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Jason Cohen

Jason Cohen

Master of Ceremonies here and on Tea Technique. Previously, Founder and Executive Director of the Tea Institute at Penn State (defunct).

http://teatechnique.org/

A Poem to Commiserate the Long Recovery from Knee Surgery

After 10 years of waiting, the partial tear in my ACL (high-school fencing injury) finally snapped (rock climbing injury). Since the surgery a few weeks ago, I’ve been in a full leg brace and have very limited mobility, which will last for another 5 – 6 weeks, when I will

First AMA Thank you and Recording

Thank you to all the listeners and subscribers who attended our first AMA last week! You can listen to the recording of the event here: It was great to have so many of you join us, and we look forward to hosting the next one in a month or two.

This Week on Tea Technique (7/8/2021)

This weeks chapter published on Tea Technique marks the half-way point in the first book of the series An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony – Book 1: On Theory, Meta-Theory, and Culture. The editorial team considered this chapter, A Bourdieu’dian Analysis for the Construction of

Extreme ChaXi: Rocky Mountain Mountaineering

Not content to leave our adventures to the hot and dry desert, we exchanged our crashpads and climbing chalk for crampons and ice axes. Starting the team off with a mid-level alpine route, we hit the trailhead around 6am. Our objective – to summit the ridge-line above Emerald Lake via a

Extreme ChaXi: Moab Desert

We marched into the hot and dry desert surrounding Moab, Utah. A dry wind blew dust around us. Lizards fled from our path. The boulders were hard, smooth sandstone marked with pockets and smooth ledges, leading to high top outs. We found a shady spot, protected from the sun, under

Google Maps Strikes Again

Or: Oops I did it again…. A few years ago I wrote about riding my motorcycle into the jungle of a small Javanese Sultanate by blindly following Google Maps… In theory, that experience should have prepared me for a future of skepticism and hesitancy whenever Google Maps recommends routes, or

Tea Technique Podcast – Editorial Conversations

The editorial team has had a great many enlightening conversations while writing and publishing “An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony – Book 1: On Theory, Meta Theory, and Culture”, available at teatechnique.org. The conversations have been interesting enough that we’ve decided to publish lightly

Gongfu Cha: Method or Madness?

Hello tea world – remember me? I recently read the article A Foreign Infusion: The Forgotten Legacy of Japanese Chadō on Modern Chinese Tea Arts by Lawrence Zhang (a few years late to the party), and was struck by the claim that Chinese Tea Ceremony is a contemporary constructed culture of

Quarantine Fever Dreams and Grandiose Delusions

TL;DR: I have a new website and book! Please join me at teatechnique.org Way back in 2012, I mentioned on this blog that I was writing a book… (see post HERE). With COVID-19 and the resulting quarantine, that book expanded into a series – and I have completed the

On Glory and Failure

Every village has its idiot, and yesterday – that was me. I traveled to the small Javanese Sultanate of Yogyakarta to spend a weekend away from Jakarta, after working on a new product there the week before. What was I expecting to find in a small Javanese Sultanate? No idea! A