We know that tea has a long and storied history and is traced back to China from dates close to 3000 BC. And around here, we tend to talk about “tea” as the product of steeping the leaves of Camellia sinensis, which include the main varieties we’re familiar with, namely, black, green, white, and oolong. …
Author: suetalbert
Tea and Illness
So the past few days have had me feeling under the weather, and I’m still not out of the woods yet. But one thing I discovered is that hovering my face over a hot cuppa tea is almost as healing as consuming a bowl of chicken soup. Being the ever-curious woman I am, I found …
The Great Bag Debate
My grandfather came to the US via port-of-call in Boston. He left Birmingham as a young man and sailed to America to find a better life. When he came to the US, the tea he knew was loose, despite the fact that teabags were invented in 1907. Teabags were initially made from Chinese silk and …
Stove Top vs. Electric Kettles
Are you in hot water? By that, I mean, “How do you heat your water for making tea?" Tea experts have told us that boiling water is the best way to get the richest, most flavourful tea, and that piping hot water is the way to rapidly infuse the tea leaves with moisture so as …
Tea and Caffeine
Editor's note: This article was originally published on February 9, 2010. The decaffeination process described here has since been shown not to be effective. My thanks to Nigel Melican of Teacraft.com for his note on this. It’s the long , cold days of winter where I live, and tea is something I drink for taste, …
British and American Tea Habits
Most of us know that tea-drinking, for us Americans, began somewhere in England. We know our history well enough to know that our founding fathers and their compatriots even threw their beloved tea leaves in the Boston Harbor in protest of the taxation that King George put on it. But how do tea-drinking habits differ …
Tea Containers
What do you drink your tea from? Do you use a clay mug? A Styrofoam cup? A bone-china teacup? There are almost as many different types of containers suited to drinking your tea from as there are types of tea! Ceramic cups or mugs tend to be either hand-formed (thrown) from clay, dried, glazed, and …
Kids and Tea
If you’re a parent and a tea-drinker, no doubt you’ve had your children ask for sips of tea and denied them. While most of us don’t know the half-life of caffeine (the time it takes for the body to rid itself of half of the caffeine consumed) is 4.9 hours, we do know what happens …
Blending Teas — Get Creative!
Have you ever considered blending teas on your own? What about mixing favourite flavours to come up with something new and yet familiar to your tastebuds? We began doing just that in our home when our son began drinking tea. Albeit, he was drinking herbal tea with us at dinner, mostly because we didn’t want …
A Christmas to Remember
If you ask our nearly 8-year-old son what his favourite part of Christmas was this year, he’s not going to list the fun toys (Lego, Playmobil) that he received, and he likely won’t remember the Angel Tree opportunities we had that made the Season special to my husband and me. He’s not even likely to …
Tea Blog 