It has been some time since I featured a tea blog. Today’s featured blog is Black Dragon Tea Bar, a Seattle-based blog run by Brett Boynton, who, together with Virginia Wright, or Cinnabar, of Gongfu Girl, runs the small tea company Phoenix Tea.The na…
Back in early 2010, I wrote a post Is Herbal Tea Tea? in which I explain. Recently, I read a post Let’s go there, shall we? on Joie de Tea, which expressed a similar sentiment. However, this post gets into an interesting aspect of this terminology,…
In January, Marlena of Tea For Today wrote a post Yaup, That’s Tea about Yaupon, a species of holly native to North America that is, to my knowledge, the only caffeine-containing plant native to North America.The following photo shows the Yaupon plant,…
This post is about tea and herbal tea, and the process of drinking tea or herbal teas, as it pertains to anxiety and relaxation. A little over two years ago, in my post Tea & Health: Beyond Chemistry?, I raised the question:Could the health benefits o…
I recently read a post, Camellia, meet Camellia on Steph’s Cup of Tea, which drew to my attention a post making black tea from your camellia japonica, by a blogger named Kelly in Adelaide Hills, Australia. In this post, Kelly explains her process of m…
Some of the readers of this blog are die-hard tea purists, and have little interest in herbal teas, but to me, herbal teas are actually as interesting as, if not more interesting than tea. Herbal teas, particularly those made from fresh herbs grown in…
I really love infusing flowers, either mixing them in with tea (especially black or green teas), or using them as an herbal tea of their own. I have a big bag of rose petals at home that I bought at a Mexican store (where they are really inexpensive) …
I live in a climate relatively far from where the tea plant is commercially grown, in a region where it can only be grown as a peculiar, delicate garden specimen, in highly sheltered areas. I’ve heard that there are a few specimens of tea plants growi…
I usually tend to write about teas, herbs, and other beverages that I especially like, but this time I thought I’d share one that I do not particularly like, although a large number of others seem to love it. And while I may not like it, I find it ver…
When the rare October 2011 snowstorm hit a few weeks back, there had not yet been a frost, and I was expecting there to be one, based on weather reports of below-freezing temperatures. The frost never materialized, and there has yet to be a frost in a…
