Culture A carefully crafted menu of homemade treats...yum!

21st Century Tea Time with Friends and Colleagues

Heather Edwards

Sharing tea with friends today can still be a dress-up affair with a carefully crafted menu of either bakery-bought or homemade treats, especially for birthdays and celebrations like graduations or promotions, but we all know that casual and convenient are more likely to be the themes today because it’s so easy and fun to do.

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Travel Travel with tea!

Tea On-the-Go: What you need to know!

Heather Edwards

Don't you wish every time you’d like a cup of tea, you’d also have the time and tools to dedicate attention and precision to making the perfect cup? We do too! But we know that in the real world, it's not that easy! With a little time and planning, these tips can make your tea-travels more enjoyable!

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Enjoyment Find the perfect gift for the Men in your life this Father's Day

Gifts for the Guys

Heather Edwards

This year, let’s get personal, and match a gift to your guy that says you know what he loves. Amp it up beyond the golf balls and silk ties; say no to another grill utensil set, and absolutely no phone gadgets, he probably has them all anyway. Instead, think Vintage, Experience, and Love.

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Drinks & Eats Selection of Cheeses

TEA AND CHEESE

Heather Edwards

It is no small irony that Asian tea has become the go-to beverage to revolutionize the European-U.S. cheese flight. We offer a beginner’s guide of pairing teas from China, Japan, Taiwan, Ceylon, and India with cheese selections from the dairy producers of Great Britain, The Netherlands, Italy, France, and the U.S. (Yes, India does offer paneer, but it’s a modest cheese producer.)

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Culture Tea Field

ALL ABOUT TEA: Pu Erh

Heather Edwards

It is not fresh, but intentionally and carefully aged, sometimes for decades. It does come in loose leaf varieties but generally puerh comes in a compressed form: bricks, rounds, knobs, balls. It always begins as green tea despite its dark color. And, it is a signature tea from the province of Yunnan in mainland China.

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History Learning about the history of Green Tea.

All About: Green Tea

Heather Edwards

It is alleged that it was Shen Nung, the Emperor and herbalist of ancient China (2700 BC,) who first sipped a few leaves that had floated down from a nearby tree into a kettle of boiling water. Those leaves were green, fresh, and their intoxicating fragrance made the emperor curious enough to taste the resulting beverage. That was the beginning of tea drinking in China but it wasn’t until the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) that tea became the national drink of China.

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History

Tea Acronyms: What Do Those Words & Letters Mean?

Heather Edwards

What do these initials and words mean? And, why don’t all tea-growing countries use them? Of the more than 35 countries which produce tea, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and India are the primary users of these designations in all their tea-growing areas to describe broken or full tea leaves, leaf position, and words for their appearance and fragrance.

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Enjoyment

D.I.Y. Tea Tasting Journal

Heather Edwards

Why a tea journal? It makes it so easy to refer back to your favorite teas, remind you where you bought them, and give you ideas for gifting tea-loving friends or family. Yes, you could use Excel or any other spreadsheet software to keep your tasting notes. But doesn’t that defeats the charm, and intimacy, of the tea experience?

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Enjoyment

Energize with Tea!

Heather Edwards

One of the fascinations about true tea, that precious leaf of the Camellia sinensis, is its ability to relax the body, energize the spirit, and sharpen mind. What shall you apply all that energy to? The practice of meditation? A hike in the woods? The demands on your mental energy tackling the problems of work or volunteering? Dancing the night away?

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Enjoyment

Celebrating Mom with Tea-licious Traditions

Heather Edwards

Every Mother's Day is an opportunity to celebrate the special women around you who have improved and enriched your life throughout the years. These "influencers" may or may not be related to you, but they're definitely part of the family of special people who have nurtured you. And that's more than enough reason to honor them on Mother's Day.

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Health & Beauty Loose Pu Erh

Tea's Benefits Now Extended to Anti-Aging

Heather Edwards

The intentionally aged tea, pu-erh, has been touted for generations as an aid to digestion and for cutting cholesterol in the body as it cuts grease on a cooking pan. Now scientists have discovered that it may also help to delay or reverse some symptoms of aging by increasing immunity, a critical factor in resisting infection, autoimmune disease, and other illnesses that can bring on aging or make aging more difficult.

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Drinks & Eats The ultimate gift of love

Chocolate and Tea: Contemporary Valentine's Gifts

Heather Edwards

The luxury and elegance of chocolate make it a natural for gift-giving all-year round, but especially on the day of love, February 14th. Although it's mostly custom, even scientists admit there's something to chocolate's naturally-occurring chemicals, serotonin and phenylethylamine, that increase the feelings of excitement and energy and heighten the sensations of love and romance.

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