From South Carolina to Australia, English-speaking people have planted tea wherever they went, and not only in Asia and Africa.  These efforts have produced teas less interesting than the stories about them - how South Carolina tea won the Gold Medal at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair where Darjeeling was used for the first [...]

Meet-up groups are popping up all over the place!  If you are thinking such groups are made up of a bunch of desperate single people longing to make a connection and hiding their hope that Mr. or Ms. Right will show up at the event, think again.
If you love tea and you love people, single [...]

If the names Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and Zaphod Beeblebrox bring a smile of recognition to your face, you’re obviously acquainted with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’ 1970s BBC radio show that spawned a multi-media cult phenomenon.
When the iconic Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles reopened after a four-year renovation, it included a [...]

For decades, tea has been the stale, boring step-child of coffee.  Coffee was rich, fresh, dark, aromatic, locally roasted, artisanal, and brimming with cultural cache.  Tea was old, crotchety, and British – or maybe niche Asian.  Regardless, it was almost always stale and static.
Don’t believe me?  In 1990, most Americans were drinking Folgers®, Maxwell House® [...]

It’s not surprising that tea and chocolate make good tasting partners. Although the cacao plant’s terroir and the tea plant’s terroir only overlap north and south of the equator, the saying “what grows together goes together” is at least partly true.  (Cacao grows within 20 degrees of the equator while tea is cultivated up to [...]

This is not the sort of flowing report one would wish to offer, especially inasmuch as the former Soviet Union was once a major tea producer with a fascinating history and interesting neighbors.  Russian tea may well be extinct, and with it dies a tradition.  What follows may be read purely as requiem, for the [...]

Every day, new patrons come to our teahouse looking for an alternative to coffee.  Perhaps their doctor told them to cut down on their caffeine intake, or perhaps coffee wasn’t “working” like it used to, causing jitters and anxiety, accompanied by lower highs and even lower lows.  Often, the search for an alternative is borne [...]

We’ve all heard it.  We’ve all tried to explain it.  Sometimes the patron buys into your pitch about the merits of loose over bagged, but other times it can be like talking to a wall.
You know what I am talking about here.  You might be able to sell them on the quality and taste difference, [...]

If you are like me, finding a new tea shop is thrilling.  So when I discovered TeaFountain in Mill Valley (San Francisco Bay Area), the clouds parted, celestial music played, and all things were right with the world.  Nearly half the store is stocked with directly imported teas from around the world and custom-designed blends, [...]

While we last met on the path to Ilam—and to Ilam we shall return—today we venture just west to picturesque, mile-high Hile in adjacent Dhankuta District.
It is here, in 2001, that the Jun Chiyabari tea garden was established.  Although, to be honest, “pioneered” would be the better word to describe the work that brothers Bachan [...]