Looking to educate myself about tea
I am a long time tea lover, however, want to kick it up this year and learn some more about tea, it’s history, kinds, etc. any recommendations for reading?.
Of course, I also plan on doing a lot of tasting
Also does anyone know of a tea “app” for Apple devices?
I recommend and app called “tea”, http://teaapp.com/. It’s the better one as far as I know.
I also recommend my blog (sorry for the self promotion) if you want to learn about Japanese tea in general: www.myjapanesegreentea.com
I bought this app and it doesn’t have the encyclopedia option! It will only let me add teas in my collection that’s it….
I noticed the same thing, perhaps it is being updated? I sent a message from Twitter, if I don’t get an answer I’ll try contacting by email.
The developer hasn’t answered my message, I wrote him an email today. I’ll keep you informed if there’s a reply.
Just received a message from him. He’s working on the update and will announce a beta program next month.
Someone just asked a Metafilter question the other day looking for recs for books on the history of coffee and tea. Lots of possibilities in here.
The China History Podcast has this 10 part series on the history of tea, from ancient times to today. It’s long but good.
https://youtu.be/iCsvtbWxZC4
Many of these can fall in more than one category, but these are the ones still (mostly) in print/easily found on amazon/abebooks…
For Philosophy/Abstract/Culture:
The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura)
The Classic of Tea (Lu Yu)
The Spirit of Tea (Frank Hadley Murphy)
The Ancient Art of Tea (Warren Peltier)
Chinese Tea: A Cultural History and Guide (Liu Tong)
For History:
The True History of Tea (Victor H. Mair)
Darjeeling (Jeff Koehler)
For All the Tea in China (Sarah Rose)
The Great Tea Venture (J.M. Scott)
General reference/handbooks:
The Tea Cyclopedia (Keith Souter)
Tea: History, Terroirs, Varietes (Kevin Gascoyne)
The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook (Mary Lou Heiss)
The Tea Companion/The New Tea Companion (Jane Pettigrew; she’s done a few tea books, google her)
Tea Dictionary (James Norwood Pratt; it’ll eventually be obsolete, as all dictionaries are want to be; Pratt’s also written other works on tea)
A lot of these focus on or heavily emphasize either China or the UK, or both (minus the handbooks, although the ‘history’ section of these still often emphasize english history); I’ve a couple more than touch on Japan, Korea, India and Russia.
More, including more specialized works:
http://artoftea.teatra.de/bookshelf/
Also:
https://www.teaguardian.com/ a series of articles done by one guy, on different tea subjects.
What really got me interested in tea and taught me a lot I didn’t know were Max Falkowitz’s articles on SeriousEats. http://www.seriouseats.com/tags/tea
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