I recently had the pleasure of attending a blind tea tasting, hosted by Evan Draper, who runs the not-so-active blog Pluck Tea. Incidentally, Brandon of Wrong Fu Cha also attended.Pictured here is the setup at the very end of the tasting:In addition t…
13Jul12
Green Tea Soap from Trader Joe’s
Back in January, I wrote about the tea selection in Trader Joe’s. Today, I want to highlight a completely different tea-related product from this company. This is the green tea soap sold in Trader Joe’s:I do not know the exact composition of this soa…
This post is about reviewing teas, and more specifically, about the question of how many similar teas the reviewer has reviewed, when writing a review. I find this question to be of key importance both when writing tea reviews and when reading reviews…
I recently engaged in a tea trade and tasting with a few friends who are casual tea drinkers, in which I brewed up Life in Teacup’s Bai Ya Qi Lan alongside Teavana’s Monkey Picked Oolong Tea, which is a Tie Guan Yin. I found this comparison very inter…
One thing that I have noticed fairly consistently over time is that different tea companies tend to have certain trends about what characteristics their teas tend to have. These trends are both evident in the choices of which styles of tea a company c…
This top 5 post focuses on unusual black teas, black teas that have something novel, exciting, and different about them.One of the reasons behind this post is that I sometimes read and hear the idea, expressed by enthusiasts of Chinese and/or Japanese …
This week, for the top five post, I have chose to share the most often viewed individual reviews on RateTea. This is not necessarily the same as the most often-viewed individual teas, in fact, all five of these reviews are of somewhat esoteric teas th…
People often ask me: “what is your favorite tea?”, and those who know me a little better may ask the more open question: “Do you have a favorite tea?”, to which I usually answer “not really, although I have a few favorite teas at the moment”. My taste…
20Nov11
My Top 5 Favorite Flavored Teas
This post continues my Sunday series of top 5 posts; we’ll see how long I can keep this up! I usually prefer pure teas to flavored teas, but from time to time I encounter flavored or scented teas that I really like, including a select few that contend…
This post is inspired by an interesting observation. I was reading Steven Knoerr’s 39 Steeps, and in the post Drink Cheap Wine . . . and Tea? (which is a great post, by the way), I noticed something interesting.The first is a positive remark Steven ma…
