life’s stages. There is no one “best” tea, but always one for you, at your age.
It’s all about the leaf, not the package, marketing, additives, flavorings and price. You can do better; even if you prefer tea bags, avoid green tea, or don’t bother measuring temperature or time. There are new options in every area of taste, variety, price, aroma, caffeine, healthiness, freshness, smoothness, sweetness and overall satisfaction.
The amount of plastic in a single bag is around 60 micrograms – 60 millionths of a gram. Change the headlines from “Tea bags release billions of particles” to “millionths of an ounce” and the emotive reaction is surely more muted. But the figures are exactly the same.
Earnestly practicing tea, with your whole mind and heart, is equal effort to time spent on a meditation cushion.
Caffeine is one of the main factors people consider in their choice of daily beverage. For some, it is the decider in their selection. For most, it is more a cautious concern.
Tea gets the spotlight in beauty
Researchers have identified that gratitude practices and encouraging positive feelings have direct effects on the immune system and cardiovascular system.
The foundation of genetic manipulation of tea is knowing what it is that you are manipulating. Tea’s a five-thousand year mystery tale. For every major fact we know, there is so much we have only been able to guess at or approximate about the “why” and “how” behind it.
There are four positions a tea lover can reasonably take on this complex question of tea safety. No one of them is self-evidently correct and, ironically, scientific data is often used to “prove” any of them. The aim of this post is to help you get a clearer focus on facts rather than impressions.
One of the most encouraging outcomes of the vast volume of research studies on tea is the consistent accumulation of evidence of its positive impacts on key areas of women’s quality of life and protection from dangerous ailments.
If you want a pick me up, tea is hard to improve on. It is a gentler energizer than coffee, brings extra natural beneficial nutrients, is free of sugar, artificial stimulants and offers a range of flavors, which in itself can sharpen the senses and waken the metabolism.
There is a new interest in exploring the full range of phytonutrient benefits. For centuries, botanicals were the entire base for treatments of illnesses that we now routinely handle through pharmaceuticals.
Think of tea as a nutrient for your bones and an investment in an imaginary health savings account. It won’t directly add to your income, but the odds are high that it will pay off in reducing the risks of osteoporosis and fractures endemic to old age.
The benefits of tea may be due to its influence on the digestion of glucose (blood sugar), the ADA noted, or because of tea’s high polyphenol content.
The risk from caffeine to humans during pregnancy is low but present.
It’s important to really know what you’re drinking and how it affects your body.
Cosmetics firm Cha Ling 20 is supporting 20 hectares of tea garden zone, located within the 400-hectare Biodiversity Reserve managed by Minguo Li Margraf. This reserve is in Xishuangbanna, South Yunnan in the famous Laobangzhang Pu’er Tea designation
Phytochemicals, biologically active compounds found in plants, provide roughly the chemical benefit of a serving of fruit or vegetables per cup of tea.
In the households of Yixing, home of the celebrated purple clay teapots, ordinary potters are crafting something extraordinary.
Sagar Mehta, who turned 90 in May 2019, is the oldest serving tea garden executive in India. The Koomtai Tea Estate that he managers produces 2 million kilograms tea—more than double the output when he was first named to rescue the troubled property.
Born and with my entire formative years lived in Shimla, India where the only agricultural produce was apples, working in tea as a career tea planter had never ever crossed my mind.
A scant 2,000 kilometers west of Darjeeling, on the opposite side of the Indian subcontinent, lays a scenic valley of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, a place steeped in Hindu mythology.
Green makes us go. It is the color of currency and commerce. It is bright and brings us luck in a shamrock or a sense of calm sailing a vast sea.
“In Asia, the color green represents positivity, and happiness—all appropriate adjectives to describe the current state of the global green tea market,” writes Sam Molineaux in World Tea News. Read more…
It took ten years for Rajiv Lochan to acquire and consolidate various plots into a single garden known as Doke Tea, an organic farm along the south bank of the Doke River in Bihar, India.
The vast Brahmaputra Valley holds the world’s greatest concentration of tea. Commercial production began 180 years ago in a region that has 800 of the largest plantations in the world; employs 686,000 tea workers daily and is vast enough to harbor ancient tea forests that have flourished for millennia.
— This time-lapse video captures the beautiful birth of the 2018 shincha harvest.A special video camera, positioned at the Nakakubo Tea Farm, advanced a few frames every 5 minutes for about 30 days last month to show us the dance of the new leaves. The digital images were then edited to create a short film.
Dr. Pradip Baruah, an avid explorer, said local tribesmen indicated the Assamica tea plants in this forest has existed in the wild since time immemorial. “I talked to the village elders and there is no knowledge of anyone planting here,” he said.
Many tea connoisseurs wait for this first harvest each year, which is usually only available in very small quantities, and will most likely be gone within the first few months or even weeks of its harvest.
Most people are familiar with the many black tea blends on the market but may not have much sense of the nuances of bringing together a complex set of flavors and of the wide varieties of choices that differentiate similar sounding teas.
Kuriyan family enterprises own thousands of acres of plantation land in Karnataka. One grows cut roses for export to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand; another latex sheets for rubber; areca or betel nut for pan; Arabica and Robusta coffee; black and white peppercorns, and cut timber.
Ghee is a style of clarified butter used in Indian cuisine. Milk proteins are browned during the process giving it a wonderful nuttiness. The addition of tea leaves during this step can add further depth to the flavors and perhaps this would then be Ghea?
The fight against climate degradation is producing some positive results and a body of good practice is emerging. Here are just a few representative successes.