Curios: Chinese Art Set in Stone

Consider owning a 470 million-year-old work of Mother Nature’s art, appropriately priced well over $500.

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Inspiring enthusiasts to refine their taste in tea

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.

Tea Aroma: The Intimate Journey

Tea offers adventures unlike those of any other beverage. We can all invoke our own special and intimate adventure in our minds and senses as we sip our cup. The first step begins with our eyes. We anticipate the adventure as we look into the cup, even before the tea’s aroma wafts to our nose.

Origin India: Kangra Valley

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.

Origin India: Tamil Nadu and Kerala

The Western Ghats, South India Backbone of South India The six-hour drive south from Balanoor Tea Estate in Karnataka to […]

Origin India: The Deep South

Balanoor Tea Estate, Karnataka   Piece of Cake His birthday was celebrated in a leafy residential section of Bangalore, one […]

Tea Cocktails

In 2002 when Audrey Saunders first introduced her ‘Earl Grey Mar-Tea-ni’ at the Ritz Hotel in London, it took the […]

Harvest Review: Vietnam

Vietnam in 2017 ranked as the world’s seventh-largest producer of tea and fifth in exports. It has 124,000 hectares under […]

The package is part of an innovation complex

Tea Packaging: The Innovation Edge

Innovation in tea increasingly depends on innovation in packaging Make the tea bag go away Change the labels Freshen up […]

Origins: Tea Cultivation Takes Root in Oregon’s Willamette Valley

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.

Of Family & Tea: Novelist Lisa See’s Tea Journey

Six-time New York Times bestselling author, Lisa See, loves tea so much that she wrote a novel with Pu-erh tea as its historical background. This comes as no surprise if one knows the See family’s journey, of immigrants in the Wild West and Chinatown with a dash of Hollywood, intertwined with tea.

The Times and Tides of Tea Innovation

Tea innovation is a surprisingly inexhaustible subject. Choose a topic that has shaped society, such as  trade, war, health, literature, […]

Harvest Review: Australia

There is a clear emerging trend in the Australian market away from mainstream black tea to more specialist offerings. Australians’ […]

Curios: First Tea Humidor

Encasing tea in these elegant jewelry cases of inlaid wood was deceptively challenging. This is because the world’s first tea […]