Tea Blog - Learn All About Tea — Tea History

How much do you care about tea?  Now, how would you feel if an arbitrary, distant government which you had no say in imposed a tax on it?  How upset would you be?  Probably, not very.  However, at one point in history, this was the last straw to start a revolution.   If you haven’t guessed yet, that revolution was the American Revolution, which really got going with the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea party, if you’re unfamiliar, was not a tea party of any kind.  It was the result of particularly angry upset Bostonians, whose tensions with England passed...

The moment I started drinking tea, my mother immediately began calling me “the British child.”  I am of the opinion that, if you’re going to attach cultural stereotypes to things, you might as well do it correctly.  The first thing to know about British tea is that, if you’re drinking tea with biscuits in the afternoon, regardless of how fancy it is, it is not called high tea.  High tea was a meal which originated in the working class, when labor laws didn’t exist, and lunch breaks were therefore a luxury which most people did not have access to.  It...

Books and tea go together like peanut butter and jelly, or warm afternoons and sleeping outside in the grass.  As such, we’ve decided to run a quick series on famous authors, and the types of tea which they likely drank, starting first and foremost with the queen of the books and tea trope- Jane Austen. Austen lived from 1775- 1817, in England.  She was an extremely important figure in 19th century literature, and a contemporary of the Bröntes.  Because of where and when she lived, we can also assume a great deal about what she drank, and how she drank...

Do you have a favorite tea?  Something that you drink every day?  Something that people who really know you know is your tea?  A Lapsang Souchong to your Sherlock Holmes?  An Earl Grey to your Charles Grey?   If so, you may be interested in Yixing.  Yixing is a traditional porous Chinese clay, which has been used to make tea pots since the Song Dynasty.  The point of Western teaware, and ceramics in general, is that, when it is washed, all of the tea which was brewed in it is washed away.  Yixing absorbs some of the tea which is...