Make your own teapot

Here is rather good video about making your own teapot. For those interested more info is available at Creative with clay

Thai tea

Thai tea or "cha-yen" is a drink made of strongly-brewed powdered black tea. Star anise, tamarind, red or yellow food coloring and some other spices are often added too. Sugar is added to sweeten the tea. Thai tea exists in two variations - cold and hot. Dark Thai iced tea (cha-dam-yen) is served chilled with sugar only. Milk is not added. Lime thai tea (cha-ma-now) differs from dark Thai iced tea because it is flavoured with lime. Mint is also added as garnish.People in Thailand drink hot tea in the morining, often with fried bread called Yau ja gwai or Pa-tong-ko. There is Thai hot tea (cha-ron) served with milk and Dark Thai hot tea (cha-dam-ron) served without milk.In Thailand tea is served in traditional tall glasses. In local restaurants whenyou want to take ordered tea out it is poured over crushed ice in a plastic bag.

Few more tea quotes

Come oh come
Ye tea-thirsty
Restless ones
The kettle boils
Bubbles and sings
Musically.
Rabindranath Tagore

Each cup of tea represents an imaginary voyage.
Catherine Douzel

Tea is instant wisdom - just add water!
Astrid Alauda

There is no trouble so great or grave
that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.
Bernard-Paul Heroux

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
Henry Fielding, "Love in Several Masques"

The perfect temperature for tea is two degrees hotter
than just right.
Terri Guillemets

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
Honoré de Balzac

I got nasty habits; I take tea at three.
Mick Jagger

All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong,
but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.
George Orwell, "A Nice Cup of Tea"

Remember the tea kettle - it is always up to its neck in hot water,
yet it still sings!
Author Unknown

Japanese tea quotes

Tea...is a religion of the art of life.
Okakura Kakuzo (1863-1913), Japanese scholar

“In the common parlance we speak of the man ‘with no tea’ in him,
when he is insusceptible to the seriocomic interests of the personal drama.
Again we stigmatize the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy,
runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one ‘with too much tea’ in him.”
Okakura Kakuzo (1863-1913), Japanese scholar

Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos,
the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle.
Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
Okakura Kakuzo (1863-1913), The Book of Tea

If man has no tea in him,
he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.
Japanese Proverb

Strange how a teapot can represent at the same time
The comforts of solitude and the pleasures of company
(Zen Haiku qouotes)

Chinese tea quotes

Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world.
T'ien Yiheng

The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen,
curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock,
unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine,
gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr,
and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.
Lu Yu, the great Chinese scholar and writer

“It tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind,
dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue,
awakens thought and prevents drowsiness,
lightens and refreshes the body,
and clears the perceptive faculties.”
Lu Yu, the great Chinese scholar and writer

The effect of tea is cooling.
As a drink, it suits very well persons of self-restraint and good conduct.
When feeling hot, thirsty; depressed, suffering from headache,
eye-ache, fatigue of the four limbs, or paints in the joints,
One should drink tea only; four or five times.”
Lu Yu, Ch’a Ching, 780

"There are seven matters related to the starting of a family's life,
firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar and tea."
Chinese proverb

"Better to be deprived of food for three days,
than tea for one."
Chinese proverb

Second tea moment - more tea in art

Hello everyone! Let me finish this weekend with yet another art video. Its title is "Second tea moment".
It was made by Finnish film editing student Jussi Rautaniemi

London cups

Here is the video of an art project (with 75 000 cups) organized on April 25 2007 at the Trafalgar Square in London, UK.

Tea making - kinetic art

I found the following art video very interesting. It gives tea making rather new meaning. Enjoy!!
Oh yes, the video was made by Australian artist and designer Russell Anderson

Tea cards

From the 1940s to the 1980s many packages of loose tea in the
United Kingdom included tea cards. These were illustrated cards
and were intended to be collected by children.
The most famous the Typhoo tea, Brooke Bond, the latter of
whom also provided albums for collectors to keep their cards in.
Some artists like for example Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe
illustrated the cards. Many of these cards are now valuable
collectors' items.

How to decaffeinate tea

Tea (chai) with milk in India

Tibetan butter tea

Butter tea or Po cha is the most typical Tibetan drink. It is also drank by people of Buthan and Chinese minorities in southwestern China.
It is made of black tea leaves, yak butter and salt. Butter make it very good source of energy for people living at high altitutde.
It is Tibetan custom to drink butter tea in seaparate sips. The host refills the bowl after each sip. For those who do not want to drink anymore it is the best to leave full bowl of tea until leaving, and then drain the bowl. That way host will not be offended.
How to brew butter tea? Well, here is the recipe I from ThingsAsian

Butter tea (Po cha)
6 cups water
3 tea bags (ordinary black tea)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup milk or 1 teaspoon milk powder
First boil six cups of water. Put three tea bags one heaping tablespoon of loose tea in the water and steep for 2 minutes. Remove tea bags (or strain the tea leaves if you use loose tea). Add 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of butter, and 1/2 cup of milk or a teaspoon of milk powder into a blender or shaker. Blend or shake the mixture for two to three minutes. Serve immediately.

More of tea poetry

Tasting Tea by Tai Bing (translated by Martin Tai, 1998)

Fetch my own spring water,
Fragrant with fallen flowers,
Set up a fire in a marble stove
Try out my new tea,
Lying under the green shades in a tranquil garden
Listening to the bees
Reporting their latest harvest

Lu Tong - a tea poet

Lu Tong (790-835) was a Chinese poet known for his study of tea culture. Very nice poem he wrote is "Seven Bowls of Tea"...Enjoy!!


The first bowl of tea moistens my throat,
the second breaks my loneliness, and
the third bowl racks my brains, bringing to light the texts of 5,000 volumes.
The fourth induces perspiration whereby all ills evaporate through my pores.
The fifth makes my muscles and bones feel light, and
the sixth links me to celestials.
Be careful when drinking the seventh bowl,
as it makes you feel as if a cool breeze were coming from your armpits.

Yellow tea

Yellow tea is a special kind of tea...which is processed in a smilar way as green tea but the drying phase lasts longer.Yellow tea..as its name tells us...has very yellow-green colour. It has mild and refreshing flavour.
A way to brew yellow tea...It is recommended to use glass-based or porcelain tea ware. Rinse tea cup and teapot with hot water. Use about 2.5 - 3 grams of tea leaves (1-2.5 teaspoons) for every 225ml of water. Steep tea leaves in hot water at 80°c to 90°c for 1 minute or so.
The most famous yellow teas in China are:
1) Junshan Yinzen ("Silver Needle") from Hunan ("south of the lake") province in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and south of Lake Dongting
2) Huoshan Huangya from Mt. Huo, Anhui province in eastern China, across the basins of the Yangtze River and the Huaihe River.
3) Meng Ding Huangya from Mt. Meng in west Chinese Sichuan Province
4) Da Ye Qing ("Big Leaf Green") from Guangdong province in southernChina
5) Huang Tang ("Yellow soup") from Zhejiang province in eastern China.

Tea on the web - part 1

Hello everyone!! In this post I would like you to recommend you two great web sites about tea...
The first one is China National Tea Museum web site. The museum itself is located 180 km southwest of Shangai in Hangzhou, Zhijiang province. It was opened in 1991. The web site include lot of information about tea culture in China. There are many interesting texts and photos...It is definitely the web site worth visiting...Enjoy!
The second web site I would like to draw your attention to is Japanese green tea museum put on the web by the Japanese tea wholesellers Kaburigen Co. Ltd. This web site is not so rich in content like the above mentioned Chinese one. Still, if you want to learn something about green tea in Japan...just log on there...

Green tea and body weight

The most important active component of the green tea are the

polyphenols like catechin, epicatechin, epicatechin gallate,

gallaogatechin, epigallocatechin and apigallocatechin gallate

(also known as EGCG).
The EGCG is a natural antioxidant. It is good thermogenic and

that way can burn of callories. People who use green tea have

their energy expenditure and metabolic rate risen at rate of 4%.

This will certainly influence changes in body weight.
Green tea catechins will also act as a glucose regulator. It

regulates the of insulin in the body and inhibits the sudden rise

of insulin in the body after the food, which may initiate the fat

conversion. The lowering of the insulin level prevents the sugar

level rise and the fat storage, which ultimately prevent the weight gain.
Level of blood sugar has certain influence of person appetite.

It is tought that continuous using of green tea naturally decrease

appetite and that way influence body weight.

Chinese love tea

It is true that almost a month ago, or to be precise on July 19 2007, I have already written about Chinese teas...But when I saw this video I told myself...I must put it on my blog for others to see...and here it is..Enjoy!

Sun brewed tea

Tea trivia

Hello everyone! Let's start this weekend with couple of interesting facts about tea.
Top tea consuming countries, per capita tea consumption in 2005:
Ireland 2.96 cups
Libya 2.92 cups
Qatar 2.89 cups
Iraq 2.42 cups
Kuwait 2.29 cups
Great Britain 2.24 cups
(source: International Tea Committee, Washington Post Weekly, October 2005)
World leading tea producers are Argentina, China, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.
The average person in the UK will consume around 80,000 cups of tea during their life.
Tea can be found in 80% of American households. Each day 127 million Americans drink tea.
Now..here are several facts about tea plant (Camellia sinensis) itself...
1) It takes from three to five years for the young plant to grow into a bush ready for plucking.
2) One Darjeeling garden in India has approximately 3 million tea bushes and each bush is hand plucked every week, about 32 times a year.
3) The two uppermost tender, young leaves and a small unopened bud called "two leaves and a bud" make the best tea.
If you use lemon with your tea, put the lemon slice in the bottom of the cup then pour on your tea. Lemon helps prevent any scum from forming on top of the tea.
Do not throw your used tea. Instead, after brewing a pot of tea, use the leaves for fertilizer in your garden to improve condition of the soil.

Interesting way of pouring tea

Tea cups at a graveyard

It is quite common that Japanese put tea cups or some other small objects on the graves of their loved ones...These objects were important to the dead person when she or he was alive...

Tea and art

Here is one example of tea as theme in art.

Jackson Pollock (28 January 1912 - 11 August 1956)
The Tea Cup (1946)
Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 71.1 cm (40 x 28 in)
Collection Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (Germany)

Tea in Morroco

Morrocan tea culture or as it is called Atai in Arabic is defined
by the way green tea is prepared and consumed in this northafrican country. This tradition has spread to other countries of NorthAfrica, parts of the Sahel (the border zone in Africa between the Sahara to the north and the more fertile region to the south) and even southern Spain.
Green tea is cleaned with boiling water before being dried. That way it is cleaned from dust collected during shipping. Local people also believe that it makes the tea less bitter. Tea is then added to boiling water. After that, sugar (5 tea spoons for
every spoon of tea) and fresh mint are added and mixed into a teapot with a long, curved spout. This allows the tea to be poured into tiny glasses from a height of approximately half a meter to form a foamy head (surface). It is then returned once or twice to the teapot for a good mix.

Teapots

The teapot, as we know it today, derived from ancient Chinese ceramic kettles and wine pots made of bronze and other materials. The oldest teapot that still exists today is the one made in 1513 from Yixing clay by Gongchun. It is kept in Hong Kong Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware.
From the end of 17th century tea and porcelain teapots were shipped from China to Europe. Most of those teapots were painted in blue and white underglaze. It means that the decoration was put to the surface before it is glaze.
First porcelain similar to the Chinese was produced in 1765 by William Cookworthy in Plymouth, UK.

Teapot in space...well, there is the constellation of Sagittarius which by many resembles a teapot...See for yourself...

Flowering tea

Flowering or blooming tea is made by hand-sewing green tea leaves into small, silvery green balls around various flowers like for example amaranth, carnation, jasmine, chrysantemums, rose and marigold. Such ball is then dried.
When added to water, at the boiling point, flower tea ball will slowly open or let's say "blossom". Such tea can be refreshed 10-15 times by adding more water...

Yerba Mate tea

Hello everyone!! New weekend has started...Today I'll write very little. Instead of me writing today I put a video about famous southamerican Yerba Mate Tea. Have fun!!

source : Nativa Yerba Mate

Diamond tea bag

British tea company PG Tips celebrated its 75th company with a rather special tea bag. In three months Boodles jewellers made for them a tea bag using 280 diamonds. The diamond tea bag is worth
£ 7,500. The bag will be sold and the money will go to Manchester Children's Hospitals.


source : Ananova

Really big tea party

Well, anyone interested to go to a tea party...As to Guinness World Records the largest simultaneous tea party consisted of 14,718 people drinking powdered green tea (matcha) according to the Japanese tea ceremony and was arranged by the city of Nishio and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Nishio, in Nishio-city, Aichi, Japan, on October 8, 2006.