The Element of Water: Get Your Tea Right
Water makes up 99% of your cup. Five simple rules on temperature, pH, minerals and spring water to brew better tea.
Adam’s Peak: Higher and higher, better and better
Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka makes one of the rarest white teas in the world. How much is made, what makes it special, what it costs and whether it is worth it.
An essay on reclaiming peace from the rush of modern life, and how a solitary cup of tea can open the door to stillness.
Everything you needed to know about the kettle
A checklist for choosing your next kettle, from stovetop versus electric to safety, pouring, build quality and temperature settings for different teas.
Napoleon: Looking for battle, empire, love – and tea
Napoleon loved tea and all its accoutrements as much as he loved Josephine, and his lavish porcelain tea sets remain one of his enduring legacies.
A clay cup of tea from National Award-winning potter Ismail Siddiq of Kutch begins a bond with his family that lasts for decades.
For a century Europe sipped tea from handleless bowls. Then an alchemist’s lucky accident with kaolin gave us hard-paste porcelain and the teacup handle.
A Himalayan trekker on why good tea is so hard to find on the trail, and the simple two-mug trick she uses to brew fresh leaf tea in the mountains.
From Song Dynasty tea fighting in Fujian to today’s international brewing championships, a look at tea’s long history as a competitive sport.
What I Learned at My First Ever Tea Tasting
A two-day sensory analysis workshop with perfumer-turned-tea expert Carine Baudry, and what it taught one writer about tasting tea.
The Science Behind My Ginger Chai
Why did Srinath Perur’s ginger chai curdle whenever he made more than one cup? The answer lay in ginger enzymes, milk temperature and a Cantonese dessert.
Does the water you use really change the taste of tea? From Lu Yu’s mountain streams to filtered tap and bottled water, here is what to brew with.
Artist Bakula Nayak on how her mother-in-law’s exacting 4 pm tea ritual turned a new relationship into a deep bond, one perfect cup at a time.
Ian Bersten traces why some cultures drink tea with milk and others without, from Mongolia and Victorian London dairies to the milk-first debate.
Meet the team: Ravi Kothari, Tea Buyer
Teabox tea buyer Ravi Kothari on his years in tea broking, switching to the buyer’s side of the table, and what Teabox’s quality checks taught him about tea.
The Unusual Pairing of Green Tea with Cheese
Move over, wine. Why green tea works with cheese, from sencha with cheesecake to longjing with Fromage de Meaux, and how to try pairings at home.
Jerry Pinto on growing up in a family of tea drinkers in Mumbai, the many teas of the city, and how tea is made at Casa Pinto.
Tea Blends That Didn’t Quite Make It
Smoked rose tea, pumpkin spice tea and a saffron vanilla chai: three blending experiments that sounded perfect and went badly wrong.
A balancing act in the Darjeeling tea gardens
In Darjeeling’s tea gardens, an old 25-paisa coin is still the weight for tasting samples, and one estate uses a Pakistani quarter. Nobody quite knows why.
8 Tips for Creating Your Own Tea Blends
Eight practical tips for blending your own tea at home with spices, herbs, flowers and fruit, from ingredient ratios to blending for iced tea.
Three heirloom tea sets sit carefully stored away, but the writer’s real treasure is a chipped polka-dotted mug that holds a generous cup.
Living the Life of a Tea Explorer
Drew Bednasek of the Teaxplorer blog on falling for tea, drinking chai in Kenya, his teaware habits and the five teas he could not do without.
From blending tea at Starbucks in Seattle to the Teabox office in Siliguri: Shruti on tasting days, fussy palates and whether blending is art or science.
4 common myths on organic farming
A former skeptic asks an agriculture expert about four common beliefs on organic farming, from chemicals and soil health to yield and the taste of organic tea.