Month: March 2020
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Caffeine and Crassicolumna
In late 2018, various media outlets were all a-buzz about a new (old) discovery. An as-of-yet uncategorized decaffeinated tea plant in Fujian province, China. Some of the articles exaggerated the claim; others got some of the science wrong completely. Put succinctly: a long-forgotten cultivar had mutated. How does that happen? Well, as most tea botany…
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The Legend of Ivan Chai
A couple of years ago, I tried a unique herbal “tea” from Latvia. It was called “Rosebay Willowherb”. The sample was sent to me by a now-defunct company, and what intrigued me most was the processing method. While the purple flowers of the plant were dried in the typical tisane manner, the leaves were almost…