12-15 minute read. Note: We are currently in southern France, house-sitting through April this year. // Welcome to 2019! The start of a new year always seems to be the best time to think back upon the last, a society-wide moment for self-reflection. The past year was a busy one. Busy physically, busy emotionally, busy professionally. Physically, we pulled up our nomadic socks and got a move on, visiting fifteen countries in the year, eight of which were new to us. We honed ou

7 minute read. // India is one of the great tea producing nations in the world, and we were lucky enough to spend almost a year there through 2018. Commercial tea production only came to India in 1837, which in the 4000-year history of tea feels like yesterday. However, in the 4000-year history, the brutality, injustice, racism and hypocrisy of the past 180 years deserve more attention. It is easy to simply enjoy India’s tea while ignoring the history. Tea is an everyday drin

They say tea is the most popular beverage in the world, after water. Saying water is the most popular, though, is to me like saying sunshine is more popular than electric light; popularity doesn’t really come into it. Meaning that tea is really the most popular drink of choice, for the entire world. Even in coffee-loving America 80% of households have tea in their cupboards and iced tea is now even more popular there than soda (the third biggest news piece of 2016 after Brexi

In 2017, we visited the UK, the US, Denmark, Norway, Thailand, Japan, India and Hong Kong. Boy did we accomplish a lot. Such as... In 2017, we realised that our favourite restaurants in Tokyo were Chinese or Korean as shown to us by my sister and brother-in-law, and many of our favourite teas were oolongs (we also learned their correct name is wulong). For the sake of research, we taste-tested sakes at a tiny festival in northern Japan, including sparkling sake, and ate a sta

Picking up where we left off from the last installment on tea in Japan, here is the fourth and final lesson we learned during our five week adventure in the land of tea. You can read the first installment here. Also note that the list of tea house experiences below is a mere scratching of the surface – Japan has so much more to offer when it comes to correctly pouring hot water over dry leaves. Fresh, fresh sencha in the Tukimasa Simokita tea house in Tokyo Now, the final cha

Below you will find three of four ‘lessons’ about Japanese tea learned during our five week visit this April/May 2017. It is less academic than it sounds! The quantity of photos should give some idea of the prevalence of tea in Japan, as it is truly everywhere (Darjeeling marshmallows anyone?). Your standard, everyday selection of tea in a Tokyo grocery store My experience with Japanese tea goes back to my first visit when I was the eager age of six: we visited a temple and w

A standard guide to tea drinking would not recommend that you start in Spain. It is a country of coffee drinkers, with over 82 variations on the standard cup of Joe. Yet, Madrid is exactly where our passion hatched from a humble chrysalis of desires and imaginings to the full-winged moth of tea obsession. In London we had perhaps 40 types of loose-leaf tea to home, so we were hardly new to tea, but at the core of it lies the common yet evasive Earl Grey. Earl Grey is a popula

We arrived at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok at 7am, and our Airbnb at 8:30. This was far too early to check-in, so needed to kill some hours. Our red eye flight had resulted in exactly that due to sleep eluding us, which meant staggering down the road under the humid sun and collapsing in the nearest café where we would sit, slack-jawed, for the next few hours until our room was ready. The silver lining? Plenty of icy Thai tea. If you have never had Thai Tea, get thee to a

After the somewhat brutal experience of tea drinking in the US, mitigated only by the patience and bemused support from friends and family, we enjoyed four days of intense tea consumption in the UK. We did not need to unpack our loose leafs or our tea filters, such was the availability of proper tea in every household. As we headed off to Stansted on a bright spring morning in mid-March, our minds raced ahead: do the Norwegians drink tea? And now we know: they don’t really dr

It is probably unfair to have Part 2 be the USA when Part 1 was the UK. On the other hand, contrasts are useful… For the unaware, tea is not an American thing. This is no accident, either - the stirrings of resentment that morphed into the US War of Independence (or Revolutionary War depending on which side of the Pond you are from) were in large part due to tea. British tea was emblematic of unfair, lazy and corrupt treatment by the Crown, and the Colonies felt that drinking

Although tea appears to be simple, it is not. One bush, Camelia sinensis, gets put in hot water and then we drink it. Not so! Which is why we are travelling with the side mission of all things tea. And the best place to start our tea-tasting travels? The United Kingdom. The colonialists. The people who smuggled a bush out of China and named it (in Latin) Camelia from China. The most famous tea drinkers in the world (not to be confused with growers, we should be clear). Let's