Seven Cups Blog Wins Award »

We were honored with an award for our blog. There were 40 tea blogs so honored.  We would like to congratulate them. According to Kate Thomson of bestoftheblogs.org there was a nominating process and blogs were voted on.  The contest was sponsored by www.onlinenursingprograms.net, and that is the site y0u will be taken to if you click on the award.  Of course there is some marketing benefit for the sponsors of the contest, but that doesn’t diminish the quality of the blogs that were award winners.  Below is a list of the winners. I read many of these blogs and I hope you will to. It is really amazing to me just how much is getting written about tea.  The level of knowledge about tea has dramatically increased since I wrote my first blog entry, and I hope that it will continue. The more educated people are about tea, the better the tea will get for consumers, the better the circumstances get for the people that grow and produce tea, and the better the business practices of tea companies will become. The makes the future better for people whose life is in some way enhanced by tea.

Austin

Cold Winters, Floods, and the Price of Tea »

It is just about that time of year when we start asking ourselves why we started a tea business in Tucson. The monsoons are hovering in the evening, sparing a drop or two, providing just enough humidity to stop evaporative coolers from working.  Today it is raining hard and roofs all over Tucson are leaking. Business is slow, but there are still die hard tea drinkers that come into teahouse in the afternoons. Most of us that live in the desert know that cold drinks are not good for you in the heat; still, iced tea sales are up. Very often in the hot humid areas in the South of China, you’ll be offered some white tea when you go and get your hot feet massaged because white tea is thought to be cooling in Chinese medicine.

The weather has been awful everywhere this year, but in the most areas where tea grows it has been exceptionally bad. Our white tea arrived a couple of weeks ago. Prices for Bai Hao Yin Zhen (Silver Needle) doubled in China because of the cold extended winter and it was hard to get. We were able to get some for less because of our relationship with the producer. It took longer that normal for it to reach the US because of floods all across Southern China. Production was effected and the supply network shut down. This year you can expect that a lot of American companies will not have any 2010 at all, and the ones that do will be charging a lot for it. The most expensive I’ve seen is $31 per ounce.  Even if the weather conditions are more favorable next year, don’t expect that the prices will come down to where they historically have been. Times have changed for the domestic market in China.

It is hard to say what will happen in Yunnan.  Instead of a cold winter they had an extended drought, followed by torrential rains. Most of Yunnan is steep mountains of red soil. In the south were tea originated it is heavily forested and one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. Roads and a strong puer market brought a measure of prosperity to what had been a very poor area of China. Even before the roads came the forest was being burn away to plant sugar, a quick and easy money crop. Of course the summer rains washed away the red mountain soil that had been quickly depleted by sugar.

While an effort was under way to introduce less destructive crops, the puer boom hit. The government strongly suggested that  a varietal that had high production potential should be planted on terraced slopes.  There was, however, a problem with this plan. The varietal was foreign to the local biodiversity, so it needed a lot of fertilizer and insecticide to survive.  The terraces also had a tendency to wash away. The older bushes didn’t have the same problems, but there was clearly not enough to satisfy the greedy speculators. Then the market crashed. Puer could not be sold, and the production over night turned to green tea production for the domestic market. This year the heavy rains played havoc on the ‘terraced tea’. 8 or 9 years ago it would be hard going to reach the tea producing areas of Yunnan and a four wheel drive vehicle was a necessity. The paved road changed that, but the roads up to where the best puer grows are not paved, and many have been washed away this year.

The Chinese market is very dynamic, so I don’t want to make too many predictions. When I first started exploring in Fuding area for white tea producers, I also tried to find some old white tea masters to interview, but I could not find any. It was because twenty years earlier the area was producing black tea primarily and the new white tea makers had shifted with the market from black tea making. Almost half of all the factories in Fujian in the middle 19th Century where owned by Russian companies. Things can change quickly in China, which for a ancient civilization, has always been true.

Things are also changing rapidly in Yunnan too. The market hasn’t recovered from the crash. Big companies like Da Yi and Xia Guan, the new privatized versions of the old government factories, and the biggest offenders when it comes to terraced expansion, are doing ok because of their marketing  power, and may be able to push their prices a bit. It is really hard to say since so many people lost serious money a few years ago.

The tea this year however has been exceptional, what there is of it, and it sold for a very good price. There is a fear that I have secretly held for many years. I’m afraid that by the time enough people appreciate good quality tea, they will not be able to get any because the Chinese will being buying all of it. Corax, the moderator of the award winning tea blog Cha Dao, wondered in a recent post whether or not good quality tea would survive the weather and the tenuous economy. The Chinese, recognizing the value of tea, will continue to supply the demand for good tea, but don’t expect there to be any more bargains.

The signs in the market are easy to read in the countryside. It has already starting to happen. When you visit the village tea markets where farmers are selling to producers, as was the case this year in Anji, the farmers are coming to market in brand new cars dressed very fashionably, and producers were paying the same price that consumers were paying 10  years ago. That’s not true across China, but it is true that tea, in most places where better grades of tea are produced, the community does better economically compared to areas where tea is not produced. Yunnan, when I visited first, not that many years ago, has be come one of China’s success stories through tea and tourism.

There is a reason why tea has been so valuable in the East for millennia. The American and European tea industry may never get it. They write Chinese tea off as if it were an afterthought, even though they are pushed towards China by a consumer that is ever demanding better quality and more variety. Most are still peddling tea that traders are making pennies on per ton, and blending and flavoring, putting it in soft drinks and skin cream, to compensate for awful leaves that are grown in the ever-disappearing areas where cheap labor exists to work the plantations that defined the now defunct British Empire. They still believe that clever marketing and packaging will do the trick for them, and that it is possible to produce puer in Malawi.

This year has been a challenging year for us. Sourcing has been difficult because of the market conditions in China. Competition for tea has been fierce.  Prices have gone up and demand has increased in the Chinese domestic market, not to mention Japan and Korea, both of which know the value of good Chinese tea.  The American tea industry’s lack of awareness of what is going on in China can’t be explained away, as it was during the Qing Dynasty, when the Europeans believed that green tea and black tea came from two different bushes.  This kind of myopic frame of reference that excludes China it is merely arrogance and a commitment to a corporate agribusiness model that is dying of it’s own environmental gluttony and economic inefficiency making it doomed to unsustainability  in the long term.

I am grateful for our customers that do get it and help to keep us alive as a business. When I started in the business the conventional wisdom was that Americans didn’t have the capacity to appreciate good tea. I thought then, and even more so now, that was nonsense. I’m still pretty unsure about about the American tea industry, or the European tea industry for that matter. One of our customers came into the teahouse after being away for awhile and said he was sure glad that we were still in business. Me too.

Austin

2 Years, Too Much: Perspectives on the U.S. Tea Industry »

Jessica Pezak is one of my favorite tea reviewers. I love her ‘take no prisoners’ reviews, and have been trying to get her to write about her experience with the tea industry for our blog for while and here it is relatively uncensored. I’m glad she is back to reviewing on her blog.

I was asked many months ago to write about my experience with the tea industry for this blog; I have had so little time and it has taken me a long time to put my thoughts together… even now I am not sure I have done the best job, but this is more or less the story of what happened with my blog, authori-tea.com. In the span of only a few years, my small (and free-to-own-and-operate) tea blog was receiving, at its height, around 1,000 hits per day from all over the world; I was receiving up to 50 samples of tea in the mail per week… and at this pace, I managed to learn a lot about the tea industry very fast.

I began authori-tea.com because I wanted to turn a hobby into shared knowledge. I tend to really like the things I like—I took up tea blogging after 7 years in the music industry running a metal & hardcore webzine; tea seemed like something that could and would take slightly less time and would be easier to keep up with than relentless new releases from metal and hardcore bands across the globe. You of course, take the risk with turning your hobby into a job, that you’ll get burned out, or tired of it… as the dialogue from the fantastic movie Adaptation speaks of:

John Laroche: Look, I’ll tell you a story, all right? I once feel deeply, profoundly in love with tropical fish. Had 60 goddamn fish tanks in my house. I skin dived to find just the right ones. Then one morning, I woke up and said, “F—k fish.” I renounce fish; I will never set foot in that ocean again. And there hasn’t been a time where I have stuck so much as a toe back in that ocean.
Susan Orlean: But why?
John Laroche: … Done with fish.

Something just like this happened with tea… except I ended up done with free tea.

I did have some idea how this reviewing/tea blogging process would work—much like my webzine. I’d establish myself as a good writer, a timely article-poster, a person with clearly defined opinions. In the beginning, for the first two months or so, I bought a whole lot of tea. It was a small investment—most tea you can find these days isn’t very expensive. I also used Adagio, which offered a lot of small samples (of often decent tea).

Before I knew it, samples started flying in…and I’m not talking about one or two a week. We’re talking about one or two per day. Within the span of a few months, I was receiving tea from Teavana, Yogi Tea, Stash and a lot of grocery store-style outfits. I was also receiving tea that seemed like it was packaged in someone’s basement out of a giant barrel. I can’t complain; I liked some of it. I met the lovely people at Seven Cups, and got some really unique and wonderful tea from a lot of companies including Serendipitea, Boulder Dushanbe Tea House, TeaSpring, Mighty Leaf and many more.

Anyone who has read a negative review on my blog knows my style: I don’t sugar coat things. I actually believe that simple fact is something that set me apart from other bloggers… you’d see reviews that in a sweet, mild, roundabout way, suggested that the tea was not very good. Generally on my site, if I don’t like something, I tell you it’s crap. It’s not that I don’t understand what diplomacy is—I just don’t care to use it. The truth is, there is just so much tea out there, you may as well cut your losses and tell people what’s good—and what not to waste money on. We reviewers have a tremendous advantage over your everyday consumer: we get to try before we buy. How better to serve other tea drinkers than to tip them off when something is a waste of time or money?

Despite my honesty, I found myself buried in tea, even when giving negative reviews to consecutive teas from the same company. I’d receive tea that was stale; mislabeled, bottom-of-the-barrel crap that you wouldn’t even find in a store. On the other hand, I also received extremely expensive, quality tea… some had flavor profiles I even struggled to describe… that’s how good, unique, diverse, fresh they were. Unfortunately the ratio of crap to quality was about 5:1. I will say, as was pointed out to me multiple times, that even companies who have products that receive bad reviews gain from being linked on your site…if you link to them (or sometimes even mention them, under certain circumstances, depending upon your Google search), they benefit from more search engine results. So even if you hate the tea, if you link to them, these companies can and will still benefit.

But I digress. I went to the World Tea Expo in May of 2009 in Las Vegas (I happened to be heading out there anyway), curious about what would be out there. For starters, turnout was less than fantastic considering all of the publicity. I was surprised to meet two separate representatives from two different companies that seemed to give me a hard time about negative reviews of their products. I had encountered this once before with a company who sent me tea, some of which I liked, and some of which I didn’t; I was asked (quite abruptly) to take my negative reviews down.

I am a public relations person in “real life,” (as in, the job I get paid in) and I’d be ashamed to practice such censorship. In my industry (hospitality & tourism), if I asked anyone to take down a negative review of my resort property, word would travel fast, and it’d do a tremendous amount of damage to my company.

Due to this inherent pressure for positive reviews, many media outfits no longer even accept free products and services; there is unnecessary and unprofessional pressure to paint a positive portrait. I was surprised by the request to take the review down, and further surprised for the poor attitudes I saw at the World Tea Expo. Either these companies have poorly trained marketing people, I thought, or the industry standard is lower than I initially expected. This attitude kind of reminded me of veggie libel laws, passed in the late 90’s after Oprah made a big fuss about mad cow disease and was subsequently sued by a feedlot operator in the state of Texas. It all seemed pretty whack to me.

I think that perhaps because the industry is young in this country, because people are so intent on turning a profit, it is misrepresented as focused on quality, when it is really just like any other sector of the American economy. Business owners are, in general, much more concerned about quantity versus quality for obvious reasons: more money, faster. You see, there is no real tradition of tea quality in North America; even English tea may be good quality at times, but squeezing lemon or adding sugar cubes to tea is still diminishing the quality of the initial product. Then again, the English still have something we in America do not: tea history & culture. Even if it imperialist, they still have a history of enjoying this drink. Our strongest link to tea is the powdered funk that comes in a big can and can be mixed with water to make “sweet tea,” “sun tea,” or whatever else.

Further, I promise you that after a few years of drinking artificially flavored tea every day, you will become very tired of it. This is really a property of tea in general that has become so Westernized—we cannot seem to manage to enjoy anything plain, in and of itself. This property is, for the most part, distinctly American: we douse our vegetables in dip, slather mayonnaise on our bread, we dip our pretzels in cheese or mustard. Nothing can be enjoyed without salt, pepper, sugar, barbecue sauce, ketchup or some other condiment.

Much like food, tea seems to be gaining mass appeal to Americans because it’s flavored—vanilla, chocolate, almond, coconut, mint, orange, mango, whatever else. It took me awhile to find this bizarre, but when you taste real, genuine, fresh tea that is not flavored, not sweetened, it will be like eating grass-finished beef or wild fish for the first time. I compare a lot of the tea on the American market to the giant slabs of salmon at Sam’s Club—farm raised, artificially colored to look healthy and delicious. Really it is the product of cheap production hinged on quantity over quality. You can pay $10 for 3 lbs of farm raised artificially-dyed salmon, or you can pay $10 for perhaps 1 lb of wild caught, never frozen wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, caught from the Yukon River. So I guess in the end, it’s up to the consumer: do we want quality, or do we want quantity?

Unfortunately it seems that in this day and age, we want quantity. Or rather, we want quality, but we don’t want to have to pay for this. We see this in agribusiness, in the growth of Wal-Mart, in deforestation and CAFOs and corn subsidies. That said, America’s future in tea seems disappointing to me; there will always be boutique opportunities for outfits that offer real, quality tea (TeaSpring, Seven Cups, etc), but much like an organic market competing with Wal-Mart, your growth will be slower, though your customers more loyal.

We’re seeing, ever so slowly, that things are changing… but it takes a long time for palettes to change, and for people to take the long, scary leap from spending less and moving fast to spending more and stopping to enjoy. Personally I don’t wait to lie in wait, writing reviews for vanilla flavored crap while I wait for more companies to really care about the product they are offering, and to sell more than candy in a filter bag. I am tremendously lucky to have learned that there is quality tea out there, unflavored, because it doesn’t need to be—truly unbelievable tea needs no artificial flavor; it does not need streamers of who-knows-what to make it visually appealing. Perhaps my favorite tea of all time, Seven Cups Iron Arhat, is beautiful… with long, crisp, gold-brown leaves, and when you steep it, it smells to me like sweet bakery dough. Like the base of an apple pie, before you add the filling. This is what real tea should be… it should have enough purity and diversity that to add anything would be butchering it.

In February 2010, I announced that I’d be shutting down authori-tea.com, only to be met with hundreds of e-mails, Facebook messages, blog comments and the like asking me to keep going. I decided I would continue, but on my own terms; and I would only be reviewing tea I found to be worthwhile to review. I decided I would not review garbage anymore; I would pick and choose the best of the best, and maybe throw in some marginal teas for good measure. Any and all garbage tea I got would be thrown out immediately. I e-mailed all tea companies and asked for no more tea to be sent. What I noticed is that there were many e-mails from purists, like myself, encouraging me to continue to review good tea, to provide a filtering service for all of the stuff that would be a waste of time for people looking for quality.

I still do receive a sample or two here and there, but I review at my own pace, and if I don’t like something, I throw it out. Life is too short for s—t tea… and there are people out there who want quality. There are, of course, uses for mediocre tea—as iced tea, as alcoholic drink bases. You can use some mediocre lapsang souchong and Russian Caravan Teas for pot roasts; there are uses out there for “just OK” tea. But really, why drink it in tea’s pure form? Spend some time hunting around, learning how to use Yi Xing ware, a gaiwan, learning how to steep and enjoy beautiful, pure, unadulterated tea. I am lucky in that it only took me a year or so to become tired of all of the coconut-vanilla-mint-chocolate-almond-marzipan-hazelnut-pumpkin spice-flavored stuff on the market. It might take you longer, but when you get there, you’ll see what you’ve been missing… and what you’ve been wasting your time drinking all the time.

-Jessica Pezak

A Game Changing Book About Tea »

There are few books about tea that add to the discussion about tea in any meaningful way, but Mary Lou and Robert Heiss’s new book, ‘The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook’ is one of them. This is a book about quality, although they sidestep the word because it has very little meaning in the industry, and instead use the word ’soundness’, saying “We prefer to begin judging the potential merits of a tea by evaluating its soundness”.

Their book points the reader in a sound direction. Serious students of tea may find that they disagree with some of the details, but it is indisputable that the path to the world’s best teas is clearly defined in this book. The international tea industry has never been clear about this path because it points to China and unblended, unflavored tea, and the established industry has a hard time delivering such tea to consumers. Even though teas from other areas are mentioned, the heart of the book is about Chinese tea. China, after all, is where tea originated, and definitions about tea need to be consistent with Chinese standards.

They have taken a risk in writing this book. The industry has not been very supportive of writers that dare to write books that challenge conventional wisdom. It may not be obvious to the people reading that are outside of the industry, but a book like this really is a game changer. People will start to look at the tea that they are buying from the conventional sources and will start to realize that tea that they are buying and is being sold for ‘good quality’ is in reality very ’sound’. Then the open secret that people in the industry know, and increasingly ‘tea enthusiasts’ are becoming aware of, is that there is much better tea out there, it’s just that it is difficult to come by in the US and Europe. Mary Lou and Robert have stirred that controversy just by providing good information.

Mary Lou and Robert Heiss are excellent teachers. The lessons presented in this book are clear and concise. This book contains lessons that professional tea buyers ought to pay attention to and gives the consumers a high standard with which to judge in buying tea. The book is intelligently organized, highlighted with good photography, and well written. There are no examples of flowery rhetoric in place of substance. They tell the reader what good tea is, and where to find it. It may seem like a small book, but it gives the reader everything they need to get started with, or to expand their experience with tea. This is a book that every tea drinker should own, enthusiast or not, and in my opinion it is the most substantive book about tea to be written in English. It is not a travel log or a romanticized history.

I get asked often to recommend books about tea. The Heiss’s first book set the bar higher for tea education, but they have surpassed it with this book. I do recommend both of their books, but this one is really a game changer. Buy it.

– Austin

Gu Zhu Zi Sun »

In the Gu Zhu Valley rests the origins of documented Chinese Tea Culture, for it is the place where Lu Yu managed the Emperor’s tea factory during the Tang Dynasty. He did so for twenty years while he wrote the first book about tea and tea culture. Even today the Cha Jing has relevance in the study of tea. The tea that was grown and processed in Lu Yu’s factory, which employed 10,000 workers, was Gu Zhi Zi Sun. This tea is still produced in the Gu Zhu Valley. This tea has become very sought after since the Changxing government built a replica of the Lu Yu factory and awareness about the tea benefited.

Gu Zhu Valley is a small place and does not produce great quantities of tea.  When I first started visiting there, the was a lot of wild tea that was getting harvested in the forests up in the hills and was sold locally. This year in Changxing there was a fake 2010 Zi Sun being sold even before the harvest had started, fresh from Sichuan. It is amazing how that works. We are buying ours from one of the traditional tea makers that still is havesting from wild bushes in the forest and making tea in the traditional way, all by hand. Notice that it takes two people, one to control the fire and one to fry. In the beginning the wok is very hot and is kept at lower temperatures as the process unfolds. The only thermostat is the tea maker who instructs the person tending the fire. Here are some photos that were taken in early April. There are also some pictures of the Lu Yu Factory Museum that I took a couple of years ago before it opened.

Austin

2010 Spring Teas are Online! »

So while we here at Seven Cups have been like kids in a candy store with the new spring teas arriving, you, our beloved customers and friends, have been pressing your noses against the glass, waiting for the moment when it’ll be your turn.

That moment is now.

The best, freshest green tea available is ready and waiting for a good home. Hopefully this means your home! They are sitting patiently on their shelves, waiting, watching their neighbors get taken away, and wondering when it will be their turn. Make their day, and call them home to you. Once you’ve had a chance to taste them let us know what you think.

-Christine

2010 Early Spring Green Tea Is In »

I am a green tea lover, so there is nothing that gives me more of a thrill that the arrival of the first green teas. For the last two years I have been here in Tucson waiting like everyone else for the tea to arrive. That’s what happens when you have kids in school. Zhuping is having all the fun, but it is still great when I start opening up the boxes.

During the Tang Dynasty tea was graded based on the first tea to make it to the capital, which in those days was Xian. It must have been just so exciting as the horses raced across China to bring the first tea to the emperor. Today I just got the UPS truck which came in the morning with 14 boxes of the best green tea I’m going to get in 2010.

It was a cold winter in China this year in the East, so the harvest was pushed off. There is not going to be as much Ming Qian tea as usual, but this is all Ming Qian that came today. Zhuping has done a great job of finding great tea and keeping the prices down in a year when the competition has been fierce. The market went crazy and some prices skyrocketed. I received a gift from a government friend of some Anji Bai Cha that sold for close to $500 a kilo, and Shi Feng Long Jing was even higher. We are lucky to have long standing relationships with the producers we buy from, so we were not hit as hard. I’m nervous about opening my gift (but I will).

It was hard to decide what to try first, but I went for the Tang Dynasty favorite, Gu Zhu Zi Sun (Purple Bamboo Shoot). I am especially excited about this tea because it is from wild bushes and traditionally made. I am going to write a post about it soon with photos. I’m just a little bit behind as always. We hope to have our teas packed and ready to buy by the middle of next week. I love this tea! I can’t wait to try all of them.

Austin

Harvest in Anji in Early April 2010 Bai Cha »

Seven Cups was the first to import Anji Bai Cha five years ago. It is a rare green tea that was lost for eight hundred years. When ever you hear about white tea being mentioned during the Song Dynasty, it is Anji Bai Cha, which means white tea, but it is not white tea, it is really green tea.  White tea as we now know it wasn’t invented back in those days, neither was oolong or black tea for that matter. The Song Dynasty emperor, Song Hui Zhong, named this tea because the color of the brewed tea was the color of white jade.  One bush was discovered in the 1980’s. The entire crop was propagated from that one bush by cuttings. Today Anji Bai Cha is now one of the most sought after green teas in China. It is easy to understand why Song Hui Zhong loved it so much. Why it was lost is a great mystery.

The winter in the Anji hills can be very cold, as it was this year. The cold stresses the tea bushes and consequently causes the bush to create a lot of amino acids that add to the sweetness of the tea. The amino acids also make the tea drinker feel more relaxed. One of the interesting characteristics of the best Anji Bai Cha bushes is the yellow waxy appearance of the tea leaves. When the temperature reaches 18 degrees Celsius, about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, the leaves turn from yellow to green. The window for harvesting the tea is very short, making the best tea very rare.

Zhuping spent a few days in Anji during the harvest, and sent back some great photos that show very clearly the difference in color of the fresh tea.

Green Tea Tour according to Yvonne Russell »

The oolong tea tour is underway now despite the problems caused by the eruption of the volcano in Iceland that stranded our travelers from Denmark. They are in the air even as we speak, and will meet up with the tour in Wuyishan.

Yvonne Russell offered us some feedback and photo’s from the Green Tea Tour and gave us permission to publish it.  Yvonne is a customer of the Seven Cups Tea House in Denver. Since it makes us sound good, we thought we would.

“It is hard for me to say there was any “stuff” I did not like because I am easy, experienced and know to be patient.  China is changing and this tour is not be for the typical tourist.  Yes, there is pollution, noise and traffic but bottled water and confident companions were plentiful and accommodations were new, clean and top rate, in fact beautiful.  As “down comes the old and up goes the new”, there is currently plenty to see on this tour which moves and looks beyond the busy roads.  Tagging along with Zhuping and Xiao Tang her competent driver, broadens one’s perspective with reminders of China’s long history, rich cultures and deep philosophical base.  Everyday was an adventure and at the end of our travels together, Zhuping expressed that her desire had been to show and share the “high standard” of China.  There are not words to express the kind heartedness of her tea friends or describe the reality of their challenges but I was impressed.

It is important to realize that this also a business trip for Seven Cups and participants should just sit back and enjoy watching Zhuping in her business relationships.  The conversations were lively and full translations to English are not a realistic expectation.  During our excursions to tea houses, island gardens, mountain farms, etc., I was aware that Zhuping was often drinking the tea to taste it’s quality.  For me, our many experiences of drinking tea were repeatedly enriched by the quality of the people who proudly shared their tea, lots of tea……and their food, lots of food.  Many interesting and varied foods were offered.  I ate it all and came home healthy.  The gardens were green, the trees were in bloom and art was found.  This is more then a tour and I never felt like a touist.  Zhuping is very responsible for her companions as she takes them to her favorite places and introduces them to her favorite tea friends.  All was comfortable, well taken care of and closely looked after.  I am ready to go again next year.

Suggestion:
If I had it to do over, I might have come a day early and booked the airport Ramada for Saturday night to rest and then be confident that Zhuping and Xiao Tang would be able to call the night before and easily find me there on Sunday for the drive away from Shanghai.  It is a good meeting place for someone such as myself who came not knowing where I was going to end up on arrival and it would have been a comfortable location to link up any other persons who might have been joining the tour.  It was also much easier to return to the airport Ramada on Saturday at the end of the tour as a convenient place to recoop for a night night before my Sunday flight return.  It has a free airport hotel shuttle service, lounge, food, etc. and is not overly expensive. ” -Yvonne Russell

Green Tea Tour 2010: Huangshan »

Huangshan is one of those places that for millennia has drawn Chinese artists. It is also a center for tea culture. The area was instrumental in the development of modern tea making techniques that developed during the Ming Dynasty. It is the last destination in our green tea tour. The tour spends time with Master Wang Fang Sheng. He is one of China’s great producers.

Mr. Wang makes our Huang Shan Mao Feng and Yin Gou Mei. He is also the inventor of display teas. He came up with the idea from having watched his mother string wild flowers together as a boy. We will bring some of them back this year. They taste as good as they look. Even though he is in his seventies, he hikes up to his factory, a climb of a couple of hours, every year to make tea, and doesn’t come down until he is finished.

The mountains are so incredible it is really had to believe even looking at pictures. Here are some. Enjoy.

I have managed to post this before the beginning of the Oolong Tea Tour. It would be a milestone if it wasn’t for the delay caused by the volcanic eruption in Iceland, that has delayed the start of tour.

Austin