Friday Knows Tea

We get asked a LOT what the difference is between white tea and black tea, herbal tea and green tea, and so on. The world of tea is mysterious and a lot of you want to learn more, so let's start with the basics! True tea comes from the Camellia Sinensis plant. Always. Any infusion made from the leaf, stem, root or whatever other part of any other plant falls into the "tisane" category, also known as "herbal tea." Those are a whole tasty world absolutely worth your time and attention, but today we're focusing on true teas.   There are six basic types of true tea, delineated by the level of oxidation allowed to occur in the leaf during processing. After picking, tea leaves frequently go through a process of bruising, withering, heating, and drying. (I say frequently because the world of tea is so vast and varied, every facet of the end product is up for flux. How much caffeine? What does it taste like? Is it smooth or brash? The answer is always "it ...

A fair number of you first encountered our tea company at NW Tea Festival , an awesome Seattle-based festival that launched in 2007 and has only grown bigger and better each year since. Newer to the tea festival scene is  Tea Fest PDX . This Portland festival only just had its third year, but is so put-together and well structured that I would have thought it was an event with 5-7 years under its belt already. I don’t have access to the attendance numbers, but we def got hit with a long line waiting to enter and it was tight moving between all the booths once we got in. I’m glad this was mostly an outdoor event, as the indoor booths were struggling to get folks to stop without completely blocking the pathway. I have to admit, being at a vendor fair/convention without working a booth of my own was a super weird feeling. We (my bestie Nat and I) kept running into people we knew and almost every person asked us “So where is your booth,” to which I gleefully replied “Nah, we’re ju...