Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival with Pearl River Mart and Silver Needle Tea Co.
The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar. It usually falls somewhere in late September or early October. For 2017, today is the big day! Many activities are enjoyed including sharing a family meal, gazing at the full moon, lighting lanterns, and eating a special type of pastry called mooncakes. The roots of this festival actually go back over 3,000 years. In the past, emperors worshipped the moon in order to ensure a good harvest. Although most people no longer depend on the agricultural harvest for their livelihoods, the tradition continues to this day. When Pearl River Mart reached out to me about reviewing…
T&Co. Subscription Box – June Collection
A lot of my time at World Tea Expo is spent networking and meeting new people. It’s the one chance I get to talk to lots of people who are just as crazy about tea as I am. At an event held by +Teforia and +Tealet I had the pleasure of meeting Jennifer Odera. Subscription services often an induce an eye roll because they are so prolific but what she told me about her new company really caught my attention. Rather than the usual randomly curated selection of teas, T&Co.’s aim is to create a total tea experience. Each month subscribers are sent tea paired with an activity, music, and a snack. Each month follows a particular…
Teabook Subscription Service
Over the years I’ve reviewed more than my fair share of tea subscription services. There are a lot of choice out there and after a while they all start to look a bit the same. My attention was caught my +Teabook when I saw Marzipan’s review on TeaLover.Net. Luckily they contacted me shortly after to do a review. Right off the bat I was drawn in by the beautiful, tea-centric packaging. Everywhere I looked there little touches and hidden quotes. And velum. Have I mentioned my secret weakness for velum? It might be from my past life as a scrapbooker and crafty Girl Scout leader. Rather than sending out seemingly random assortments of bulk teas,…
Global Tea Hut: December 2015 – Old Grove
I was really excited for the December issue of Tea & Tao from +Global Tea Hut because Liu Bao is a tea that I never had a chance to experience before. Looking at the leaves you might think that it was a cooked puerh. That guess would be close but not quite on the mark. Liu Bao is a dark tea produced in Guangxi rather than Yunnan. The fermented leaves are pressed into baskets and then exported to Malaysia and Hong Kong. I was really fascinated reading about how intimately the story of this tea is woven with the story of Cantonese miners. Old Grove kept me company while I waited out the winter storm…
Global Tea Hut: November 2015 – Mountain Rain
I’m so behind on sharing my +Global Tea Hut experiences with you guys! Better late than never I suppose. I was excited about this one as soon as I saw envelopes popping up on my Instagram feed. Dian Hong is one of my absolutely favorite types of tea and every one that I have tried from Global Tea Hut has been awesome. 2014’s Golden Vajra and Daughter of the Forest are still the penultimate in my book but Mountain Rain was still a very nice tea. The dry leaves were beautifully curled with lots of golden tips. There was plenty of leaf for experimentation so I brewed this tea in a gaiwan, kyusu and…
Global Tea Hut: October 2015 – Cloud-Hidden
Life has been a bit on the hectic and crazy side so I’m a bit behind in sharing my Global Tea Hut experiences with you all (among other things). This used to stress me out quite a bit in the past but I’ve decided to stop beating myself up over it. Scaling back my publication schedule has helped. Ultimately what matters is that I take the time to enjoy the tea when I can. The lifeblood of +Global Tea Hut is its members and October’s shipment paid special tribute to that. The theme of Tea & Tao Magazine was “voices from the hut”. The gift that was included in this months envelope was photographs from…
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