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…
My girlfriend Kelsey recently gave me a present, the newer edition of Kenn Kaufman’s book “Advanced Birding”. I’m finding this book has a lot of universal relevance to my life, including to the subject of tea tasting.It’s shorebird migration season, a…
People have vastly different tastes in tea. This morning, a new review was posted to RateTea, which I happened to read, and this review was of Two Leaves and a Bud’s Mountain High Chai. This tea now has five reviews on the site.Interestingly, four of…
I recently read a post by Courtney Powers on The Purrfect Cup, titled Say Goodbye, which highlights a tea purchased in the closing sale for Tony Gebely’s Chicago Tea Garden. I first want to say (as I have on various social media sites but have yet to …
In the course of sampling teas and reviewing them, I often go through a process with a new or unfamiliar tea company, in which I move from having no familiarity with the company, to trying one, two, three, and then more teas. Eventually, I form an imp…
Before I delve in, I want to explain the exact meaning of this post’s title. Among tea bags, there is a broad range of quality. But my personal experience has been that green tea bags range much farther into the low end of quality, poor quality, than…
Back in December of 2010, I wrote about Grapefruit and Tea, describing how I found that grapefruit did not go well with tea. If you missed that post, there’s some interesting material in there both about tea and grapefruit, and about grapefruit’s stra…
Sylvia, who works with me on RateTea, shared an amusing story with me about her friend Abby in college. Abby was preparing to make some tea, but got distracted or sidetracked somehow, and poured a cup of hot water but forgot to actually put any tea in…
Pictured here is the bottom of a cup of black tea:One thing that I’ve noticed while drinking certain teas is that certain flavors and qualities of a tea tend to sink to the bottom of a cup. This is less of a problem when using a relatively short, wide…
This post is inspired by reading a review of HELPS Teas Organic R&R on Nicole’s blog Tea For Me Please. I received a packet of samples from the HELPS brand (owned by the Pharmadus company) at World Tea East. If you want to read my full reviews (I…
