Blanca Valencia - dev site
These days in sophisticated circles tea pairings are all the rage, tea sommeliers are sought after and meticulously crafted tea list are appearing in glamorous New York and Paris restaurants and hotels. One would think tea is a new discovery and not a product that frankly has been around for thousands of years. This tea […]
Time flies, it’s been 6 months since I posted Part I; there we looked at harvesting and processing Green Tea, now, in Part II we’ll wrap up with brewing, drinking and selling… Brewing As we know, the flavors of green tea, whilst fresh and bright in small quantities, if left to brew too long will become unpleasant, bitter […]
I accidentally bumped into these Asianera bone china tea cups in a Xintandi shop in Shanghai and I could not resist buying them. They are a fusion of Chinese and Western tea cups. The tea cups are tiny like the Chinese ones. They make our weekend oolong tea sessions feel even more luxurious. Asianera is […]
Confession… I’ve always wanted to like Green Tea, but have almost always failed. Apart from the Yamamotoyama bags that we buy in Mitsuwa, Chicago, it always seemed, literally, too fishy to me… an overpowering taste of seaweed and greens that I struggled to enjoy. What better challenge, therefore, to start our journey to better understand […]
My first introduction to tea was through the large pot that sat in the middle of our breakfast table for the first 20+ years of my life¹. Like most westerners, my family added milk and sugar to this to mask the fairly strong flavor. In my early 20’s, I next met “tea” in the US, […]