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Seven Cups Tea Tour Day Five
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…
Seven Cups Tea Tour Day 3
(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
Seven Cups Tea Tour Day 2
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
Seven Cups Tea Tour Day One
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.
Buying Guzhu Zisun
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
Lincang County Yunnan Black Tea
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
First stop to get to 2011 black tea crop
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 is going on across China;… // 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 to keep up to date so we can forestall any… // MORE
2011 Tea Tours Sold Out, Great Firewall Look Out
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.
Brewing tea for hardcore tea drinkers
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
Year Of The Rabbit Sale Ending
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
Seven Cups’ Lapsang Souchong featured in the Wall Street Journal
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
Please fill the tea kettle!
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…
2011 Tea Trends: Seven Cups makes a major shift
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.
Tea and Chocolate and the Tea Guild of Canada
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.
Happy New Year!
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…
Tea Buyers Alert…Warning
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…
Seven Cups 2011 Tea Tours
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…
Dahongpao, A New Chinese Tea Bubble?
“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…
Tea trends in Scandinavia
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…
Seven Cups: Talk of the Town, Best of Tucson
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’…
Seven Cups 2010 Wulongs (Oolongs) Arrived
After a long wait our 2010 wulongs have arrived. We have only tasted one so far (cupped if you are English), a Monkey Picked Anxi wulong. (For the people at PETA that called me a few years ago to inquire about the well being of the monkeys, no monkeys were actually used in the harvesting…
FDA Accuses Lipton and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group of Exaggerated Green Tea Claims
You had to have been living in a cave for the last 10 years not to know that drinking tea is good for your health. There are many tea research projects going on in many countries. We used to publish on our blog and newsletter all of the outcomes of ongoing tea research many years…
Cold Winters, Floods, and the Price of Tea
It is just about that time of year when we start asking ourselves why we started a tea business in Tucson. The monsoons are hovering in the evening, sparing a drop or two, providing just enough humidity to stop evaporative coolers from working. Today it is raining hard and roofs all over Tucson are leaking…
2 Years, Too Much: Perspectives on the U.S. Tea Industry
I was asked many months ago to write about my experience with the tea industry for this blog; I have had so little time and it has taken me a long time to put my thoughts together… even now I am not sure I have done the best job, but this is more or less the story of what happened with my blog, authori-tea.com.
A Game Changing Book About Tea
There are few books about tea that add to the discussion about tea in any meaningful way, but Mary Lou and Robert Heiss’s new book, ‘The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook’ is one of them…
Gu Zhu Zi Sun
In the Gu Zhu Valley rests the origins of documented Chinese Tea Culture, for it is the place where Lu Yu managed the Emperor’s tea factory during the Tang Dynasty. He did so for twenty years while he wrote the first book about tea and tea culture…
2010 Spring Teas are Online!
So while we here at Seven Cups have been like kids in a candy store with the new spring teas arriving, you, our beloved customers and friends, have been pressing your noses against the glass, waiting for the moment when it’ll be your turn. That moment is now. The best, freshest green tea available is… // MORE
2010 Early Spring Green Tea Is In
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…