Series Note: At long last, the final installment in my self-indulgent series that covers all our blends and what inspired them. If you’ve got this far, your torment is almost over. This is Part VII. Who doesn’t love a good chai. Well, a few people , but we can dismiss them out of hand. In […]
Series Note: the penultimate installment in my self-indulgent series that covers all our blends and what inspired them. If you’ve got this far, well done you. This is Part VI. I read a lot of tea books, and the origins of Earl Grey tea are a bit unclear. And not really within the scope of […]
This post is a bit of a re-run. But a special one. Since 2009, I have written over 200 tea blog posts. I virtually stopped all of my other blogging, though I do write books and get a few magazine assignments here and there. Some of you may know that my tea blog did not […]
Series Note: I’ve decided to write a series that covers all our blends and what inspired them. And this is it. Part I Two of our most well known blends are Lord Petersham and The Duchess. And they are interrelated. A chance remark by Meredith Henderson, known on twitter as “bckmph” led to an image […]
Last night, Lady Devotea and I put on an event. A tea event, naturally! As part of the Adelaide Wine & Food Festival, we have struggled to get noticed above the parapet of the festivals’s focus, which is wine and seafood, wine and beef,wine and more wine, wine, a bit more food with wine, and wine. Nevertheless, […]
With a pop-up tea shop in full swing once a month, we decided that we might try some tea chests as tables. Not an easy thing to do these days. Tea no longer comes in chests. It comes in paper sacks, vacuum bags, cardboard boxes, plastic – all sorts of ways. I had seen some […]
Wouldn’t you know it, in the middle of getting knighted for services to tea, my alarm went off and woke me up. Still, I thought it could be an omen, so I checked the mail box to make sure there wasn’t anything official in it from Her Maj. Nothing. Looks like I’ll be passed over again this time for the New Year’s Honours list. […]
If you look at 18th and 19th English tea caddies, you’ll see they have a lock. Often, the key was kept around a trusted neck – the head servant, or even the lady of the house. Tea was (and I think is) a precious commodity. And it wasn’t used only once. I remember seeing a […]
Here’s yet another blog where I combine tea and history and travel, albeit with quite a misleading title. From this photo, taken from our hotel window this morning, you might assume we are somewhere tropical. Not so. We are in Kingscote, because both Lady Devotea and I have been commissioned to write articles for upcoming editions of […]
The last three days in England have been spent without internet for various reasons, and there is a bit of a logjam of blog posts. So even though I write this about 15 hours ahead of our departure from this country and hemisphere, it seems to me I can’t post it until we arrive back […]