Hoshino villagers have experimented with growing, processing, and savoring tea for more than 600 years. The village’s Tea Culture Museum offers visitors a first-hand experience preparing artisan tea amid displays of ancient crafts.
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.
Tea Studio celebrated its second birthday in August 2019. What it offers is a new model for processing tea in India. Small has not meant few teas. Nearly 90% of Tea Studio’s teas are exported to Canada, United States, Japan, and Australia. Teas are made to order, production is a modest 20 kilos a day.
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 (刘峻周) 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.
China’s National Tea Museum, established in Hangzhou in 1991, is considered the epicenter of knowledge and appreciation of China’s most treasured beverage. Whilst there are small tea museums sprinkled across China
Consider owning a 470 million-year-old work of Mother Nature’s art, appropriately priced well over $500.
Kakuzo Okakura first described Japanese tea culture to a readership in the U.S. in The Book of Tea in 1906. Since then, his book, his ideas, and Japanese tea culture have traveled across the world.
The Nine Bend River (Jiuqu Xi) is a masterpiece one hundred million years in the making, cutting through China’s oolong tea capital.
KOOMTAI, Assam – Forty years ago executives of Goodricke Group, which had just split from Duncan Brothers & Company Ltd., […]
Straight out of university with a masters in English, I found myself at age 22 up in the High Ranges […]
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
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…
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…
Jorhat, Assam The vast Brahmaputra Valley holds the world’s greatest concentration of tea. Commercial production began 180 years ago in […]
Eons of evolution in the ancient tea forests of China has established a complex and delicate biomass. The gnarled, pale-grey and green trunks of the oldest trees are home to myriad adaptations of spiders, lichen, and the tree parasite known to locals as crab pincer, a tea mistletoe.
Siliguri, West Bengal During his 47-year stewardship of Makaibari Tea Estate, one of India’s oldest and most celebrated tea habitats, […]
Pradip Baruah was born curious. He spends much of his time in the office and lab as chief advisory […]
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.
The concept of terroir is still in flux, though trending toward a more widely accepted framework for an all-encompassing set of synergistic influences.
The Western Ghats, South India Backbone of South India The six-hour drive south from Balanoor Tea Estate in Karnataka to […]
Balanoor Tea Estate, Karnataka Piece of Cake His birthday was celebrated in a leafy residential section of Bangalore, one […]
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia In the time of the great Khans a caravan laden with four “poods” of tea found favor with […]
KYOTO, Japan — This time-lapse video captures the beautiful birth of this year’s shincha harvest. A special video camera, […]
It’s no news that climate change is a growing, severe and global problem. Alas, it’s also not news that this […]
Vietnam in 2017 ranked as the world’s seventh-largest producer of tea and fifth in exports. It has 124,000 hectares under […]
Tucked away near Oregon’s Willamette River in Salem, is Minto Island Tea Company: a nearly half acre plot of land containing Camellia sinensis var. sinensis bushes. More botanic laboratory than tea farm, it’s a 29-year-old science project and the only place in the state of Oregon where tea is being cultivated and sold.
There is a clear emerging trend in the Australian market away from mainstream black tea to more specialist offerings. Australians’ […]
Tea and Buddhism: Much More than Just Contemplation It seems natural to associate Buddhism with tea. Tea expresses China’s history. […]
Tearooms are romantically portrayed as cozy and pleasant places to relax and enjoy teas with cakes, biscuits and sandwiches. Tearoom […]
Australians have a history of being black tea drinkers and following their mostly British heritage, but that is rapidly changing. […]
Large government-supported tea estates are failing. Scarcity of labor, the cost of large-scale production and reliance on chemicals and pesticides […]
Green tea (nokcha in Korean) is called “sparrow’s tongue tea” (jaksulcha) due to the tea leaf’s delicate shape. In Korea, […]
Stephen Carroll is one of 42 Tea Journey tasters reporting on the 2016 harvest. Look for his posts on South […]
I began visiting tea markets to find companies selling interesting teas. I spent countless hours sipping teas at tea shops […]
GRASSE, France — Less than an hour away from Nice, in the South of France, there is a small town […]
The tea industry runs on the backs of women. Their strong yet nimble fingers pluck the delicate buds from the trees, and sort the imperfect from the perfect leaves. Yet in many tea-producing countries, women are far more likely to live in extreme poverty and have less access to education. However, some people are striving to change that narrative by educating, empowering, and enabling women in tea to rise up and bring others with them. This Mother’s Day Tea Journey wants to celebrate the companies and individuals who are helping make a difference for mothers and female tea workers around the world.
It’s dawn and Elizabete Ume Shimada is already behind her sewing machine. Every day, this 90-year-old woman wakes at 4:30 […]
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia The nomadic way of life shapes Mongolia like no other country. Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country […]
In Badulla, Sri Lanka, farmers bring their first tea harvest to the Muthiyangana Raja Maha Vihara Temple for blessings. Dan Bolton joins in the celebrations on a visit to the island, enjoying the vibrant cultural experience it offers.
Tea once traveled the most daunting journey of any plant on the planet. Few tea drinkers know the story of […]
A high-mountain wulong known for its elegant aroma and sweet lingering aftertaste, Alishan Zhulu tea is appreciated by connoisseurs worldwide. Discover its story from Ren Zhi Deng, who was a catalyst in transforming his hometown into one of the most revered tea-producing areas in Taiwan.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia In a country where eating is more or less the national sport, tea is prominent on the […]
In Didin’s (my maternal grandmother) house in Kolkata there were many storage cupboards inset into the thick walls with glass […]
KITSUKI, Japan Small family-owned tea gardens are inseparable from the economic and social past of historical places such as Kitsuki, […]
From the vibrant colors and culture of Colombo to the peaceful hillsides of Kandy, Sri Lanka is both a tea […]
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.
RANITAR, Nepal Tea was a gift fit for their king that the humble people of Nepal have cherished since its […]
Nepal’s altitude, seasonality, soil, and various microclimates combine to establish a remarkably well-suited terroir for growing tea. The country’s finest teas are delicate with subtle aromas; Handmade teas are an expression of the tea maker’s art, inspired by new demand for delicate whites, oolongs, and airy black teas sold directly to retailers in Europe, Asia, and North America.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia One of the great pleasures of traveling is taking time to enjoy tea in a new place […]
The tea industry runs on the backs of women. Their strong yet nimble fingers pluck the delicate buds from the trees, and sort the imperfect from the perfect leaves. Yet in many tea-producing countries, women are far more likely to live in extreme poverty and have less access to education. However, some people are striving to change that narrative by educating, empowering, and enabling women in tea to rise up and bring others with them. This Mother’s Day Tea Journey wants to celebrate the companies and individuals who are helping make a difference for mothers and female tea workers around the world.