Category: Tea Features
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Sheng Puerh from a Secret Wild Tea Garden
Glen and Lamu of Crimson Lotus Tea are one of my favorite husband-‘n-wife puerh hunter duos. Up until 2016, I only knew of them, and the good reputation they’d garnered over five years as trustworthy sellers of Yunnan’s favorite export. However, over the last couple of years, I developed a bit of a quixotic, after-hours…
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A Taste of the Tea Studio
Sometime in early spring, my tea-centric social media feed blew up with images of this: My first thought was, Wow, that is one SWEET mansion! A modern-looking building, decked out with many windows allowing for natural light, smack-dab in the middle of a tea garden? It was as if someone drilled into my brain and…
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Two Teas from Arunachal Pradesh
Of all the states in India, Arunachal Pradesh is one of the most mysterious and mystical. I’m not exaggerating. A cursory research glance turned up nothing concrete in regards to an agreed-upon “history” prior to the 1900s. The rest is conjecture, subjective, and vague—depending on who is relating the info. Even the official border between…
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What the Heicha?! A Shou “Puerh” from Fujian?
Back in the spring of 2017, tea afficianado Nicky “Steady Hand Tea” Evers passed on a unique specimen. A Wuyi oolong from 2005 that was wet-piled, dried … and stored in Taiwan. It fell into no discernible category. The taste was “like” a Hunan heicha … with notes of cliff side roast. I compared it…
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Darjeeling in Autumn
I chose a weird time to talk about autumn flush Darjeelings. For one thing, it hasn’t been a typical year for the region. (An understatement, true.) But before I get into that, I should probably explain what I mean by “Darjeeling autumn flush”. Here’s a bit of a primer.
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White Teas from Vietnam
In the fall of 2015, I found myself reading a tea blog (instead of writing one). Fellow tea geek Amanda Freeman used to keep one of the more prolific tea blogs in the community, and—at times—I suffered from a bit of professional jealousy. Often, she’d run into weird and strange teas before I did. And…
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A Tea Leaf on the Wind
In the hierarchy of tea businesses, monthly tea subscription services are like man-buns. Unless you have a really good reason for starting one—or your name is Toshiro Mifune—it is usually best not to. Since 2014, there has been a veritable surge of tea start-ups, and the route they’ve all chosen? You guessed it, the monthly…