Steep Stories

Tag: white tea

  • My First Tea Fest

    I hemmed and hawed for weeks about whether or not I would actually go to the Northwest Tea Festival this year. Thankfully, my poor impulse control got the better of me, and – boy! – am I glad it did. To miss this tea-binge-o’-thon would’ve been act of idiocy. I present to you – fine…

  • Blending Tea and Fiction

    To those that have been following the sporadic attempts to give this blog focus, you’ll know I’ve been experimenting with tea fiction. Sometimes with wondrous results…and other times with startling missteps. Train-wreck or not, I figured an exercise on how these yarns developed was worth exploration. Up until the “Great Vanishing” of September, I had…

  • Solomon’s Purple White Seal of Approval

    Whenever I go on impromptu tea quests, they’re usually solo. When they’re not, they’re usually my idea. This particular jaunt was not only not my idea but one triggered by a blog response. A week or so prior, I posted a bit of tea meta-fiction surrounding my tasting notes of Korean teas from Hankook. A…

  • You Think You Know Yunnan?

    Oh, hi. You’re still here. Damn…have you been waiting long? Two months? Really?! Ummm… Yeah, I had…uh…Carpal-depress-‘o-flu. It’s contagious. I’d stay back if I were you. Now where were we…January? Ah, yes. To say it’s been a rough Winter is an understatement. I spent three weeks of it on my second bout with “Le Plague”.…

  • The Sex Tea Saga

    [This was the first tea blog I ever wrote. It was posted on Myspace in late ’07. (Remember that site?) The entry garnered 30+ responses over a week and even spent some time ranked in the Top 20 “Romance & Relationships” section. I have yet to top it, but I have also never revealed it…

  • Missing the Forest for the Teas

    Yet again, I journeyed to Hawaii. Okay, not literally but at least in tea form. I hope to get to those damn islands someday, but when your wallet’s a moth-colony, you have to settle on a cup of tropical tea instead. This marks the third Hawaiian-grown tea I’ve sampled. The first was a black tea…

  • Awesome Assam is Awesome!

    Teas from the northeastern state of India called Assam are known for many things. First and foremost are their robust and malty characteristics. Second (and this is one I’ve noticed) is their lean towards – how to put it – tiramisu sweetness. Very odd. Part of their unique character comes from the varietal of tea…

  • I Swoon for Icewine (Tea)

    Icewine – or eiswein – is an interesting German peculiarity that appeared on the scene some three hundred years ago. Simply put, white wine grapes were plucked in the middle of winter while the juices inside were still frozen. The sugars within were more concentrated as a result. Creating a batch was a labor-intensive process…