Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Unforgivable
In Russia, tea is an important part of culture and society. When you tell a taxi driver or waiter to “keep the change”, in Russian you literally say “the rest is for tea”. Of course, Russian Caravan tea is an important historical legacy, and those guys have come up with some pretty impressive samovars. However,…
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Charlatans
Today, I’d like to share with you an exercise in improving our corporate logo. Here it is, in case you’ve forgotten: Lovely, isn’t it? But I started to wonder if something was missing. So, I thought about my deep and abiding respect for the United Kingdom’s second longest reigning monarch, Queen Victoria. What if…
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The Gift That Keeps on Giving
As those of you who hold a small celebration every time I post a blog post will be aware, December 22, 2019 was such a day. In that piece, I announced that the gift of spending some time and having some tea with me has actually been raised to the level of Christmas gift. Or…
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Tea Timing
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…
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Steeping With The Enemy
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…
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Dead Leaves Society
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…
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Sharing Tea In The Time of COVID
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…
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Not All Cover-Ups Are Bad
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…
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From Thailand With Love
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…
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Iron Willed
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…
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