Steep Stories

Category: Tea Features

  • 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…

  • A Tie Guan Yin Flight from Taiwan

    Tie Guan Yin is one of the most interesting takes on oolong ever developed. Despite its ancient-sounding name—invoking the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Guan Yin— the “Iron Goddess of Mercy” only dates back to the 19th century. Hailing from Anxi county, in Fujian province, China, this complicated style of oolong originally began its life as a…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • A Tea Pairing from One Wuyi Artisan

    For those that have tuned in to my li’l corner of “the In-Tea-Net”, folks can tell I have an affinity for talking about where the tea comes from. I have focused a lot of text-space to estates, gardens, factories, and the farmers that supply their wares to them. Less frequent, though, are my forays into…

  • The “Heritage” of Assam

    I’ve covered Assam before, and the many tea gardens that lie within the Indian state. To date, though, I don’t think I’ve focused on tea factories in the region. So, this post will be something a little bit different. But let’s start at the beginning. World Tea Expo, 2014: it was my second such tradeshow.…

  • 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…

  • 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…