Cult of Quality (Page 2)

Cult of Quality

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China Spring 2023: Mid-Trip Update

The Tea Technique Team's triumphant return to the origin of tea and tea culture is well underway - with half of the trip successfully accomplished. Our time here has exceeded our wildest expectations, both wonder-inducing, gratifying, and humbling. The level of care and knowledge our tea friends in

10 Years Strong: a reunion with my Korean tea friends

I had the great pleasure of hosting my dear friends Ik Joon and Hyoam at my tea room, for a session focused on Yixing and Oolong. I first met Hyoam in 2011, when I traveled to Korea to bring the country's tea tradition back to the Tea Institute

Returning to China (in planning)

The Tea Technique Editorial team and I are returning to China to work on research projects for the book series - if you're based in China or Taiwan and want to meet, please shoot me an email - we'd love to share tea with you. The

A fully updated CoQ!

The old blog was running on a self-hosted ec2 instance for at least ~11 years, becoming increasingly difficult to upgrade and manage. I've finally pulled the trigger and rebuilt the site here. This should make posting, commenting, and formatting easier. The new blog host allows for email signups

Pu’er Blend Off

The Editorial Team and our special guest Chris MacNitt, a tea formulator at one of the largest tea companies in the world, challenge each other to a pu’er blend off. The editorial team are all professional product developers, so this was fun, challenging, and high stakes.

The second season of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations has begun

We’ve published the first podcast for Season 2 of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations Book 2: Yixing Teapots – Knowledge, Connoisseurship, and Technique! All Editorial Conversation Podcasts are freely available on YouTube, Spotify, Simplecast, and teatechnique.org.

Announcing BOOK 2: Yixing Teapots – Knowledge, Connoisseurship, and Technique

I am overjoyed to announce that my 2nd book, on Yixing Teapots, has begun publication on Tea Technique. While the last chapter of Book 1 was published in December of last year, I was already about a year into writing Book 2 with research, notes, outlines, and experiments ready to

Satire of Gongfu Cha

The art of satire is in rendering the serious absurd. Good satire is the opposite of slapstick; the humor isn’t in the performance of something inherently funny – it’s in the serious performance taken to its logical extreme, such that the fans of the object of satire themselves find

Phenomenology and the Analytical Mind

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. – Monk Linji Yixuan (f. 851 CE) Phenomenology is the study of experience. The phenominist approach is the practice of creating and controlling experiences. Throughout our lives, individuals attempt to create a variety of experiences: birthday parties, dinner parties, dates, and

A Poem to Commemorate the Completion of Book 1 – On Theory, Meta Theory, and Culture

The Editorial team and I have just published the final installment of our first book in the series An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony. Please do check it out on www.teatechnique.org! To commemorate the publication of the first book, I’ve written a