I got an email yesterday from a friend who asked me what had happened to the rest of the Yunnan Tea Tour’s blog postings. Well, I have been home just for a couple of days and am just starting to get back in the swing of things after recovering from killer jet lag. Better to… // MORE
Our third day of our Yunnan Tour brought us the Nannuoshan one of the Six Famous Mountains of Xishuanbanna
I’m sitting in a cafe in Dali a long way from Yiwu where we were on the second day of our Yunnan tour.
I have a special love for Yunnan. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth, and one of the most interesting, especially if you are a tea lover, and it is filled with very friendly people who really enjoy life, and feel it is even more enjoyable if they have some guests to… // MORE
One axiom that is typically taught to new tea students is that “all tea comes from the same plant.” If these students continue to learn about tea and study Chinese tea in any depth, they will discover that this statement is almost as wrong as the old belief that black tea and green tea come… // MORE
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 I first returned to Yunnan for a short… // MORE
This is my last post from the Green/Wulong Tea Tour for 2011. The tour is still continuing for a few more days…
The first day we were in Huangshan a good portion of the afternoon was spent at a dedication and ribbon cutting ceremony for Wang Fangsheng.
Hangzhou is the capital of Zhejiang, it was once the capital of China for a short period in the Song Dynasty, a favor place for our tea tour…
(This morning headed to Moganshan to watch some yellow tea being made. It is the rarest of Chinese yellow teas. It is virtually unknown outside of Dejing country, which is about 30 minutes north of Hangzhou. In 2010 the tea had a surprising spiciness and I am hoping that will be present in this year’s… // MORE
It is the second day of our tea tour and we are in Anji County. It is a lovely spring day but it was a little chilly when we left this morning from Changxing. I hope that if you are following our posts you check out the Google links at the top of the posts.… // MORE
We started off this year’s green tea/wulong tea tour on a beautiful spring morning. Our first stop was the Lu Yu Tribute Tea Factory Museum. During the Tang Dynasty there were 20,000 people involved in the factory, and all of the tea produced was for the consumption of the court. Production only lasted for about a month.
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, as he wrote the first book… // 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
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 is going on across China;… // MORE
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 to keep up to date so we can forestall any… // MORE
Our tea tours are full for 2011. I’m excited about this years tours because I get to be a bit of a tourist myself. I get to just kick back and take pictures.
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
Our Year of the Rabbit sale is coming to a close on February 28th. We like to start the year with a month long sale with all of our teas discounted. The sale has become a tradition for us, so remember it for next year. It’s become part of our company’s Feng Shui. The Year of… // MORE
The Wall Street Journal talked to me about doing an article about tea, and our Lapsang Souchong, a couple of months ago, but we never could find out when it was going to be published. I got a email this morning from someone that had read the article
This past weekend I was in New York City, auditioning for a summer music festival. As you well know, Chinese New Year was last Thursday…
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…
The internet is like the wild west sometimes when it comes to doing business. We have ripped off for information a number of times and in the case of www.teainchina.biz/ they were not even clearer enough thieves to remove our name from the information they were stealing…
Our 2011 tea tours itineraries are online now. We are only doing two this year, we are just too busy to do three. The spring tour only has one more opening and the puer tour is filling up quickly, so if you have been planning on coming, get registered as soon as you can. We were able to reduce the price this year…
“Since the middle of last year, the report says, prices of certain types of Da Hong Pao have increased tenfold. According to one expert interviewed by CCTV, the wholesale price for mid-range varieties of the tea has risen from between 200 and 400 yuan to around 4,000 yuan per kilogram, with retail prices reaching 20,000 yuan or more…
If you are in Europe and you are wondering if where you can find tea that is sourced by Seven Cups, and you are in Denmark, then please stop by Simply Tea. The owner is Alexis Kaae. She has been to China with us the last to years, and we are so happy to have her as a strategic partner in Europe…
If you are in Europe and you are wondering if where you can find tea that is sourced by Seven Cups, and you are in Denmark, then please stop by Simply Tea. The owner is Alexis Kaae. She has been to China with us the last to years, and we are so happy to have her as a strategic partner in Europe…
This year both our teahouses, in Tucson received a four star rating from Talk of the Town for ‘Excellence in Customer Satisfaction’. We are honored to have such a rating, but we also received what for us is the best award of all, ‘Best of Tucson’…
