Like most of you, I’ve been following the discussion going on in the specialty tea industry about the political tea party and its impact, if any, on tea’s image.  I had resolved to stay out of it, but the topic (like the tea partiers) just won’t go away.
Most recently, the emergence of a coffee party [...]

Fact: Consumer unfamiliarity and uncertainty are the primary obstacles to the growth of the specialty tea industry.
Fact: The tea industry is strewn with competing information, myths, and unsubstantiated claims.
Solution: TeaClass.com.  OK, so it’s not all the way there yet, but it’s a BIG step in the right direction.  TeaClass is a powerful and dynamic tool [...]

Inspired by The New York Times best-selling book, Three Cups of Tea, Tea Party Angels is an innovative concept that turns a girl’s tea party into a fundraiser for girls’ education around the world.  Imagine thousands of young girls hosting tea parties across the country and asking their friends to bring a small donation - [...]

The consumer research firm Mintel recently released predictions for 2010 trends in consumer spending.  Reading these is like reading your horoscope - you naturally question the wisdom of statements so malleable as to bend to any number of realities.  Their flavor trend predictions, on the other hand, are far more concrete.  Here at least there [...]

In a couple weeks, World Tea will launch a new WorldTeaNews.com.  It will be like the existing web site in terms of the quality and depth of content, but will differ in a couple significant ways.  The most important is that it will include some content you can only access with a paid subscription.
Lots of [...]

Steve Smith…where are you?
I’ve been following tea super star Steve Smith’s new Portland start-up activity since last May when The Oregonian did a piece on him.
It sounds like Steve was getting a bit bored during his year-long visit to France, and I suspect his do-not-compete clause was probably running out with Starbucks, so he was [...]

I have a bone to pick with a local political group in Washington.  They call themselves “T.E.A.”.  Of course, this has nothing to do with tea; it stands for “taxed enough already”.  When I read about this organization, I was not surprised that they’ve inappropriately adopted “tea”…they just don’t get it.  They’re opposed to Obama’s [...]

Why did the people who were protesting excessive spending with tax-day “tea parties” pick tea as their symbol?  Clearly, it was an effort to hearken back to the Boston Tea Party, a protest by colonists against taxation without representation.  But were there other reasons?  Is tea such a luxurious commodity that they thought it represented [...]

What happens to a good-intentioned company that sells herbal supplements & natural tisanes…and makes the grave mistake of claiming these products are healthy? The FDA sends US Marshals to raid the warehouse and seize thousands of dollars worth of company property and products, of course.
I recently read about the FDA’s seizure of $71,000 worth of [...]

There are a number of perks associated with having a tea blog.  Perhaps my favorite one is having the opportunity to sample innovative new products.  The folks at Ceramcor sent me one of their gorgeous new ceramic Tea Potles, part of their Xtrema teaware line.  This ain’t your grandma’s kettle.  I was immediately drawn to [...]