bringing style to the art of tea appreciation
Tea Foundations I’m thrilled to announce that George Brown College has rebooted its in-person tea program starting with Tea Foundations. And I’ll be your guide! This is also a prerequisite for the Advanced Tea Program (Tea Sommelier), which we are also planning to restart. Look at the beautiful space we have above The Chefs’ House, St. James Campus, Centre of Hospitality and Culinary Arts, 215 King St. E., Toronto Join me for this dive into the universe of tea, […]
On Tuesday, September 14, 8.30pm, Soo will be chatting with me about my tea universe – lots of potential for liveliness! Visit Soocha Tea for link to registration. During registration, an optional donation can be made to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Hope you can attend!
Saturday February 1st, 1.30pm The 8th Annual Toronto Tea Festival takes place over 2 days, Saturday February 1st and Sunday 2nd, at Toronto’s Reference Library, in the Appel Studio. I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking on Saturday Feb.1st at 1.30pm. Topic – Botany of the Tea Plant. I’ve really enjoyed researching this project. A bit of a deep dive for me, but I’m learning so much! My plan is to distill this knowledge into a concise 30 […]
An Extraordinary Experience I have just experienced an adventurous evening of tea and chocolate pairing at Soma Chocolatemaker, in downtown Toronto, organized by The Tea Guild of Canada. We were met by Soma’s guide Samantha. As she lead us through the tasting of each morsel, she explained its place of origin and the close relationship the chocolatier had with their farm sources, confirming for me that specialty chocolate sourcing has parallels to direct-sourced fine tea. Curiously, some of the chocolate […]
Founder, The Tea Spot and author, Cancer Hates Tea There are many reasons to attend World Tea Expo, but I’m finding that as I grow into the industry, I’m just as interested in tea people as product. Maria Uspenski introduced herself to me a few years ago, after The Tea Book was published. She was warm and enthusiastic. One of those rare humans who seems to glow from within. She had long been associated with the expo. Her company, […]
Anatomy of a Painting The 1715 oil painting, Two Ladies and an Officer at Tea, (above) has often been used to cite the prominent place that tea held in elite society of the early 1700’s. For tea social history enthusiasts, it is a quintessential image, one of the earliest to depict the partaking of tea in the western world. It is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s vast collection. While researching for a talk I gave on history of […]
Bookends We traveled back to northern Ontario a few weeks ago. The last time we visited, it was springtime and I wrote about that season in an earlier post. The wilderness was awake with nesting birds and budding trees. It’s now autumn and the colours of the landscape have changed. Sunsets seem brighter, the wind cooler and the air is damper. This year, the wind off the lake was very strong, making it difficult to canoe except in those rare […]
An Interview with David Campbell of Tillerman Tea Whenever I taste a tea that is new to me, I embrace the opportunity to take a little detour and stroll into unfamiliar territory. I’m sure this pursuit of tea knowledge is the reason that many of us stay engaged in the industry. I first tried Winter Oolongs a few years ago and while I enjoyed them, I had no frame of reference for what might make them special. When I recently […]
In its sixth year, and now one of the biggest consumer tea festivals in North America, The Toronto Tea Festival is preparing for a large crowd of tea fans – both novices and connoisseurs and everything in between. The weekend event will be taking place at Toronto’s Reference Library in the Appel Salon Saturday February 3rd and Sunday, 4th, from 10am – 5pm. The Festival was founded by Tao Wu and his sister Mingzhu Gao, of Tao Tea Leaf in […]
There are still some good suggestions on the previous post (2013), but so much has happened in the tea world and my tea life that I thought it deserved an update. curati.co I’m often asked which teas I can recommend and where to buy them. “Where can I find fine quality tea that is fresh and that I can trust to be sourced directly?” Since I don’t sell tea, I provide names of vendors I trust, but inevitably people […]