Just a few weeks after reviewing Chicago Tea Garden’s Golden Bi Lo, I turn to Teas Etc’s Bi Lo Chun Reserve, a delightful green tea with a remarkable nose.
Bi Lo Chun is a specialty of tea makers in Jiangsu Province, China. This particular sample from Teas Etc (a free sample, by the way) features lovely white downy leaves, indicating that the leaves were harvested at a young age.
Today’s tea is a kabusecha — a Japanese green tea that is 45% shade-grown for three weeks prior to harvest. That puts it halfway between sencha, which isn’t given any shade at all, and gyokuro, which is 100% shade-grown for the three weeks before harvest.
A new year, a new tea. Hojicha is a roasted Japanese tea that consists predominantly of the stalks of the tea plant. It is, according to Harney, a relatively recent invention, dating back to 1920. The rise of mechanical harvesters had meant that there was an excess of tea stalks after harvesting. Seeing the waste, a Japanese merchant in Uji took the stalks and started roasting them. Hojicha was born.
Fair trade is a tricky thing. I’ve written before about why I believe fair trade is important, but there’s a flipside: too often, fair trade tea is of lower quality to similarly-priced, non-fair trade tea. Which leaves a tea lover to decide between sacrificing quality or sacrificing an ethical stance.
Over the past year I have bought primarily non-fair trade tea, for one big reason: there are very few fair trade tea options around here in Melbourne, and the ones that I can find tend to be in teabag form. But one goal I’ve set for myself over the next few months is to explore some of the fair trade tea options available online. Here are five online tea stores that sell fair trade tea.
How do you like my new tea set?
I celebrated my birthday last week and got three new tea brewing devices: a porcelain gaiwan, a yixing teapot and this one, a simple Japanese teapot with a large infuser basket.
It has been fun experimenting with the gaiwan over the past week, while I’ve been considering which type of tea my yixing should be devoted to (anyone have any thoughts?). I decided to use the teapot pictured above to make today’s tea, Monk’s Bliss by Mellow Monk.
It’s been a long time since I sat down and reviewed a tea, which can largely be blamed on the fact that we’ve been down with some sort of flu for most of August and a good chunk of July. But the sinuses are cleared and the taste buds are active again, so today Bec and I sat down to enjoy a cup of Kilinoe green tea — the first Hawaiian green tea to be sold in the mainland USA, thanks to Narien Teas.
When I was twelve, I lived with my parents in Kapingamarangi, a remote atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Besides fish, bananas and papaws, one of the most common sources of food was taro, a yam-like plant grown in swamps.
I don’t often spend time thinking of Kapingamarangi, but today’s tea experience brought back pleasant memories.
I was surprised a few months ago when Billy from Narien Teas told me where he was going on his latest tea finding mission: Hawaii.
Apparently the island state known for brilliant beaches, great surf and volcanoes is now dipping into the gourmet tea market. Kilinoe Green Tea is a hand-harvested, hand-rolled and hand-fired tea grown on a small eco-organic tea estate on Big Island, Hawaii. According to Narien Teas, it’s “a mildly-sweet and fragrant tea that never over-steeps.”
My tea collection is a dominant force in our pantry. Off the top of my head, I’d guess I have over 50 teas to choose from. Yet every morning, I find myself gravitating towards three teas in particular:
While browsing through Mighty Leaf’s website in preparation for the review I just posted, I noticed that they have a great offer on for people who haven’t tried their tea pouches before: Buy your first tea pouches from Mighty Leaf and get 25% off.
There are actually three separate offers – one for herbal tea, another for black tea
and a third for green tea
.
Tea Finely Brewed helps discerning tea drinkers develop a deeper appreciation for the world's most popular beverage (other than water, that is).
