Experience what it’s like to be a tea lover in Brighton, England, home to specialty tea shops Hoogly, Bird & Blend, and MD Teas. All three brands originated in this popular day-trip destination and seaside city loved by Londoners.
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Europe
Discovering the beautiful European countries and their people
Selling Tea in Italy: Forgetting the Noise of the World
Tea sommelier Daniela Ferraresi has spent over 20 years promoting tea culture through her Rome specialty store namasTΓ¨y, located behind the Pantheon in one of the world’s highest coffee-consuming nations. Her store serves as a calm refuge where customers discover quality loose teas and embrace tea as meditation
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The Acapella Plantations: The Song of Roussillon Tea
Jean-Marc Sanchez is pioneering the photovoltaic greenhouse concept in tea production and is the first to cultivate tea in the Occitan region of Southern France.
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British Tea Culture β Solace, Snobbery and Sharing the Love
The British are famously obsessed with tea. It was described by the author, George Orwell, as βone of the mainstays of civilisation in this country.β During World War I, tea was one of the few items that escaped rationing as the British government feared that a lack of tea would lower national morale. During World War II, they stockpiled tea in warehouses located away from potential bombing targets.
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OXALIS: Connecting Czech Culture and Spirit
Tea culture in the Czech Republic got a boost when Petr Zelik decided to revive it with his company OXALIS. Inspired by Eastern cultures and Western preferences, this is the story of a tea brand that has kept up with changing times and continues to make its impact in tea.
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PyrΓ©nees: The Birth of a New Tea Terroir
A tea enclave has emerged amid the Pyrénees Mountains, a natural barrier between France and Spain that runs over 430 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. A young agronomist, Lucas Ben-Moura established a new terroir in the Argelès-Gazost valley, a few kilometers south of Lourdes.
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Fine Tea from the Island of Jersey
With its 1,800 hectares of soil, the Jersey Royal is spoilt for choice when it comes to deciding where to plant tea. The islandsβ acid soil is perfect for the tea plant to grow. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, Jersey winters are mild, without any risk of frost, while summers are moderately warm and sunny. The islandβs high humidity also provides ideal conditions for the tea plants to thrive.
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Rediscovering 174 years of Tea
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew houses a remarkable cache of tea leaves and tea material culture collected over the past 174 years. Kew, a 326-acre botanical garden southwest of London opened in 1759 and today houses one of most diverse living and dried botanical and mycological collections in the world.
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Cultivating Tea in Coastal Portugal
In 2011 Portuguese wine maker Dirk Niepoort and his wife Nina Grutkowski planted two hundred seedlings in their garden adding a little at a time until, in 2018, there were 12,000 seedlings. Last spring CamΓ©lia Tea processed its first commercial crop, with a distinctive flavor that is the result of a terroir of its own.
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KΓ©rouzΓ©rΓ© Mill’s Botanical Garden
The LΓ©onard region of Brittany in Northern France has been considered a land of plenty for centuries; but who would have thought that a tea perfectly expressing the alliance between land and sea would grow from its soil?
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Japan’s Cultural Tea Bridge to Europe
The currents of Japanese tea culture are flowing outward to Europe. In the past 50 years, Europeans have been diving and delving into the green waters. What is it about Japanese tea that attracts Europeans, and how is it pouring into European culture?
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Garden of the Fairies
In 2014 in Brittany, France, Denis and Weizi Mazerolle processed 50 grams of their very first green tea using traditional Chinese methods. The tea had its own typicity, expressing aquatic, greeny, and seaweedy notes, it was a pure evocation of its terroir. Two thousand trees now make their garden, Filleule des fΓ©es, one of the largest in Europe.
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Kissed by the Sun
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary […]
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Silence of the Lakes
This is some dummy copy. Youβre not really supposed to read this dummy copy, it is just a place holder for people who need some type to visualize what the actual copy might look like if it were real content. If you want to read, I might suggest a good […]
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Origins: Black Sea Georgian Tea
Many sought to establish a tea dynasty in Georgia, and failed until a tea merchant named Popov invited the Cantonese (Guangdong) tea expert, Liu Junzhou (εε³»ε¨) and ten of his countrymen, to Chakva, just north of Batumi, in 1893. Liu brought 1,000 kg of tea seeds and 150,000 saplings from China. By 1950 under Soviet control Georgia tea supplied half the world. Read what happened next.
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Tea and Terroir Through Time, China and France
The concept of terroir is still in flux, though trending toward a more widely accepted framework for an all-encompassing set of synergistic influences.
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Grasse: Tea Blenders’ Paradise
GRASSE, France β Less than an hour away from Nice, in the South of France, there is a small town that I call the βtea blendersβ paradise.β For us tea alchemists, the use of favouring is paramount to our tea creations, and Grasse is definitely the place to go for […]
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Modern Tea Trends Take a Decidedly Victorian Turn in London
The quintessentially English custom of afternoon tea is experiencing a serious renaissance in London with dozens of hotels and tea salons offering both traditional services and those updated for a modern palate and sensibility.
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Growers Hope to Revive Georgian Tea
For most of the past century, Georgia was one of the world’s leading tea producers, supplying the unremarkable brew that filled tea cups in the Soviet Union. The Soviet collapse and the countryβs civil war virtually killed the industry, but itβs starting to make a comeback.
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Tasting Notes: Georgian Tea
What kind of tea is coming out of Georgia these days? Well, itβs not your (Georgian) grandfatherβs tea! We recently sampled a green and some black teas from producers reviving a tea industry that under the Soviet Union was once the worldβs fourth largest producer.
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Regal Rituals
The English, says author and tea historian Jane Pettigrew, βhave forgotten a lot of the importance, significance, and history of our tea drinking habits.β
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