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Even though I don’t use teabags, the machines that make them fascinate me. Imagine a machine that takes the processed tea leaves and dumps a small amount into a little bag, adds a string, adds a tag, and does this by the thousands. Wow!
Yes, those little teabags are made on a machine like this. (screen capture from site)
Of course, teabagging machines are part of a line of machines used these days for processing teas. There are machines for producing CTC style teas, orthodox style teas, and special ones just for green teas. They handle the various stages: withering, rolling, oxidizing, drying, and sorting/grading. For a lot of these teas, the final step is the bagging.
The basic structure is pretty much the same. There has to be a hopper where the processed tea is fed in, rolls of bag material, a cutter to make the bags the desired shape (such as the round bags of Typhoo and the rectangular bags of Barry’s) and seal the edges together, string and tags and either glue or staples to attach them to the bag, and a way to gather up the finished bags into boxes. Over a hundred bags and even as many as 250 bags can be made per minute in each machine. At the rate of consumption in countries like Ireland and the UK, many of these machines would have to be employed to be sure those tea drinkers didn’t run out.
Argentina is home to one of the top tea bag production machine companies in the world. The company is MAI from Mar del Plata, Argentina, having customers in 78 countries and many innovative designs. Their standard machine fills 120 rectangular bags per minute with up to 3.3 grams of dry tea per bag, and can also package tisanes which tend to have larger pieces. Another top company is Teepack in Meerbusch, Germany. Tecnomeccanica is another top company in this field; they are in Italy and have a machine design that is faster and can fill 250 pyramid-shaped bags per minute.
See a teabagging machine in action here. Don’t stare too long at it or you might get hypnotized.
One final note: all that effort to put the dry tea into those bags and then folks like me cut them open and dump the tea loose into the pot. Sorry about that! For many tea drinkers those bags are a lifesaver, allowing for the quick steeping of a cuppa. For hubby and me, they are a flavor distorter.
See more of A.C. Cargill’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.
See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.
Reading through the first two parts of this article, which had been planned as a 2-part article only, it came to me that two quite significant aspects regarding organic tea cultivation and organic certification of teas are missing there: once, the question of at which point in the supply chain the testing for an organic tea certification is to be performed, and second, how much of the pesticide residues in a tea will actually be taken in by humans drinking that tea.
The first aspect mentioned is a good part of what makes organic certification for teas as difficult and complex as it really is. Basically, we have 3 stages in the supply chain of tea: tea producer, tea trader (wholesaler), and tea retailer. Now, at which stage are we going to test and certify the organic properties of a tea?
If we are going to test a tea on the producer level, pesticide residues could at a later stage be added to the tea by blending it with contaminated tea. Moreover, where exactly are we going to take the tea sample to test here? From one bag of tea? From one batch? From one harvest? Or, in the best case, from a mixed sample that composes of samples of all batches and/or harvests through a year? And even then, are we going to repeat the same complex and expensive effort in the next year and in every next year again? And: who will draw the sample? Often, tea samples for testing are simply provided by the producer, or least with considerable involvement of the producer. Who will guarantee that such samples are not carefully selected to prove what wouldn’t be true at all for a real representative random sample, something that would compromise the whole assessment and certification process?
Drawing and testing samples at the trader level comes with all of the traps mentioned above for testing on producer level: which batch, which season, which year to test, and how to ensure the representativeness and uncompromised nature of the drawn sample?
Now, let’s go right into the tea shop: how many kilograms of a tea the average tea shop will sell through the year? One? Two? Five? Or even ten or twenty? Who is going to finance testing for one, two, five, ten, or twenty kg of tea? The shop owner? A funny idea, isn’t it?
I am not saying lab tests of teas aren’t contributing to safety. Where performed with due care and consideration of the above mentioned traps, the definitely will. But even then, as we have seen, there will still be holes for contamination with pesticides to take place and leak through to the final package of tea in the tea store shelve.
Now, the second point I wanted to mention, an argument we hear quite often recently, probably coming from the side of tea industry that doesn’t want to go the stony, expensive, and finally still unsafe path of certification (however, there’s something about it): only a small portion of the pesticide residues contained in tea leaves will make it into the actual tea beverage. Most will be stuck with the tea leaves, which are hardly ever being chewed and swallowed by the tea drinkers. Mostly, such as for example in the European Union, pesticide residues in tea leaves are measured exactly as this: pesticide residues in tea leaves, but not as pesticide residues in the actual tea (infusion), this taking its toll on the meaningfulness of their permissible limit values in the first place.
I do not want to be misunderstood here! I surely don’t want to advocate the use of pesticides in tea cultivation. And I would definitely welcome anything that would serve to reduce or even completely eliminate pesticide levels in teas. It is just that I believe that the current approach of organic certification serves this purpose only in a very suboptimal way. I might have said this at an earlier point in this article, but I still wish to repeat it once again: prevalence of organic principals in global tea cultivation can only be achieved by a thorough control or complete outlawing of the production and use of pesticides in the producer countries, and by the implementation of continuous efficient measures to raise awareness in this regard in these countries. This, however, will not be achieved in the chaos of national legislations dealing with an international market, but only if the relevant legislations are effective on the same international level as the market.
See more of Thomas Kasper’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.
In the last book column I wrote for this site I made mention of a book I’d run across that had to do with coffee, of all things. Let me once again make it perfectly clear that I have not gone over to the dark side. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be a tea drinker for life, but I found the title and the approach of the aforementioned book interesting even so.
Be a teaist! (ETS image)
It’s called The Coffeeist Manifesto: No More Bad Coffee! and it comes to use courtesy of a gentleman named Steven D. Ward. To summarize briefly, it tells coffee lovers how they can achieve the best cup of coffee possible, whether it be on the home front or on the increasingly crowded coffee shop front.
I confess that I haven’t read the book (I’m not that interested in coffee) but, in looking over the various blurbs and whatnot, I found the following to be the most interesting and relevant to us tea drinkers:
Fact: Making very good coffee is NOT THAT HARD. With a minimal investment in time and education you can make the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had in your life in the comfort of your own home. This book shows exactly why billion dollar for-profit coffee chains are inherently unable to produce coffee of the quality you can make in the kitchen.
Which could be said for tea, for the most part, but let’s break down that statement a bit. While I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that making very good tea is “not that hard” I would say that if you follow the basics of using the correct amount of steeping time and the correct temperature you’ve pretty much got it wrapped up.
Of course, none of that counts for much if you don’t start with the best tea you can possibly get your hands on. Which is not that hard, but it takes a little work. As for that “minimal investment” part, as I never tire of pointing out, given how many cups of tea can be produced from a given amount of tea leaves, what might seem like a high price at first glance turns out to be rather reasonable. That’s even more so if you compare it to what you’d pay if you go out for tea.
Which is a topic that I’m not really all that qualified to comment on, since I never go out for tea. But with the dramatic increase in the number of tearooms and teahouses in recent decades, a little bit of careful shopping should lead you to a carry out tea that’s at least satisfactory and perhaps better.
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.
19 Lessons on Tea (screen capture from site)
As I was gearing up to write the latest edition of this column I thought I would browse through Amazon’s Kindle store, looking for books on a certain topic (first two guesses don’t count). As I did so, I found myself amazed and slightly befuddled at how many versions there are of Kakuzo Okakura’s influential 1905 work, The Book of Tea. I gather that the book is not protected under copyright laws and thus, given the relative ease of putting together a Kindle edition, you can take your pick among about a zillion of them. Given all that, I’d caution you to choose carefully.
This time around we start with a book about coffee (excuse me?). Bear with me for a moment, if you will, and no, I’m not going over to the dark side. I haven’t actually read Steven Ward’s The Coffeeist Manifesto: No More Bad Coffee! but based on the description, I like what he seems to be striving for. Here in the tea world we’re all making great strides nowadays but in my opinion people are still too willing to accept bad or mediocre tea. So The Teaist Manifesto? Anyone?
If you’re looking for the ultimate guide to Chinese tea you might want to look into something like Bret Hinsch’s The Ultimate Guide to Chinese Tea. It’s bills itself as “the first comprehensive and accurate book in English on the fine art of Chinese tea.” Which might be overstating things just a bit, given how many other books on the topic are out there. Take The Ancient Art of Tea: Wisdom From the Ancient Chinese Tea Masters, by Warren Peltier, for example. It treads similar ground and appears to have been published a few months prior to the aforementioned volume.
If you’re pressed for time and you couldn’t possibly commit to reading 20 lessons on tea, 27Press has just the thing for you. That would be 19 Lessons On Tea: Become an Expert on Buying, Brewing, and Drinking the Best Tea. Whether it’s really “the ultimate guide to everything you need to know about this healthy and flavorful daily indulgence” is something you’ll have to judge for yourself.
If you’re ready to make a substantially larger commitment you could take a crack at 365 Things Every Tea Lover Should Know, by Harvest House Publishers. It’s apparently a “fun, attractive collection rejoices in all there is to learn, savor, praise, and enjoy about tea.” I haven’t done the math but if try a selection a day you should be able to get through it in about a year.
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.
A quick look around the internet will show you that when it comes to the word used to describe land where tea is grown, there is no consensus. You’ll see tea gardens, tea plantations, tea estates, tea plots, and so on. Is any one of these right or preferred?
A tea estate by any other name would be just as beautiful. (Yahoo! Images)
Official Definitions
A very official source is long-time dictionary compiler/publisher Merriam-Webster. Here is their take on what these three things are:
Garden — 1. a : a plot of ground where herbs, fruits, flowers, or vegetables are cultivated; b : a rich well-cultivated region; c : a container (as a window box) planted with usually a variety of small plants. 2. a : a public recreation area or park usually ornamented with plants and trees <a botanical garden>; b : an open-air eating or drinking place; c : a large hall for public entertainment.
Plantation — 1. a usually large group of plants and especially trees under cultivation. 2. a settlement in a new country or region <Plymouth Plantation>. 3. a : a place that is planted or under cultivation; b : an agricultural estate usually worked by resident labor.
Estate — 1. state, condition. 2. social standing or rank especially of a high order. 3. a social or political class; specifically : one of the great classes (as the nobility, the clergy, and the commons) formerly vested with distinct political powers. 4. a : the degree, quality, nature, and extent of one’s interest in land or other property; b (1) : possessions, property; especially : a person’s property in land and tenements <a man of small estate> (2) : the assets and liabilities left by a person at death; c : a landed property usually with a large house on it; d British : project. 5. British : station wagon. 6. farm, plantation; also : vineyard
Gee, that was helpful … not!
Let’s look at other factors that may determine which term is used when.
Who’s Using What
The thing that started me even wondering if there was any difference between a tea garden, a tea plantation, or a tea estate was when I was looking into teas grown in the U.S. There is a tea “plantation” in South Carolina and tea “gardens” in Hawaii, for example. In other countries such as India, they use “garden” and “estate” mainly. Nilgiri has many small tea “estates” that are 100 to 200 hectares and often run as family operations or small businesses. Assam has Mornai, Pertabghur, Hattigor, and a host of other tea “estates.” Darjeeling has numerous tea “estates” such as Soom, Mim, Arya, and Goomtee. The term “estate” is used in other tea producing countries such as Kenya and Uganda. Japan tends to use the term “garden” for theirs. The folks promoting tea tourism seem to make no differentiation between the three terms, using them interchangeably and according to what they think will appeal to potential visitors. Any rhyme or reason here seems to be a figment of the imagination.
The term “plantation tea” or Taidi Cha (台地茶) is basic quality, commonly produced tea, with the tea plants arranged in narrow rows and shaped to make them easier to harvest. And “tea garden” is used as often for the name of a restaurant as for an actual tea garden, as a simple online search reveals.
A Tea Garden by Any Other Name…
It would seem that the Bard was right when he said that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Whether you call it a tea garden, a tea plantation, or a tea estate, it’s the tea grown there that counts.
See more of A.C. Cargill’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.
If you’re of a certain age, you might recall popular commercials for a certain stockbroker (if not, you can always turn to YouTube). After the mere mention of their name reliably caused an entire room to go silent, the proceedings closed with the catchphrase, “when E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.”
Which is a roundabout way of saying that if you’re the big kahuna in your particular industry, then, just like with an 800-pound gorilla, people are probably more likely to pay attention to you. Recently one of the honchos at a certain ubiquitous mega-corporation made a few comments on his company’s impending move into tea. While said company is much better known for their coffee and their existing tea offerings have often lurked in the shadows, that all is apparently going to change.
What does all this have do with the price of tea in China, to quote the old phrase? Well, in addition to the fact that it may actually affect the price of tea produced in China, in a very real way, it’s also likely to have a significant impact on the tea industry as a whole. Let’s not forget that once upon a time, back before said firm became a coffee selling powerhouse, coffee was just coffee and there really wasn’t much to get excited about – and we all know how that’s changed.
Now, with their recent purchase of one of the U.S. tea industry’s biggest players (and let’s not forget that existing tea line) you-know-who is turning their attentions to the beverage that even they point out, is said to be the second most consumed beverage in the world, after water.
For more on the topic, check out this recent article/video from a popular investing site. Though you’ll have to hack your way through a thicket of financial buzzwords (“leverage the premium nature of” and so on). If you’d rather not, the gist of the thing is that though “tea” was originally part of the gorilla’s name, they have not made it enough of a focal point, they intend to keep alive the chain of stores they recently purchased with the potential for hundreds more locations on the horizon, and they will also increase their focus on tea selling in their existing locations.
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.
As we have learnt in part 1 of this article, buying “organic” tea might arguably be our best option to protect ourselves from the possible health hazards arising from the use of pesticides in tea cultivation, at least at first sight. A closer look reveals a different picture, though:
- “Paper doesn’t blush”, as they say, and the same applies to website contents to an even greater extent. While in some western countries, there are clear legal definitions available of what can be called “organic” and what not, this is not the case for the majority of countries in the world, so both brick-and-mortar and in particular online teashop operators can basically write what they want, if they are acting under the legislation of such countries. Honestly, I wouldn’t even bet on all “organic” statements in western shops being actually true, and being an insider to the industry, I do know that except for the random check by the relevant authorities and institutions, the loose-knit net of official monitoring allows for a lot of fraud in this regard to take place and evade detection. As a result, any organic claim not supported by a reputed certification, isn’t worth the paper or data sheet it is printed on. Where they say “organic tea”, they must have a certificate available that can be viewed on request, whether online or in a brick-and-mortar tea shop. Of course, it is tempting for a trader to call their teas “organic”, thus making them more popular, justifying higher prices, or actually make them look cheap, with no costs for the verification of their organic claim being involved.
- As stated above (in part 1 of this article), there are many hundreds of different pesticides that can be used in the cultivation of tea plants. Hardly any of the check lists used by organic tea certifiers will be able to cover them all. Actually, certifications can even be more than tricky, when covering only a certain range of pesticides, but completely omitting others that might in fact be commonly used in the relevant territories. The result would be an “organic certified tea” that in fact doesn’t have the slightest chance to be even close to being organic and might contain even some of the most hazardous pesticides. Regarding the factual levels of fraud and corruption on both official and private business level (and where these two levels meet and intertwine) in countries such as China, India, and many other tea producing countries, a nice official statement saying that “teas from this region are cultivated strictly to the principals of organic farming under the close supervision of blablabla” will be good to have as a hard copy, so you could still use it to wipe your ….
- And there is another, completely forgotten downside to “organic certification”. The process of certifying a tea as organic on a trustworthy and reputable level might be affordable on a certain company size or corporate level, but will not be accessible or otherwise feasible for the majority of small individual tea producers, and this is where things turn upside down: there might be (in fact are) small producers in all of these countries existing who really are aware of and observing a set of organic cultivation principles, the same often even being rooted in their traditional regional or tribal culture. Then, there are wild teas that are also not exposed to pesticides for obvious reasons. And you, who has finally come to trust some established and reputed organic tea certification, are going to miss all of their teas, just because their producers have no access to or cannot afford the certification process, or don’t see any point in the same, given their teas are organically grown anyway.
I am not even able to show any safe way out of the described dilemma. Raising awareness on the producer side and/or an efficient ban on the use of all potentially hazardous substances in tea cultivation on a unified international level might just be the only promising approaches to improvement, though yet far from perfection. In the meantime, if you do have health concerns in regard to the use of pesticides in tea cultivation, it might indeed be advisable to choose your sources carefully and maybe even on an individual basis for each of the teas you like and each of the teas you plan to try. And read between the lines, where they say it is organic…
See more of Thomas Kasper’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s a quick look at some tea developments that may not necessarily be new but are still not in the mainstream of tea drinkers’ awareness.
Post-Qingming harvesting is now complete (Photo source: stock image)
Tea Harvests Progress
First flush teas are generally harvested in March and April, depending on their location. In China: Pre-Qing teas are harvested from about March 30th through April 5th, so they are done now; the mid-April (Yu Qian) teas are finishing up; Gu Yu and Li Xia teas will be getting underway from about April 30th through May 31st. In India: Darjeeling first flush teas have pretty much finished and shipped to vendors, Assam first flush is done with the second flush (what those “tippy” Assams are made of) is growing as you read this. In Japan, most regions will be starting harvest soon (usually the end of April through early May).
If you like those really fresh teas, keep these dates in mind when ordering from your favorite tea vendor. Some are already pre-announcing the expected arrivals of these new teas (not to be confused with new tea products added to the vendor’s site).
Bottled Tea Sales
Sure we here in the U.S. drink bottled tea year round, but it seems to be more in warmer weather than in cooler. And projections look rosy for bottled tea makers as more Americans dump the cola in favor of that tea. Black, green, oolong, and white in both flavored and straight versions are filling grocery store shelves, but not for long as buyers rush in to stock up. Flavors include lemon, peach, raspberry, and citrus, plus some less common ones like pineapple, apple, mint, strawberry, and chocolate.
Job Opportunities at Tea Gardens
With the change from hand-picked to machine harvesting in some tea growing countries such as Kenya a few years ago, jobs at tea gardens have also changed from rows of women out in among the tea plants to more skilled workers driving the harvesters. They also need other semi-skilled workers. For example, Unilever, a large-scale tea grower with a presence in various countries, had an ad online recently looking for drivers in Kenya to drive the lorries carrying harvested tea leaves to the processing plant. Other positions become available as harvesting times kick in.
That’s it for this month. Will see what next month brings.
See more of A.C. Cargill’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.
