Tea Blog

Did you hear the one about 900-year old cup of tea recently found in the southeastern United States? Well, don’t get too excited. First of all, it’s not an actual cup of tea – spillage and/or evaporation presumably saw to that. Second, as near as anyone can tell, none of the natives living here at the time had access to real tea, as in the beverage made from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant. But “tea” is a malleable word for most people, and in this case it’s one that can be used to describe a beverage brewed from the shrub Ilex vomitoria, a species of holly, which produces a concoction known as the black drink.

Then there’s the one about the tea swilling orangutans in a Sydney zoo. According to this article, they are particularly fond of jasmine and the tisane (herbal tea) known as chamomile. In “real” tea news, here’s an article about the big pot of the stuff that celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal brewed up not so long ago. It took place in Darwen, England, where the chef used a giant teapot containing about 500 liters of water and a pyramid tea bag with about 2,000 times the amount of tea found in a regular bag.

Have you ever wished for a site where you could view a new photo of a teapot every week for a year? Maybe not, but there’s one out there if you ever get the urge. It bears the appropriate moniker FiftyTwo Teapots and it comes to us from Sheffield-based photographer Luke Avery, who promises a new photo every Thursday.

From our Clever Teaware Bureau, here’s a report about a mug that (sort of) floats. Which could be used for other beverages than tea, now that you mention it, but it’s quite clever nonetheless and its designer is currently seeking to fund production through Kickstarter. What do you do with you tea stirrer after you’re done stirring tea with it? Here’s one possible solution (see photo above).

If you know anything about Star Trek: The Next Generation, the second of the five Star Trek TV series, then you might know of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s fondness for Earl Grey tea, and more specifically “Earl Grey, hot.” Which led one enterprising marketer to come up with a Star Trek Earl Grey Tea.

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