Travel + Leisure Names Seven Cups One of Six Best Places to Drink Tea in America
TUCSON, AZ – Travel + Leisure’s tea fanatic Bruce Schoenfeld first tasted da hong pao, a rare Chinese oolong tea, at Seven Cups Teahouse in Tucson, where Austin Hodge serves teas he sources in remote regions of China.
I first came to Yunxian in 2005 after a trip to Dubai. I was invited to Dubai to become a member in the newly formed Dubai Tea Trading Center. Dubai wanted to become the hub of tea distribution and was providing remarkable incentives for companies to set up business there.
Last week a fellow tea entrepreneur emailed us with a question. We had never spoken before, so he wasn’t sure how to approach us about a very sensitive issue. He had been searching for a map of Shi Feng Mountain and noticed that some of our photos and content appeared to have been lifted from… // MORE
I was looking at our archives, and I have been writing something on a pretty regular basis since 2003. Of course it hasn’t been all me; there have been others that have contributed. In the beginning it was just monthly emails, and the actual blog didn’t come into existence until around 2005. Still, that is… // MORE
Seven Cups Founder Wins Award In Puer City I have been thinking about how I was going to write about this for a almost two weeks now. This award came as a complete surprise to me and I am still trying to get my mind around it. I found out about winning this award when… // MORE
Purchasing Tea: Gu Zhu Zi Sun This is the favorite part of my job: buying tea. Guzhu Zisun (Purple Bamboo Shoot) is a very special tea; it was the first tea to be distinguished as a tribute tea during the Tang Dynasty, and was produced under the watchful eye of Lu Yu, China’s tea saint,… // MORE
A few days ago I was in Lincang County in Yunnan taking a short trip before the first tea tour begins as well as seeing about the Dian Hong black tea harvest. The good news is that a pre-harvest rain has come, thus avoiding a repeat of last year when drought conditions left the spring… // MORE
Kunming April 2011… I am hear to get a first had version of the weather, and visit Lincang county to see the first grow and assess the coming crop. Some of the best black tea that is produced in China comes from this area, and it is one of our best selling black tea
Qing Ming In Hangzhou April 2011. Yesterday was Qing Ming Festival in Hangzhou. The day was cold and rainy but the tea harvest is well underway: it started late but, unlike last year, there wasn’t a false spring that resulted in a damaging cold snap that destroyed the new growth on the bushes. Harvesting… // MORE
Guangzhou, Late Tea Harvest, and the World Tea Expo The spring is late in coming this year because it has been another very cold winter in China. Even here in the south it has been unseasonably cold. I have been in Guangzhou (Canton) for a few days researching changes to the Chinese export laws… // MORE
I was prompted to talk about brewing tea by a Twitter conversation with @michaeljcoffey and @joiedetea. I am kind of a part time lurker in the social networking world, and I’m often surprised by the level of sophistication in the discussions about tea. I think that is really great, and am thrilled to see it. That… // MORE
First a disclaimer, there is no statistical evidence involved in this analysis of trends in the tea industry. What I am going to offer here is more like a farmer looking at signs in the environment and predicting the weather.
We were visited today by Carol Ann Savage, one of the founders of the Tea Guild of Canada. She brought some great chocolate with her. They are single origin chocolates made by Soma Chocolate’s in Toronto. The source the cocoa beans themselves.
Amazingly enough, I am sitting here on New Year’s Eve with all of my work done. It feels great. Everyone else has gone , their work done as well. I am drinking some remarkable puer, Da Xue Shan Sheng, a green puer that was transported for one week by mule…
I am a green tea lover, so there is nothing that gives me more of a thrill that the arrival of the first green teas. For the last two years I have been here in Tucson waiting like everyone else for the tea to arrive…
Seven Cups was the first to import Anji Bai Cha five years ago. It is a rare green tea that was lost for eight hundred years. When ever you hear about white tea being mentioned during the Song Dynasty, it is Anji Bai Cha, which means white tea…
I’ve just returned from a whirlwind trip to China. I was sent a ticket by a Chinese corporation that is thinking about opening a chain of retail tea shops. Their plan is to create a ‘tea beverage’ and they want a trustworthy supplier…
We recently visited Hangzhou, which has become the modern national capital for trade groups and various governing bodies. Hangzhou is completely different than the bamboo forests we’ve been living in these past few days. It’s cosmopolitan and reminds us of France with tree-lined streets. In the morning, we watched Mr. Weng Shang Yi (Shi Feng… // MORE
It’s been a week of big honors for Austin. So big, he had to ask me to write a blog entry about it, fearing if he made these announcements himself he’d lose his all-important façade of modesty. Jokes aside, we were proud to learn this week that our own Austin Hodge is the first American… // MORE
An AZ Daily Star Article on Seven Cups Unfortunately, the article is only available to those who have a subscription to AZ Daily Star, so here’s the article in completion. Thanks to Dan Sorenson at the Arizona Daily Star… Keiko Naito, a manager at Seven Cups Tea House, heads out with a customer’s order.… // MORE
This was a question that was posted as a comment that I thought deserved to be elevated to a post. Puer is a hot topic and pretty controversial because of the wide variation in price and amounts of money some Chinese and Japanese collectors are willing to pay, mysterious even mystical qualities ascribed to puer… // MORE
As if Friday weren’t exciting enough for office-bound tea drinkers on the 9 to 5 worldwide! I will be posting an excerpt from one of our more informative email responses. This way our readers can get easy insight into the answers to questions that tea drinkers just like you have posed. So, please draw yourself… // MORE
