Reading the Tea Leaves

Tea Education, Consultancy, and Tastings

Archive : Recent Posts

  1. Picking a Pi Lo Chun Green Tea

    I’ve always considered it a fascinating (if only to tea enthusiasts) bit of tea trivia that a tea that goes by one name, Pi Lo Chun, can show up in two entirely forms:  the standard, original one from Jiangsu, China has the downy, spiral-shaped leaves that give the tea its name.  “Lo” means snail, and [...]

  2. Teas Not Taken (Part 5)…Sigh

    Samples of spring teas arriving early to mid-April mean that they were finished at the end of March, with plucking begun a couple of weeks before that. Such early season plucking means wonderful raw material: unopened buds and budsets just starting to sprout. Prices tend to run high for these teas and the window for [...]

  3. Teas Not Taken (Part 4), Tea from Trees

    I ended the 3rd post in this series (a while back) with what I hoped was a tantalizing trailer about tea trees.  As the photo shows, these trees are not especially distinctive to look at, but the flavors coaxed out of their leaves are, in my opinion, some of the best that teas have to [...]

  4. Spring Teas: Bamboo Green

    Sichuan is known to most people for its fiery cuisine. At the virtual opposite end of this province’s addictive, numbing dishes is another of the region’s products, bamboo.  Giving inspiration to poets and artists, bamboo as a comestible is mild, even bland tasting, and evokes lush images of cool, green vistas, viz. the Bamboo Forest [...]

  5. This is a follow-up on an earlier post about names of Chinese teas. I remember drinking a Green tea at a friend’s house recently.  Knowing of my interest, my friend brought out a tea that had been a gift, and the sealed foil pouch inside had not been opened yet.  The outside of the box [...]