Pekoe Tea Grades: Unmuddling OP, BOP, SFTGFOP System
There’s the only one method of tea grading that amounts to a system: pekoe grades. It’s comprehensive, precise, arcane – and also easy to misinterpret.
Pekoe Tea Grades: Unmuddling OP, BOP, SFTGFOP System
There’s the only one method of tea grading that amounts to a system: pekoe grades. It’s comprehensive, precise, arcane – and also easy to misinterpret.
Inspiring enthusiasts to refine their taste in tea
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
Curios: Chinese Art Set in Stone
Consider owning a 470 million-year-old work of Mother Nature’s art, appropriately priced well over $500.
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.
Tasting Notes: Yellow Goddess of Mercy Oolong Tea
Background Yellow Goddess of Mercy, also simply known as 105, is a relatively new oolong tea from Mount Wuyi in […]
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 […]
Caffeine: What We Really Know About its Effects
Caffeine is one of the main factors people consider in their choice of daily beverage. For some, it is the decider in their selection. For most, it is more a cautious concern.
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
Clean, Elegant, Approachable Teas
Peter Luong is not a tea mystic. The founder of San Francisco’s Song Tea & Ceramics knows and values the […]
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 […]
Luxury Line Cha Ling’s Focus on Puer Resonates Globally
Tea Journey last spoke with luxury Franco-Sino skincare line Cha Ling’s Director of Development Elodie Sebag two years ago about […]
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.
Harvest Review: Assam’s Smallholders Inherit the Land
Jorhat, Assam The vast Brahmaputra Valley holds the world’s greatest concentration of tea. Commercial production began 180 years ago in […]
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.
Origin India: Rimpocha the Legacy of Makaibari
Siliguri, West Bengal During his 47-year stewardship of Makaibari Tea Estate, one of India’s oldest and most celebrated tea habitats, […]
Origin India: Discovering The Wild Tea Forest of Assam
Pradip Baruah was born curious. He spends much of his time in the office and lab as chief advisory […]
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.
Tea and Terroir Through Time, China and France
The concept of terroir is still in flux, though trending toward a more widely accepted framework for an all-encompassing set of synergistic influences.
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 […]
Tasting Notes: A Taste of Winter in South India
There is a revolution going on in South India, right under our noses. Up until the late 1980s perhaps, South […]
Russia’s Dark Secret: Baikhovy Tea
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia In the time of the great Khans a caravan laden with four “poods” of tea found favor with […]
Tea, Cha and Tisanes: Botanicals Reshape Tea Demand and Supply
There’s been a growing shift in the strange, unfamiliar and exotic words you’ll see on a tea ingredient label or […]
Tea Cocktails
In 2002 when Audrey Saunders first introduced her ‘Earl Grey Mar-Tea-ni’ at the Ritz Hotel in London, it took the […]
Biogenetics: Reducing the Mystery and Multiplying the Benefits of Tea
Tea’s a five-thousand year mystery tale. For every major fact we know, there is so much we have only been […]
Time-lapse of Japan’s Shincha Harvest Tea
KYOTO, Japan — This time-lapse video captures the beautiful birth of this year’s shincha harvest. A special video camera, […]
Climate Change: Growers Fight Back
It’s no news that climate change is a growing, severe and global problem. Alas, it’s also not news that this […]
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 […]
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.
The Matcha Revolution: Baby Powder, Plastic Blankets and ¥3,000 Yen
The thousands of articles and blogs on matcha fall into two main groups: “Wow!” and “What?” Wow focuses on some […]
Tea Nuances: Exploring the World of Green Tea Blends
We all know that green tea is healthy. However, most of us have only unearthed a fraction of the green […]
Old Age: Live Well – and Drink Tea
The health benefits of tea are increasingly established. Even discounting the extreme claims of its being a magic cure for […]
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’ […]
Innovation in Tea: Watch These Spaces
The Innovation Imperative: Where and How, not If In a time of change, the question is not whether to innovate, […]
Pesticides in Tea: Getting a Clear Picture Not a Vague Impression
Some studies have identified 131 pesticides in tea (Zhu, 2019); others have identified up to 400 (Ly, 2020). Many tea […]
The Nuances of Authentic Tea Blending
Most people are familiar with the many black tea blends on the market but may not have much sense of […]
Innovation in Tea Flavor Design: Anything Goes – With Anything
How would you describe the flavor of these ten teas? They are a representative selection from the many market innovations […]