Expertise

“Down-chain tasting invites creative adventures into language and experience that is independent of a single lexicon. The focus is on concrete references to scents and aromas but abstract descriptors that personify overall quality are effective. Of course, your words have to describe something that touches on a shared experience  — otherwise, it’s useless.”

My introduction to tea was unspoken and visceral.  Humble mugs of the strong, milked ‘builder’s tea’ of my youth in the North of England still fill me with nostalgic pleasure whenever I’m in the U.K. My body chemistry has never been without the magic nectar. – Kevin Gascoyne

Tasting Qualities: The Past and the Future of Tea by Sarah Besky manages to easily deconstruct and demystify the space between the plantation and the cup of tea.

What would rhyme have to do with a tea’s aftertaste? To understand the many layers of this play on words, it is important to know that Chinese singing and by extension Chinese poetry have a Yang (masculine) and Yin (feminine) rhyme system.

Background Yellow Goddess of Mercy, also simply known as 105, is a relatively new oolong tea from Mount Wuyi in […]

There is a revolution going on in South India, right under our noses.  Up until the late 1980s perhaps, South […]

We all know that green tea is healthy.  However, most of us have only unearthed a fraction of the green […]

Experiencing the taste of tea and then describing that experience in spoken and written language is an art and a science, dependent on both inspiration and a lot of hard work. Professional tasters discuss some of the key questions about their craft.

Yiwu big tree puer has coarse stems and apparent long black strips. These big, slow-growing trees grow with minimal human […]