Remembering Devan Shah

The tea education initiatives of specialty tea importer Devan Shan founded and supported in this country and India live on ― memorials to a man of enormous accomplishment.

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Inspiring enthusiasts to refine their taste in tea

Remembering Devan Shah

The tea education initiatives of specialty tea importer Devan Shan founded and supported in this country and India live on ― memorials to a man of enormous accomplishment.

Koliapani Tea Estate

Advocating Artisan Tea for Smallholders in Assam

The Tea Leaf Theory team is very lean, choosing to remain independent, bootstrapped, refusing certifications, they represent a new kind of startup, modern yet rooted in something traditional, ancient even. There’s the social impact but Tea Leaf Theory is not an NGO working for small farmers. “We want to make them entrepreneurs, not beneficiaries,” say co-founders Upamanyu Borkakoty and Anshuman Bharali.

Temi Tea Pluckers

Sikkim’s Temi Tea

Sikkim’s Temi Tea has protected and sustained its legacy. But it also made this legacy a part of its brand story, one that complements its topnotch tea.

The Bend Wuyi River

How Chinese Describe the Aftertastes of Oolongs

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.

Forest Pick Tea

Forest Pick Wild Tea from Manipur

Three sisters from Manipur, India, and their brother launched Forest Pick Wild Tea about two years ago. Together they organized villagers to harvest tall-grown tea trees on a schedule, arriving with portable processing equipment to make artisan oolong, black, green and white teas. “Irrespective of the market size or market opportunity, Forest Pick Wild Tea is not another start-up, but an eco-system we are creating in which all the villagers participating will benefit.” — Julie Gangte

Jin Hua Fungi

Fungi Love Tea, Too

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.

The Art of Earth and Fire

Jian Zhan teaware inspires poetic praise among its ardent lovers and devotees. Those who gain a genuine appreciation of Jian Zhan teaware find it impossible to shed their fascination with the history, science, art, and economics of these enchanting cups.

Mr. Kiya In His Field

Amazing Lessons on Japanese Tea at Cafe Seisui-an

Tea farmer, seller, event coordinator, gourmet, and nationally certified tea appraiser, Yasuhiko Kiya radiates love for his tea-growing neighborhood, Japanese tea, and his son, who will become the fourth generation to run the family business.

Restful Tea and Tisanes

If you are wondering if tea can help you sleep better, the quick answer is yes so long as the tea is caffeine free.

How Tea Can Improve Your Milk Supply

Many mothers feel they don’t produce enough milk, especially in the earlier days, weeks, or months after giving birth; after all, when you breastfeed, you can’t see exactly how much your baby is eating. What if increasing your milk supply was as easy as brewing a cup of tea?

Tea and Your Brain

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.

Announcing the Health & Wellness Issue

Tea is proven to enhance the well-being of those who drink several cups a day. It inspires a process of discovery among imbibers, cultivating a deep appreciation for the growing, crafting, and preparation of great tasting tea. Finding your own favorite tea leads to a daily ritual and, in time, a healthy life-long habit.

Destinations: Hoshino Village’s Tea Culture Museum

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.

The Gentleman Planter of Craigmore

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.

Puer Tea and Cardiovascular Health

In puers, 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 puers, it is cardiovascular health.

The Studio: Muskan Khanna

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.

Plastic Tea Bags: Shocking News or Nothing to Worry About?

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.

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 (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.

Tea and Women’s Health

Tea seems a powerful factor in preventing or easing the wide range of ailments where estrogen is a key factor.

Tea for Energy

Tea is the gentle energizer, for mind and body. It contains 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. If you want a pick me up, tea is hard to improve on.

Tea: Investing in Your Long-Term Bone Health

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.

Destination: China’s National Tea Museum

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

Kakuzo Okakura and the Cup of Humanity

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.

Round the Bend

The Nine Bend River (Jiuqu Xi) is a masterpiece one hundred million years in the making, cutting through China’s oolong tea capital.

Mindfulness at the Cupping Table

In The Power of Tea Meditation, we talked about applying mindfulness to overcome the brain’s automatic tendency to look for […]

The Power of Tea Meditation

  I started to feel something stir within my tea quite some time before I actually worked in tea professionally. […]

India’s Oldest Manager in Tea

KOOMTAI, Assam – Forty years ago executives of Goodricke Group, which had just split from Duncan Brothers & Company Ltd., […]

Chicken in the Pot

Straight out of university with a masters in English, I found myself at age 22 up in the High Ranges […]

Announcing the Incredible India Issue

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

Tea Discovery: Jin Jun Mei is a Wuyi Red Legend in the Making

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…

Tasting Notes: Jin Jun Mei

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…

Suiting Beauty to a Tea

Global beauty industry embraces tea’s rejuvenating power “We’ve benefited from rising awareness among about the detoxing power of puer tea […]

Health & Wellness: Tea for All Your Ages

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.

Tea Discovery: Crab Pincer Tea

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.