A little over a year ago I made the acquaintance of Raj Vable of Young Mountain Tea.
We met up for lattes at Tea Bar PDX (where the above picture was taken), and he passed some samples on to me. Including an interesting Nilgiri black tea that I took a liking to. But that wasn’t the only reason for his visit. He was also starting up a rather ambitious Kickstarter campaign, and he wanted some help spreading the word.
Kamairicha literally means “pan-fired tea” in Japanese.
I first tried it a year ago, and I dug it. I even wrote a poem about it. The less spoken about that, the better. Moving on . . .
Before I get to rambling about black tea from Guatemala, I’m going to do something a little different to start this off. I’m going to turn the introduction over to my blogger friend, Chris “Tea-Guy” Giddings, since he’s the one who introduced me to the tea I’m about to discuss. Take it away, Chris:
“It was a dark and stormy night… no… literally… that’s what it was! You still don’t believe me? Whatever!
I got a message from William and Jace Longnecker from TRW Fair Trade. I kid you not! No, seriously! Would you let me finish!?!
So, it was a dark and stormy night, when I got the message offering a chance to review a black tea from Guatemala. GUATEMALA! I’d never heard of quality tea from Guatemala, so of course I was intrigued. I mean, wouldn’t you have been?
Anyway! When it finally arrived a few weeks later, it was beautiful! I couldn’t believe my eyes! Long black , twisted leaves presented themselves. OK I thought, this looks good… but IS it good? IS it really?
I’ll let Geoff take it from here. I don’t think you’ll believe me anyway.”
Photo by Chris Giddings.
Well over a year ago, Tony “World of Tea” Gebely posted a photo of a dark tea on Instagram.
It was an aged moacha (i.e. the rough stuff used to make puerh cakes) . . . but it was from – of all places – Thailand.
Used with permission by Tony Gebely.
For obvious reasons, it grabbed my attention.
I remember the first time I learned of the existence of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It was 2009, and I was perusing my local Powell’s. Back then, genre fiction was mostly dominated by steampunk and supernatural teen fair. This mash-up of period piece and horror tropes came at just the right time in literary history.
But I’ll confess I rolled my eyes at first.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén