Category: Tea Musings
-
A Business Trip with Benefits
A Business Trip with Benefits – World Tea Expo 2015, Day 1 Arriving at the Long Beach Convention Center, and seeing that sign, was like coming home again. This was to be my third World Tea Expo in a row. The first year was a three-day whirlwind of awesomeness. The second was like a quickie,…
-
State of the Minion Address: “World Tea Expo and Beyond!”
I’ll make this brief, I swear. Some of you fine tea folks are either (a) on your way to World Tea Expo, (b) already there, or (c) grumbling about not being able to go. To those in the former two categories, I just wanted to let you know . . . Hey! I’m there, too! (Soon,…
-
Steeped Recipes at Smith’s
I can’t cook . . . worth a damn. The only interest I’ve ever taken in food preparation is, well, how to eat it. That is where my exploration of the culinary arts begins and often ends. Beyond the making of an epic sammich (yes, sammich, not sandwich), my ability to cook, bake, and .…
-
Regarding Tea Sachets
In more informed tea circles, it is common knowledge that teabags are crap. Those little bags of ass-flavored tea usually contain the dust left over after the good, loose leaf tea was packaged. The taste of an average black tea from a bag is rough and bitter, like licking a chalkboard. (Yes, I’ve tried that.)…
-
A Dork Drunk on Doke
Let’s talk a little about terroir. It’s a word usually bandied about by wine folks in order to sound “edumacated”. Blame the French. The word “terroir” derives from the French word “terre”, which literally means “land”. Terroir, as a concept, is applied to plants that are influenced by the “land” where they grow. Geology, geography,…
-
A Saturday Evening with Friday Afternoon
It was a Saturday, as the title suggests. Saturday, March 21, to be precise. It was a really shitty Saturday, in other words. The work shift was going frustratingly poorly. My student loan sharks announced they were tripling my monthly payment. And finally . . . a panic attack was looming. Not sure how that…
-
The Passing of a Tea Shaman
In 2009, I met an extraordinary man. A legend, really. He had just opened his newest operation, Steven Smith Teamaker – aptly named after himself. He had reason for such bravado, having co-founded two of the largest tea companies ever. Stash Tea Company and Tazo (pre-Starbucks) were his brainchildren. The man had earned his stripes.…
-
Bug Bites, Tea Huts, and Sipping Wisdom
Early on in my tea writing “career”, there was one name that always popped up – Lindsey Goodwin. She was one of the tea writers on the scene, managed her own consultation website, and was the resident caffeine guru for About.com. And at one point in time, she was also a Portlander. As one might…
-
New Tea on New Year’s Eve
It was New Year’s Eve . . . and I slept in. No major surprise there; I always sleep in on my days off. The only plans I had for that day were helping my brother with some housework and a friend’s party later on. In the meantime, I had a moment to myself to…