Newsletter Archive Feb. 11, 2022

I hear you saying Valentine’s Day is a consumer holiday, but we’ll argue there’s plenty to celebrate here. A day to celebrate your beloved, sure, but consider that St. Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers. We’ll toast to that. Maybe you’re more for celebrating the other rites of late winter. Say, the first sweet crop of early rhubarb. A gradual change from snow to rain. Plum blossoms in bloom. Or (our local favorite) the Tucson Rodeo kicking off.

Take your chosen celebration this weekend and browse the most giftable teas in our catalog through Monday. Two 200g cakes are featured: Zi Ya (Purple Buds) Sheng Puer 2021 and Yue Guang Bai (White Moonlight) 2021, as well as two hand-sewn blooming teas: Chrysanthemum Green and Rose Jasmine.

Need something nice and simple to brew your loose-leaf in? You can also choose from three new teapots, each made from unglazed dark yixing clay with a steel strainer inside.

We should also mention those blooming teas come from their inventor, Mr. Wang Fangsheng and his son Wang Huizhou. They are the same folks who produce our Huangshan Maofeng. While their Maofeng is a legacy product of seven generations of the Wang family, blooming teas are a relatively recent invention. Mr. Wang Fangsheng created the first one in the 1980s. As it’s sometimes told, the inspiration for it came from flowered wedding veils, but we prefer a slightly different origin story. As Mr. Wang Junior tells it, the inspiration for these bundled leaves was really the velvety density of his mother’s roast corn cakes. If that doesn’t sound like love manifest, we don’t know what to tell you.