Jennifer Nowicki, founder of Cultivate Taste Tea, is a certified specialist leveraging 30 years of industry experience and business expertise to share the world’s finest, authentic single-origin teas.
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Tag: Tea Tasting
Tea Taster Profile: Jan Dellwisch
Since I was born in East Frisia, Assam Orthodox tea has always held a special place for me. I see it as an abstract connection to my heritage — the East Frisian tea culture — which is deeply tied to a region on the other side of the planet from Assam.
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Maria Kockmann: Tea With Consciousness
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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Anything for Tea: Budget Backpacking in Nilgiris
Buddies Cafe in Ooty. This cafe is the largest tea room in India, which features over 220 varieties of tea: artisanal and hand-crafted single-origin teas, orthodox blends, tisanes, and CTC dust. When I first entered the cafe, Nirmal Raj stood next to a wall of transparent glass tea canisters and opened them enthusiastically to allow customers to inhale as he spoke animatedly about each tea. After leaving my non-heated hostel, I chanced upon the cafe, searching for a warmer place to write from. As a shoestring budget backpacker, I had traveled to the Nilgiris tea-growing region on an overnight bus from Bengaluru, India, and soon found myself returning daily to Buddies Cafe.
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Tea for Dummies
When I do a tea tasting with customers or friends, I often give them our tasting wheel to help them figure out words to best describe their experiences. It is a bit more fun than using a rating scale. If you have ever been to a tasting, you’ve probably seen something like this before. The same words can describe flavour for almost anything you are tasting.
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A Nerd’s Tea Lab
This book is a sensual delight: in it, you learn to explore tea using your senses, including sight, smell, taste, and even sound. Dr. Lovelace describes experiments you can try at home with tea using budget-friendly materials. This is a fascinating journey into the science of tea you can take without leaving home.
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Andrew McNeill on Down-Chain Tasting
“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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Taster Sensation Kevin Gascoyne
My introduction to tea was unspoken and visceral. Humble mugs of the strong, milked ‘builder’s tea’ of my youth in the North of England still fill me with nostalgic pleasure whenever I’m in the U.K. My body chemistry has never been without the magic nectar. – Kevin Gascoyne
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Review: Tasting Qualities – The Past and Future of Tea
Tasting Qualities: The Past and the Future of Tea by Sarah Besky manages to easily deconstruct and demystify the space between the plantation and the cup of tea.
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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.
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Tasting Notes: Wang Hai Green Tea
Wang Hai tea is a pre-Qingming green tea that is grown on Mount Tiantai in China’s Zhejiang Province.
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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 China’s Fujian Province. It was officially introduced in 2003 after 20 years of hybrid experimentation. A creation of the Fujian Tea Research Institute, it is a cross of the famous […]
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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 Indian tea – from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala – was predominantly comprised of mid-grade CTC (cut, tear, curl) produced for the local market. In addition, there was a range […]
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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 teas produced around the world. If we were to drink a different green tea variety every day for the next five years, we would not even come close to tasting […]
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Tea and Romance Between the (Book) Covers
Teatime allows us to slow down and savor life – and what better way to savor life than by escaping with a good book? Put on the kettle and nestle into your favorite chair to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a romantic read. These tea romances explore many relationships: romantic, friend, family, and even our relationship with ourselves.
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Nepali Tea Opportunity
A lack of infrastructure, a lack of capital, natural disasters, a pandemic, and a very tough competitor at the border – are the challenges faced by Nepal growers. The Nepal Tea and Coffee Development Board report that very few (3,244) of the three million employed in Nepal’s tea industry work full-time. Seventy-four percent of temporary workers are women, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. There are 18,180 small farm owners, in stark contrast to India’s vast tea plantations and the social complexity of such systems. The farmers can either process the tea themselves or sell the raw leaves to factories.
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Inside the Taster’s Practice
Experiencing the taste of tea and then describing that experience in spoken and written language is an art and a science, dependent on both inspiration and a lot of hard work. Professional tasters discuss some of the key questions about their craft.
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Tasting Notes: big-tree raw puer from Yiwu region, Yunnan
Yiwu big tree puer has coarse stems and apparent long black strips. These big, slow-growing trees grow with minimal human intervention on the terroir of Yiwu Mountain in China’s Yunnan province, which boasts rich biodiversity. Fine white hair found on tea stems are an indication of its long domestication. The dry […]
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