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Earl Grey is a widespread favorite!
Where would we be without our beloved celebrities? It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who once wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” I’m sure there’s more than a few grains of truth to that but at least one way in which celebrities tend to come down to Earth with the rest of us is in their love for tea.
There’s been a minor flurry of celebrity-related tea news lately so how about we start with Kate Hudson? The actress asserted recently that she makes better tea than her English fiancée though the claims that she’s “invented” her own tea might be a bit overstated. Said invention is merely composed of two bag of Earl Grey per serving with two sugars “and cappuccino milk with froth.”
I’ve heard the name Stephen Fry many times now but until writing this article I wasn’t quite clear on exactly who he was and what he does. However, on other side of the Atlantic the actor is apparently considerably more popular. So much so that a recent poll found him beating out the Queen as the person respondents would most like to have tea with.
Speaking of royalty, the fourth-ranked celeb in the aforementioned poll was the Duchess of Cambridge, better known as a Kate Middleton. Here’s a report about a Nevada-based tea merchant who created a Duchess of Cambridge blend in her honor. It’s “an elegant blend of rosé petals, sunflower petals and cornflowers on a base of Ceylon OP large leaf. A bright brew within a hint of sweet rose.”
Though she’s described as a “comedy legend,” Victoria Wood may be another one of those celebrities who’s better known in the United Kingdom than she is here. She’s currently starring in Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup of Tea, in which she “travels the globe to explore Britain’s love affair with tea in a two part special on the little plant that changed the world.” Among the celebrities she visits with in her travels, singer Morrissey and Matt Smith, who stars as the latest incarnation of the eternally popular Dr. Who.
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
As if we didn’t have enough to be concerned about. Tea bags? Really?
There are those who would say that the easiest way to sidestep any potential dangers with tea bags is not to use them at all. Which might be a valid point and one that I can agree with, to some extent, given the tea bag’s reputation for turning out somewhat lackluster tea. But not so fast.
As it turns out the news that inspired this article has to do with the “good” tea bags, if there can be said to be such a thing. It came from that august publication known as The Atlantic and was titled Are Tea Bags Turning Us Into Plastic?
If you follow the latest developments in tea bag technology, then you’ll probably know that in recent times the increased interest in “good” tea has led to some improvements in tea bags, specifically those of a type that are designed to be more spacious, which allows tea leaves more room to breathe during the steeping process and should improve the flavor of the tea.
The problem with this – if there is a problem – has to do with the plastic many of these bags are made of. The writer of the aforementioned article notes that this may contribute negatively to the problem of landfill waste and then turns to concerns about health.
As the author notes, these bags, which “are most commonly made from food grade nylon or polyethylene terephthalate (PET)” have a high melting point and would be considered relatively safe with regard to their potential for leaching harmful compounds into tea. He/she (Taylor?) goes on and takes a relatively in-depth look at the pro and cons of plastic tea bags but ultimately does not come to any real conclusion.
Which leads me to conclude, as I always have, that my poison of choice will be tea made from loose leaves (and steeped in one of those plastic gravity-fed gizmos). But if I were a fan of plastic tea bags I probably wouldn’t give them up out of any concerns over health just yet. But that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Ceylon Tea (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
Ceylon tea is still something of an unknown (or perhaps lesser known these days) quantity for me, but that’s gradually starting to change as more samples start to trickle in. I sampled a few from another merchant a while back that were good but not great. Most recently I took the English Tea Store’s Organic Ceylon out for a spin and I liked that one better.
Which brings me to the Tea Store’s Lovers Leap, which is also a Ceylon tea. Which are primarily black teas from the island nation formerly known as Ceylon and now known as Sri Lanka. This one is grown in the Nuwara Eliya district there, which is located at about four thousand feet above sea level. As coincidence would have it I ran across an article from the Chinese press recently about this very same region. According to the article it’s one of the most important tea production centers in the country and is sometimes referred to as Little England, a reference to its colonial roots.
My first reaction upon steeping a batch of this tea was disappointment. The Tea Store’s blurb refers to it as “a high grown lighter flowery flavor tea, very good after dinner” and I found it to be very light indeed, much too light for my tastes. Realizing that the leaf was a little larger than many of the black teas I’ve been drinking lately I decided I’d try using a little more of it and things improved considerably.
Well, now that’s more like it, I thought to myself, as I came up with a much darker brew and a flavor to match. I’ve been drinking a lot of bold and heavy Assam tea lately and prior to that one of my everyday teas was a very strong black variety from Yunnan. I’m not typically a fan of the more delicate black teas. While this one is a little lighter than what I’m used to the revamped formula made for a great batch and I’m sure I won’t have any problems working my way through the sample pack.
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Is drinking tea bad for you? Well, apparently it is if you drink it to ridiculous excess. Of course, you could probably make the argument that anything you consume in ridiculous amounts becomes bad for you. A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine has garnered a rather ridiculous amount of press in itself, now that you mention it. It told the tale of a woman who for seventeen years drank a pitcher of tea a day made with up to 150 tea bags, a habit which wreaked havoc on her teeth and bones. Perhaps it would be impolite of me to say that a little common sense might have prevented this, but there it is.
On a decidedly lighter note, how about some tea-scented toilet paper? No, it’s not a belated April Fool’s day joke. It’s hard to imagine that the Japanese could come up with something offbeat and quirky but that’s where these several “flavors” of the aforementioned product come from. As much as I love tea, I’m afraid I’ll pass. Ditto for the Earl Grey lip balm available here, along with other such flavors as Tupelo Honey and Mint Julep.
If you’re more in the mood for something tea-flavored that you can actually consume, then you might try a product from yet another brewer who’s decided to blend the two great tastes of beer and tea. Here’s a brief blurb on Flying Dog Green Tea Imperial Stout, which comes with a price tag more suited to a moderately decent wine.
It’s been way too long since we presented our noble readers with any strange and offbeat teapots, so it’s time to make amends. Here’s a roundup of 9 Unique Teapots from Real Simple magazine. For almost four times the quirky teapot goodness have a look at 33 Quirky Teapot Designs from the good people at Trend Hunter. Finally we close this edition of the gadget report with a truly unusual helmet fashioned from a tea kettle. There’s one for the tea lover who has absolutely everything.
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Lover’s Leap Tea (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
If you’ve read my ramblings at this fine tea site or at my own tea site then you’ll know that I don’t make any secret of my dislike for the practice of adding stuff to tea. Stuff like milk, cream, sugar, honey, laundry soap (just seeing if you’re paying attention) and so on.
By the same token I don’t have a problem with anyone who does. If we all drank one kind of tea prepared exactly the same way the world of tea would be a pretty boring place and there wouldn’t be as many things to write about.
I think these preferences for putting stuff in our tea probably have a lot to do with our upbringing and I suspect that if I’d been brought up in England I wouldn’t be writing such an article. As it turns out I was born and raised on the left side of the Atlantic in a family where the only thing that resembled tea was this powdery substance you scooped from a big jar, mixed with water and served chilled.
Which doesn’t exactly prevent one from choosing the path of adding stuff to tea but that’s not the way it worked out for me. As I gradually began to get clued in on the secret that there were really good teas to be had I decided that they were best tasted without any adornments.
But recently, in the interests of fairness, tolerance, world peace and the like, I thought I would revisit the subject of stuff in tea, specifically milk. My poison of choice in this area is soy milk and so I thought I would sample a few black teas thus adorned.
I started with Lover’s Leap, from the English Tea Store, which I just finished reviewing for this site and which I liked quite a bit. With a dash of milk I still liked it quite a bit, but this has never really been this issue. The problem was that what I was tasting was not really the tea, which is what I wanted to taste in the first place.
Next up was a Chinese black tea that I liked for the most part, but that which had one or two flavor notes that put me off a bit. I liked this one just as well with milk added and perhaps even a bit more, since I wasn’t quite as keen on the original tea in the first place.
None of which comes as a surprise and I’m not sure what any of this solves, but I guess I’d summarize it by answering the question “got milk?” with a polite, “no, still not.”
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
If you pick up the book Tea and Tea Blending expecting to read about the latter topic you might come away mildly disappointed. There are only a few brief chapters of this 151-page book devoted to the topic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking a look at.
If you’re looking for more of this sort of thing you could also take a look at a book that was published around the same time – Tea-Blending as a Fine Art, by Joseph M. Walsh. The fourth edition of Tea and Tea Blending, the edition under consideration here, was published just two years before that, in 1894. Authorship is somewhat vague, being attributed to a “Member of the firm of Lewis & Co.”
Regardless of who wrote it, you could say that for the most part it’s a fairly standard overview of tea culture and the industry, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It starts off with a few chapters devoted mostly to a history of tea in England and an overview of and statistics regarding the tea trade. The author also throws in a chapter comprised of Hints on Tea Making, in which he notes, “unskilful preparation can make good tea into a nauseous draft.” To which I say, “well said, anonymous sir”.
From there it’s off on a brief trip around the world, starting in China, with a segment that takes up the largest chunk of the book. After that it’s on to a not quite as large section on India and then a chapter each devoted to the teas of Ceylon and Japan, Java and more.
As the mysterious author notes, when he finally gets around to the tea blending stuff, it’s a practice that he claims is relatively recent but had already become “entirely a matter of course.” He claims that this practice didn’t actually become common until Indian teas had come “fully on to the market.” He goes on to provide an interesting overview of which types of tea work best with various hardnesses of water, something that I don’t recall seeing before.
From there it’s on to a few sample blends and then a summary which emphasizes the importance of learning the ins and out of tea blending. Read all about it here or wherever else you choose to access your free classic digital texts.
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I have to admit that the practice of finger tapping when tea is being poured is something of a mystery to me. Which probably makes sense since as far as I’m aware it’s a practice that’s primarily confined to certain Asian countries and most notably China. But when I ran across an article recently at an Asian food site I thought it was time to take a closer look at the practice.
China Tea Sampler – steep and tap! (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
I took a look a few of my favorite books on tea history and Chinese tea culture and they seem to be curiously silent on the subject. From a European perspective, I found reference to a similar custom practiced with wine in this report that dates all the way back to 1885. But as the aforementioned article suggests, finger tapping is a practice that supposedly dates back several centuries to the Qing dynasty.
As the story goes, one of the Chinese emperors of the day had disguised himself so that he could get out among the common people. Though he was traveling with a servant it was the emperor who actually found himself pouring tea for said servant at a teahouse. Which left the servant with the dilemma of how to show the appropriate level of gratitude without blowing the emperor’s cover. His solution was to bend two fingers and rap the knuckles on the table to show his appreciation.
Which sounds like it could be another of those quaint legends about tea that are too good to be true but it’s a custom that still survives to this day in some places, although often with three fingers used instead of two. Not surprisingly, the custom is said to be more popular among older tea drinkers than the young and one can’t help wonder if it might be in danger of falling by the wayside as those elderly tea drinkers pass along.
Of course, there’s no law that says that only elderly Chinese tea drinkers can tap for their tea. So the next time someone pours tea for you do your part to preserve this tradition and give them a few taps.
While it really has nothing to do with the subject of this article here’s some bonafide scientific research on finger tapping that’s too good to pass up.
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
After writing an article on some fine tea-related offerings on British Airways and a few Asian airlines I thought it might be interesting to revisit the issue of tea in high places. For starters, I thought I might see what some of the big name airlines offered. Not that I was expecting much, given that some of the world’s top airlines are American and Americans are not among the world’s great tea drinkers.
Virgin Atlantic teacups (Photo source: screen capture from site)
The first thing I noticed when looking for information about tea and airlines is that variations on the phrase “coffee, tea or me” come up a lot. In case you missed it, this was the title of a popular 1967 book that supposedly detailed the exploits of a pair of high-living stewardesses – as they were called back then.
But I digress. Back to the topic at hand – tea on major airlines. Depending on how you rank them, the world’s four biggest airlines are based in the United States. I’m sure you’ll recognize their names. Next on the list is the German-based Lufthansa.
At the top ranking airline in the world, as nearly as I can tell, the menu includes “tea” and that’s about the size of it. That’s Delta, if you’re wondering. At second-ranked United it’s more of the same, though they also have a special Japanese meal that comes with “Japanese tea” for those availing themselves of the better classes of travel.
A search for tea at Southwest’s web site turns up a bunch of results, including a number of places apparently in their destination cities where you can go for tea. As for finding out what kind of tea offerings they have on their flights, well they’ve got “tea.” At American Airlines, you can get “tea” from a certain well-known American tea company. At Lufthansa you’d have to be a more skilled web site navigator than I to determine exactly what they offer in the beverage department. But if I interpret this page correctly you’ll find actual tea plants growing at their home offices.
Which is about what I expected. I won’t say that there might not be some spectacular gourmet tea offerings on offer from these airlines that I might have missed. But I’d be willing to bet that if they had invested in coming up with something worth mentioning, they’d have mentioned something more than “tea.” Of course, perhaps if you fly on the world’s 7th and 13th largest airlines, whatever they may be, the tea will be out of this world. Who’s to say? Time and space didn’t permit me to turn this into an in-depth thesis.
We close with novelty tea cups, courtesy of Virgin Airlines, whose business travelers can apparently avail themselves of a real high tea – in more ways than one.
See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
McVities Plain Chocolate Digestives – go ahead and dunk! (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
Just as I’m sure you might be able to draw conclusions about a person’s personality based on how they eat an Oreo, so too might you be able to analyze them by their preferences when it comes to dipping, dunking (or whatever term you prefer) things in tea, coffee, milk or whatever.
I’ll say right at the outset that I am not a dipper. I’m not saying that in my entire existence I’ve never dipped or dunked or whatever, but at this time in my life I am most definitely not a dipper. I can’t even imagine dunking cookies, biscuits or what have you in my tea, but I’m sure there must be people who do it. So I will repeat my standard refrain – we all like what we like.
If you ever find yourself wondering about the science of this sort of thing, then British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal has just the thing for you. As a recent report noted, on his TV show, Heston’s Fantastical Food, “with the help of a high-tech gadget inserted up the nose, he found that a chocolate-covered biscuit dipped into hot black tea did indeed have more flavor than an undunked one.”
While a high-tech gadget up the nose sounds a little bit daunting, there’s apparently some sort of real science behind all of this. Researchers at the University of Nottingham have come up with a gadget called MS-Nose, which “which measures the amount of flavor released in your mouth as aromas.” Now, that’s progress. They got together with Blumenthal to figure it all out and apparently there was some actual scientific evidence to back this claim.
None of which is really a triumph of science, if you ask me, a devoted fan of black tea. I don’t mean to be indelicate about all of this, but for my money black tea could probably improve the flavor of an old shoe – or just about anything else, for that matter. Not that I’m going to start dunking anytime soon. I’m just saying.
If the science of dunking isn’t enough for you then be sure not to miss my previous article on the “sport” of dunking stuff in tea.
See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Seems there’s more social media these days than any reasonable person could be expected to keep up with. I don’t live under a rock, but until recently I hadn’t even heard of one of the latest and greatest. It’s called Vine, and you could sum it up by saying it’s an app that lets you create and share six-second looping videos. For what it might be worth – and I’m sure there are clever souls who have figured out how to make it an art form.
Social Media (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
As a tea person I’m not sure how you could turn this one to your advantage, but of course other social media can be beneficial to your mission – if used properly. I don’t claim to be an expert on social media or tea, but I guess I know enough about each to be entitled to an opinion. The first thing I’d say about social media is that, if you don’t have anything to say, then don’t say anything. Which is to say that there are probably people who are more inclined toward social media than others and, if you don’t feel that you’re one of them, then maybe you shouldn’t bother.
In my own case, writing a tea blog that will turn eight this year, I decided a few years back that I’d stick a toe in the waters of social media. Facebook was getting big at the time, and Twitter was making a rapid rise. The former didn’t really appeal to me, and I didn’t want to spread myself too thin, so I decided to go with Twitter, which works quite well for sending out updates about the site, as well as the articles I write here, other tea news that seems fit to print and whatever else.
I don’t create any of my own video content, so I never really bothered with YouTube, and when Pinterest came along, I once again invoked the rule of not spreading myself too thin and decided to abstain. But I do use plenty of YouTube content at the site, where you can see plenty of interesting, amusing and off the beaten path tea-related videos.
But to get back to Twitter for a moment, I’ve run across hundreds or thousands of tea-related Twitter users over the years and I’ve noticed a few things I’d caution against – not that I’m the reigning expert on this sort of thing. First and foremost, if you’re not able to keep up with your Twitter (or any other social media) account, then it might be best to kill it off or never even start it. For my money an abandoned social media presence seems to present a worse impression than none at all.
On the flip side, and this is geared mostly to merchants, is a caution against using social media as your only presence or perhaps your primary one. I’ve seen this done a few times and, while I’m no expert on tea and ecommerce, it seems to me that running your merchant site on Facebook or a Yahoo or eBay store sends an impression to users that perhaps you’re not so serious about your product.
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© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
