Not quite sure what a caption like “Don’t smoke tea. Drink cigarettes” is trying to accomplish.  But after seeing the accompanying photo - besides getting a laugh - you may become even more befuddled by its design.  Instead of tobacco, the cigarettes in this photo are filled with tea leaves.  Put one of them in [...]

If you drink Chinese tea - primarily oolongs or puerhs - and have avoided the temptation to acquire a Yixing teapot, I applaud you.  They surely are a slippery slope, with as much misinformation out there as accurate information, and telling the difference can be difficult.  But for those of us who have acquired one [...]

Tea.  You have to drink it out of something.  I mean, you can’t just lick it off the counter.  Well, I guess you could, but no one in their right mind would ever do that.  And, if you don’t want to put your mouth to the spout on the teapot and drink it from there, [...]

I recently had lunch with a dear friend and avid tea drinker, Yvonne Maisonette.  Yvonne has been transitioning from her career as a fashion model and actress into entertainment journalism and asked if we could do a segment on tea.
As much as I love talking about what I’m doing with my company and the different [...]

I have been studying and collecting tea bowls (“chawan”) for about ten years.  I am fascinated by the objects themselves and their place in Japanese ceramics, aesthetics, culture, and history.
It is only in the last few years that I felt I had sufficient knowledge and understanding to undertake making my own tea bowls.  The Japanese [...]

You may fall in love with the leaf, but soon you will also find that you have an amazing collection of teaware (and accessories).  When people first get into tea, they work on procuring good tea and get to know that tea as well as they can.  But eventually their focus turns to teaware, either [...]

Art.  Tea.  Is there a connection?  Surely tea is an art, especially when one looks at the elaborate traditional tea rituals some cultures have.  But can art relate to tea?  Most definitely.
Most people are familiar with some of the more obvious examples of tea-related art.  Tea pots and cups (especially lavishly decorated ones) are certainly [...]

Sadly, as is often the case in LA, the stress accrued in getting to an appointment counteracts the relaxation the appointment is designed to deliver.  But despite the fact that it was Parents’ Weekend at UCLA and the campus was teeming with proud parents and their UCLA sons and daughters, the extra traffic and dearth [...]

Yoon Hee Kim is an oasis of calm as she steeps a beautiful Korean early spring green tea. With deft movements and the deepest focus, she is a dynamo, sourcing and blending tea, teaching the Korean tea ceremony, and in the process, paying homage to her family’s long history of involvement in the tea business.  [...]

In earlier posts, I’ve shown pictures of some of my wood-fired teapots, tea bowls, and cups, and explained why I do long firings fueled with wood.  However, being a New York City potter, I didn’t have a wood kiln, so I became an itinerant wood-firer, firing in any kiln I could find, helping out with [...]