NOTE: I wrote this for The Devotea’s joint sales site with Baristador coffee. Reproduced here for those who subscribe to this blog. This past few days have seen the first iteration of the new arrangement for us at The Devotea; after joining forces with Baristador, we now have one weekend per month where we do […]
Let me tell you about a guy who is, frankly, a bit of a lunatic. He’s veeeeeerrrrry fussy about the way he brews his beverages. Not just because he likes to control water temperature and water/raw material ratios etc, but because he completely refuses to make his drinks the way most people do. The cheap […]
A chance comment describing tea as “dead leaves” caused eyebrows to lift. It was my friend Geoffrey Norman, sharing a Facebook memory of a paid commission to write about tea, which he described as “that time I got paid to write about dead leaves in water”. It immediately reminded me of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to […]
With a tea event on my horizon, it seems like a good time to pause and consider how the COVID-19 pandemic has, and should, modify our tea habits. Good procedures are good procedures, so we should look to taking every precaution, even if, like me, you are lucky to live in a place where this […]
To me, America is like a great white shark. It’s sleek, it’s big, it’s an inevitable part of life, it’s at or near the top of the food chain, and, particularly in certain parts of LA, there’s an awful lot of very white teeth. And you could spend a lifetime studying it and not understand […]
Last week, there was a day where I didn’t have a good day. Lady Devotea did not have a good day either. In fact, it was early on in a succession of challenging days. Now I don’t want you to think it was something earth-shattering. Nobody got diagnosed with some sort of terminal ailment, a […]
The other day I got asked a simple question about tea, requiring a yes/no answer. And it was this: “I’m anaemic, should I switch to herbal tea?” This was on Quora, where I’ve previously had a great deal of enjoyment making fun of stupid questions ( as in this post) . But rather than reach […]
In Star Wars, (the first one made that was really the fourth one, as opposed to the first one, which they made fourth) there’s bit when Darth Vader casually drops in the saucy fact that he is, in fact, Luke Skywalker’s father. It’s one of those moments of suspense that, despite the deep breathing maniac’s […]
At my “peak”, for want of a better word, I posted over 100 blog posts in one year. But lately that has tapered off a little. I say ‘a little’, but this is my fourth post for 2019. I know it’s been hard for the rest of the world, particularly other tea bloggers. My friend […]
A visit to Pheonix Tea was on the cards again, but this time, not the wonderful Phoenix Tea of Burien, Washington State, USA, but Phoenix Tea of Hong Kong. Google Maps suggested walking in a strange loop out of our way, instead I insisted we cut a path straight to where it should be. And […]