I was aided in my reading by this book being one of my first on my iPad which I picked up in an attempt to help me move my library from being physical and heavy to even more extensive and no heavier than my reading device!

I was amazed at the amount of detail which was presented in this book. I was treated to a realist view of how the tea plant came to be so widely appreciated by the western world. Its instrumental pieces, discoveries and inventions necessary even for simply transport are astounding! 

Our story starts with basic coverage of the botanical revolution taking place in England in the early 1800′s. Prior to this point, few people kept gardens or had plants of any sort growing in their homes. Generally, even the rich didn’t have much more than shrubs or trees and almost all of those tended to be domestic plants. Nothing of foreign growth such as lilacs, bonsai or bamboo.

It’s easy to get lost with this beautiful story of industrial and economic espionage. You’d be remiss if you didn’t ask yourself whether this was a work of fiction. It certainly reads like one. Only, it isn’t.

A rather interesting plan was concocted to dress Robert Fortune in traditional clothing of a wealthy Mandarin and travel the whole of China for the purpose of collecting tea plants and production methods and send them to India for cultivation. The plan worked!

Robert Fortune shrewdly worked out the international ownership rights to any and all plants not used for tea production. When this whole thing started, it was a generally accepted assumption that teas came from different plants. Black from one, green from another, etc. Robert Fortune helped to dispell this myth which he had initially subscribed to, but which the Chinese helped show him was wrong.

True to what we may understand of Chinese erroneous production methods for other products today, it turned out the Chinese had been including harmful chemical dyes with the green tea they shipped because the western world wanted their green teas to actually be green. A practice thank goodness which is no longer followed.

It was the botanical revolution and tea which helped to inspire and encourage the early use of an item called a wardian case which was used to transport plant seeds safely across the seas. Without these cases the salt in the air alone would destroy the virility of the seeds making them unusable once they reached their destination.

The invention of greenhouses was also early in this period and without them, trasport of the live plants from China to India and other locales would not have been possible.

I hope you are as captivated and enthralled by this book as I was. Sarah Rose has really put together a very special work which doesn’t feel like a dry history book at all. Instead it reads very much like a novel, and it engages every facet of the imagination as you read through it.

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

It is for this purpose that beginning in August, accessory and product reviews will be swapping with news, culture and history.

You can thus expect to see the following items reviewed on Thursdays moving forward:

• Books
• Software
• Infusers
• Kettles
• Water Warmers
• Cozies
• Tea Houses/Tea Rooms
• Tea Storage containers

Moving forward you can expect the following to appear on Mondays

• News
• Culture
• History
• Event coverage
• Announcements
• Updates
• New feature introductions
• Interviews with tea industry experts and entrepreneurs.

I believe this new schedule will jive better with you as my audience and certainly hope it will help drive traffic in a more predicatable manner.

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

The questions I have been asking myself for the past six months are:

• Is advertising inherently evil?
• Does it constitute a waste of visual space?
• Does it distract from my content?

After quite a lot of thought on these and other worries I have finally decided that some visual advertising may actually be helpful for this site. My primary mission is to expose visitors such as yourself to more tea and tea flavors and brands than they may have had access to before.

The visual space usage doesn’t have to be all that great to help expose you to new teas, and hopefully… help offset some of the costs of running this site.

You will find adverts on the following page types:

• Tea Reviews
• News, Culture & History posts
• Accessory, Books and Software Reviews

You will NOT see advertisements on these page types:

• Static pages (such as the Tea Info pages)
• Brand Pages
• Feature Announcements

As I move forward with integrating the advertisements I’d like to make this process as transparent as possible. To ensure I’m not taking large kickbacks, you should know I have chosen to use an affiliate link service called LinkShare.

Different advertisers contribute in different ways, and I only apply for affiliate participation with companies or services which have something to offer the modern tea drinker.

So far these are affiliates I have signed up with:

• Adagio Teas, purveyors of some mighty fine teas. Some of which I have already reviewed.
  
• Amanzi Tea, a tea company I have yet to review.
  
• Alessi, an accessory maker with some neat contemporary products.
  
• Tea Forte’, another tea company with unique packaging whom I have yet to review.
  

I hope this level of transparency will help make the ensuing advertising more palatable. You won’t see the adverts everywhere and they won’t be like paint splatter on the pages where they do exist. They’ll only be for companies which have something topical to offer you. All proceeds will go to keeping this site going as costs continue to rise with increased traffic and posts while introducing new features!

Thanks for understanding this need. I’m excited to see how this goes and if enough funding offset begins coming through these affiliates, you could see more in-depth writings showing up as I can fund some extra research time!

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

What exactly spurred me to sign up for the World Tea Expo is something I can’t reveal much about at the moment, asside from the fact that it does indeed relate to The Project.

I learned something while out in Las Vegas… though it wasn’t related to gambling, adult inhibitions or travelling. Indelibly I learned that my greatest strength and passion is, and likely has always been, with people. What makes us tick individually. It turns out that this year’s World Tea Expo, for me, ended up being all about the people.

While Saturday certainly marked a wonderful close to a beautiful and full day of tea related adventues… it was the people I met that day which truly energized me. The wonderfully high quality teas and the colorful array of accessories were really only icing on the cake.

I ate breakfast Sunday at the Roundtable All-Day Buffet at the Excalibur. The buffet was just $25 to come and go for as many trips as you’d like within a 24 hour period. My dietician would have been aghast at the prospect if she knew… but what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas… right? I actually ended up eating rpetty well there. Fruit, eggs and grapefruit juice were what appealed to me and I chose rather appropriate portion sizes. In case you’re wondering… I did go back for lunch and dinner… but I had a middle meal during a Tweetup I’ll mention later.

Sunday and Monday were where it was all at. Two more sessions: “Selling Your Tea Online Successfully” and “Creating A Menu With Cost & Creativity in Mind” bisected my morning and afternoon. Both presentations were steller! I couldn’t have been more pleased with the investment I made in paying for these two sessions.

Michael Cramer of Adagio Teas covered a wealth of great information related to community building… engaging and keeping your customers on your website and helping with conversion of simple visitors into customers who buy your products.

Melinda Decker, owner of LaTeaDa Tea Room in Clinton, IL provided an interesting presentation as well. While her ideas mostly focussed on her more traditional Victorian style tea house… she provided a number of robust and reusable ideas for making the most out of the materials you buy, simply by using the same ingredients to make multiple products… such as a cake, cobbler or pie being turned into a dessert in a glass.

I spent the rest of Saturday, literally networking with people. Hitting booths, talking people up over tea, getting my business cards handed out and really just getting to know people.

I ran into Jack Cheng of Steepster.com, Lindsey Goodwin of VeeTea, The fine guys over at Village Tea, Ty Beddingfield of Gamila… the inventors of the Tea Stick and a plethor of other completely wonderful folks on Sunday. Several of these folks, plus Ilya from Adagio Teas showed up for an evening Tweetup after the expo floor closed and we had some grub and drinks. In particular, Ty and I really talked for a while about ideas and things. A wonderful day.

After dinner Sunday night, I hit up Cherry, a dance club over in the Red Rock Hotel. This club was one hell of an experience! I thoroughly enjoyed the hours spent there dancing and admiring the crowd. I really get energized when a club is as alive as Cherry was that night. Rare I think, for a Sunday night.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is up… but I’ve been awake for hours already. To protect myself some from JetLag I have always tried to awaken as close to Eastern time as possible. I worked out in the rather meager (by my standards) health club in the Excalibur… an amazingly expensive $20 a day on top of the room bill.

After breakfast at the buffet again, I made my way over to the expo for some tea and my morning session: “Reaching Beyond Your Front Door For Additional Income” and then on to my afternoon session: “Price it Right & Sell it Smart.”

Ronald Eng of Kopius Teas put on a wonderful presentation. Very well spoken with great diction and clarity. His ideas were understandably expressed and he was very energetic about answering questions. A serial entrepreneur, Ronald had some great ideas and concepts to share.

Robert Hedrick of Holton & Heath also had some great insights on proper pricing, commodity vs exclusive and the power of branding potential. This was a also a very good presentation.

The rest of my “day” on Monday was spent scurrying around making my final connections with brands and companies, procurring more business cards in exchange for mine as an attempt to build more outlets and opportunities for me to grow with the tea industry over the next couple decades.

I did end up linking with Ronald Eng and Emilie Yanagi of Kopius Teas, the people at Zojirushi North America, a couple great folks over at TeasEtc, Maria Warman from Art of Tea and I cannot forget Nora of Golden Star Tea who has an amazing sparkling bottled tea beverage presented in a chapagne bottle!

At the end of the day I ran into May King of the new UK tea brand, MayKing Tea as well as a few other friends including Norman who is starting a tea garden in Hawaii! I ended up going out dancing with these two and we had a wonderful time out at Margaritaville down the strip after throwing back a few drinks at Liquidity, a bar in the Luxor Hotel & Casino.

I don’t want to leave anyone out… but I’m HORRIBLE with names… I ended up meeting several hundred people at the expo and coming away with some great friendships made over the three day event.

I have to recommend this event to anyone starting a new tea business, or anyone already in the industry!

I’ve already made the decision to head back to Las Vegas next year for another round of tea education. Maybe by then I’ll already have a small presence in the tea industry and be ready for some thoughts on expanding to becoming a tea brand. Here’s to the future!

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

Monday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

This is the first book review here on Tea-Guy and I’ve got to say, I was impressed! I hope I can do many more book reviews here and relate just how informative, captivating and illustrative the works are. Let me know what you think!

Quick Info
Rating	4/5
Title	The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea
Publisher	Penguin Press
Author	Michael Harney
Pages	214
Price	$25.95 USD

By now you might realize that Harney & Sons is one of my favorite tea brands. I’ve covered quite a few of their teas here already and you’re assuredly going to see more. That being said, I approached this book with a clear mind and very little “fan boy” mentality, and believe I’ve come up with a review from a book I was ecstatic to pick up.

The neat thing about “The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea” is how Michael Harney chose to take you on the journey through the tea process. While most tea related books I’ve encountered certainly try to move from least processed to most processed teas, as one would for a tasting, Michael Harney uniquely ushers you along. Providing multiple examples from each category, breaking them down with expert tasting notes, and providing suggested pairings are just a few of the features of this book I really liked.

In addition to the relatively unique progression from White to Greens to Oolongs and Blacks… the Harney book includes further breakdows for larger categories. Greens are broken into Chinese Greens and Japanese Greens while Blacks are broken into Darjeelings, Assams, Nilgiri’s and British Legacy Teas.

With this more granular breakdown Michael Harney makes it easy for a relative newbie to tea to get up to speed. He discusses the nuanced history of tea, the intricate production processes and a great deal of his experiences rounding up some of the best teas in the world over the past twenty years.

I can’t stress enough the value of walking through a real tea tasting (like a wine tasting, but for tea) step by step. This book provides the ultimate in that endeavor and I would quickly recommend it for anyone looking to learn to train the palette to be more discerning of minute flavor differences between similar teas.

Michael Harney recommends tasting the teas in each chapter in order, and trying at least two at a time (to help traing your palette). I would deffinitely reiterate this recommendation.

Look for a future walk-through for tea tasting to be posted here on Tea-Guy.

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org