Meet the hands and the hearts behind the leaves.
Tea sommelier Daniela Ferraresi has spent over 20 years promoting tea culture through her Rome specialty store namasTèy, 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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Chaozhou is the epicentre of Phoenix Dan Cong (Fenghuang Shan), a diversely aromatic oolong. Discover how Yujian Cai, with his family history in pottery, is shaping the future of Chaozhou tea traditions and culture, taking them forward into the new era.
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Discover how two Mexican nationals living in Japan have embraced Japanese tea culture, in this heartwarming story of how they found their calling as practitioners of the Hoenryu tea ceremony in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto.
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Ghana’s tea culture is entwined with an older tradition of herbal blends that are used as infusions, in soups, stews, tinctures, tonics, and even steam inhalations for medicinal value. Moringa and lemon grass top the list and tea, which until now was seen as similar yet different is beginning to find its place thanks to people like Clarissa Akakpo, a speciality tea retailer.
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When asked what the key to a successful blend is, the first word that comes is “love,” love of the plant and love of the producer, from which stems a desire to always enhance the products and never distort them.
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Bringing consciousness to tasting, not just in the sensory experience of the mouth or intellect, but also in the body. Sometimes these approaches face each other: the very Western sommelier side, especially French, and the very experiential Chinese approach.
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The tea industry relies on women whose strong yet nimble fingers pluck the delicate buds from the trees and sort the imperfect from the perfect leaves. Yet women are far more likely to live in extreme poverty and have less access to education. This Mother’s Day Tea Journey celebrates the companies and individuals change that narrative by educating, empowering, and enabling women in tea. Join us in supporting those who a difference for mothers and female tea workers worldwide.
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Misako Lelong-Nohsoh shows us that Japanese green tea is nothing to fear. She takes away the formality of the Japanese tea ceremony and introduces us to Japanese green tea as she wants us to experience it: as a beverage like wine, coffee, or black tea that is woven into the everyday fabric of our lives. This is the delightful story of her journey from Japan to France and from violist to Japanese Green Tea Ambassador.
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Katrin Rougeventre’s journey is a singular one. She is France’s leading expert on Chinese tea and Chinese culture and has contributed to its diffusion in Europe. Among all the great French tea experts, what distinguishes Katrin is undoubtedly her roots in Asia, where her entire gustatory and sensory training took place.
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The Satemwa Tea Estate, founded in 1923, began to revive the production of orthodox teas about 15 years ago. It is the only estate in Malawi crafting orthodox teas. Taster Alfred Mwase says, “my only experience prior to 2010 was CTC. My first tasting of specialty stimulated interest in these unique teas. Satemwa is a pioneering estate that is open to experiments with new tea cultivars, withering times, rolling techniques, oxidation times, and drying cycles.”
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“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.”
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At age 6, on his way to school, Roy Fong would linger at a Hong Kong food stand where day laborers were making gongfu cha. Sometimes someone would offer him a cup, and he never forgot the wonderful aroma and taste.
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He speaks of tea as one would about a real person, as a friend. That’s true love, if it can be called anything.
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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.
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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.
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KOOMTAI, Assam – Forty years ago executives of Goodricke Group, which had just split from Duncan Brothers & Company Ltd., sent one of their best estate managers to Koomtai Tea Estate, a company-owned garden in Assam’s Golaghat district. His mission was to assess whether to sell off the unproductive property […]
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Peter Luong is not a tea mystic. The founder of San Francisco’s Song Tea & Ceramics knows and values the subtle, complex characteristics of tea, but displays a polite skepticism about the many claims for its physical and mental health-enhancing abilities. “I don’t like the ‘fetishing’ of tea,” he says. […]
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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…
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Siliguri, West Bengal During his 47-year stewardship of Makaibari Tea Estate, one of India’s oldest and most celebrated tea habitats, Rajah Banerjee, 70, instituted innovations that continue to reverberate globally. The 1,100-hectare estate was both laboratory and classroom. “I was never an owner, just a steward in passing,” he says. […]
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Ten innovative women who shaped the history of tea: social, political, trade, business, and cultural.
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The intense, curious, and inventive mind of Allen Han has been focused for years on industrial design. The 45-year-old is best known for his role in creating the Xbox 360 and the Kindle Fire. But, since 2014, this designing mind has been turned to a new venture: creating the Teforia […]
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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.
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At a very young age, Cotterman developed a passion for pottery, making pinch pots in the rocky Texas dirt of her yard. By the age of 12, she had her first formal experience with a throwing wheel during a summer camp class.
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Meet Yongzhong Xie: born into tea, raised by tea and to a great extent, defined by his tea. A tea master and a task master, Mr. Xie demonstrates the art of manufacturing fine Keemun tea.
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