TeaFreaks

Hi I am new and I love tea!
Hey there all fellow tea lovers! I just found LiveJournal today and then found teafreaks. I am excited to be here and talk tea with everyone.

I am a master blender and have loved tea all my life. I have been blending for the better part of 20 years now and have dedicated my life to tea and the whole experience. I do have an online shop and per the rules I will mention it here once! http://wwwTranquiliTea.etsy.com I sell my teas there and other hot drink mixes like cocoas, mocha lattes and cappuccinos.

I'm not here to sell my teas I am here to share the love of tea with everyone. I want to know more about your tea experience, your favorite kinds of teas and flavors, new products you want to share and so on. So let me hear what you have to say about tea and if you have questions I might have the anwsers!

Adagio recommendations?
I'm getting ready to make a huge purchase from Adagio. It's been a while since I've had loose-leaf tea and I want to get back into it for the cold season ahead. The store nearby that carries loose tea is really too expensive and they don't have enough variety so to the internet I go!

I've already started developing a shopping cart from Adagio, but I want to get some of your input as well.

What are some of your recommendations?

What are some of the teas you wouldn't ever recommend?

I'm really open to trying anything and everything, so don't hold back with your recommendations! :)

New and Question
Hi all. I'm one of those horrible tea bag tea drinkers and am looking to switch over to loose leaf tea. My problem is this. I am the only one in my house who drinks tea. So a teapot isn't ideal for me.

I'm looking for something that will make one cup of a tea at time, anywhere from 8-14 onces but also in a gift set form so it comes with some loose teas to try. I drink black teas for the most part and I love chai. I recently purchased some rooibos vanilla tea and I love it.

Any suggestions?

I am new to this community........But am an obsessive tea drinker, i'm lucky i'm not home very much since i'm such a busy person, because when i'm home all day with my little tea pot i end up drinking over 6 cups in one day:P....and i'm a breakfast tea drinker, and apparently there higher in caffeine than others:P.....
one thing i've found with myself and mulitple other tea drinkers is that they are very particular....things that particularly get to me with tea include
1.People making me a weak cup tea (better too strong than weak)
2.People putting more than a dash of milk in black teas
3.People putting sugar in tea (yuck! only exceptable in ice tea, and even then i don't like it much)
3.Going to a cafe and paying $3.00 for a tea bag
4.Going to a cafe and paying $300 for a tea bag and having them put the milk in before the teas brewed
5.Going to cafes to find that they have only 3 different types of tea but 6 million different types of coffee... (all i want is a pot of Irish Breakfast! no not english breakfast and not an irish creme late! a pot of Irish Breakfast tea and if not Queen Mary)
6. waking up in the morning to find my brother hasn't left enough milk for my tea in the morning
7. people giving you odd looks for being a 16 year old ordering tea

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: 'Blow up the Pokies' The Whitlams

Tea + Ice Cream = Heaven!!
I found a recipe for Earl Grey ice cream the other day via one of the many blogs I follow. I drooled over it and decided to try it out. I haven't seen anything like this posted here, so I thought I'd share. Here's my modified recipe; simplified, no eggs, and sized for a one quart ice cream maker (1/2 qt of liquid). Fabulous for a hot day when you want your tea but don't want the heat.

TEA ICE CREAM
Ingredients
2 c. half & half
1/2 c. sugar
dash salt
1/2 c. heavy cream
5-6 tea bags (flavor is your choice!)

Preparation
1. Warm the half & half and sugar in a saucepan. Remove it from the heat, place the tea bags in the pan, cover, and steep at room temperature for an hour.
2. Remove the tea bags and stir in the heavy cream and salt; refrigerate until cool.
3. Prepare as directed by your ice cream maker.

Notes: I used 5 bags of Bigelow Lady Grey tea and the flavor was fantastic! Any flavor that you like with dairy would be wonderful. You can, of course, substitute all or some of the half & half for milk of any percentage (1:1 ratio), I just had 1/2 a gallon of it in the fridge and decided to use it. I added the heavy cream mostly to make up for the liquid that the heating cooked out in the first step.

My batch turned out perfectly and very tasty. While I was making a second batch of it my ice cream maker just stopped dead. I joked with a visiting friend, saying that the ice cream maker knew it was the most perfect batch of ice cream it could make, so it decided it could die now. :P I checked it this morning though and it's just fine; it must have just needed a break. :)

Crossposted in the usual places.

Hello there. My name is leontyne and i live in California.

Recently, i went to France and in Paris i felt absolutely in love with the tea house, Laduree. In particular, i fell in love with their Chinese The de Rose. I brought two tins home with me but now they are all gone and i have been unable to locate any laduree tea in the US.

I was wondering if perhaps anyone in this community has heard of a location in the US that sells Laduree tea, or if you do not, does anyone know an especially good Rose Tea that i might try?

chineseteaforyou going out of business
a good tea site, www.chineseteaforyou.com is going under. citing "restructuring" as a reason, theyll still be processing and accepting orders for a while. i highly recommend their jasmine tea.

Help! Moths!
I have moths in my pantry!

Unfortunately I think they probably arrived in a box of tea, but I've looked through all my boxes, canisters, and tins of tea and have not found any evidence of moths: no moth holes in the bags or any larvae, but have spotted a number of adults hanging out on the walls and door of my kitchen pantry, most of which seem to cluster around the top shelf on which I store most of my teas. They could have just as easily arrived in a bag of cornstarch or flour, but I've gotten new tea more recently and the moths have only recently appeared.

I've thrown out the mostly empty boxes and transferred the teas of the mostly full boxes to plastic baggies, which I then placed in airtight plastic containers, and finally placed in the freezer. I want to freeze them for at least a week to be sure that I've killed any larvae or eggs! I'm going to go through the rest of our food and wash down all the shelves with Dr. Bronner's lavender liquid castile soap this afternoon.

Have any of you dealt with an insect infestation like this before? If so, what was your strategy to get rid of the bugs and to prevent them from coming back?

Current Mood: curious

Chai Tea
Hi,

I'm Tara and a newbie to the community. I've been here for several weeks but just reading and commenting every so often but haven't introduced myself until now. lol

I've been a tea drinker for years now, but I've been drinking more iced tea than hot tea. I LOVE iced tea, but I also want to get back into drinking hot tea and not just for winter (in which I mostly drink hot chocolate anyway). I don't know, it's weird, I drank more hot tea when I was a teenager than I do now (I'm 36).

Anyway, yesterday I bought assorted teas from Tazo at Wal-Mart. I really wanted to try the Chai Tea, and was going to buy it but then I saw the assorted that had Chai in it. Which is good, because if I didn't like it, at least there would be other teas in the box that I could drink.

So, this morning, I tried it and liked it. :) It smelled just like Christmas. lol It's not something I'd drink everyday but if I'd want something different and not the same old thing, Chai is it for me.

cross-posted

Yixing Question
Yesterday, I finally decided to pick up my first yixing teapot. Just now, I was getting ready to do the initial seasoning, which from what I've read involves making a few pots of tea and letting them sit. So I rinsed out the interior of the teapot thoroughly with cool water, then gradually brought the temperature of the pot up with tap water. Once the temperature of the water in the pot got to the max the tap water would allow, I got rid of the tap water, put some Ti Guan Yin in the pot, and began filling with water at about 195º F. This is when a big nasty crack appeared in the side of the pot. So my question is: did I do something stupid, or was this pot probably defective? This is more or less the rinse, pre-heat, brew procedure that I follow with every other teapot, and I haven't read anything that would have lead me to believe that yixing is so much more delicate than other materials. But at the same time, I want to make sure I didn't do something stupid before I call and complain to the person I bought it from.

Japanese teas
I have a question. One of my new clients is a high-class gourmet Japanese restaurant. I have got several very nice Japanese teas but they want more of high-end, expensive teas. Does anyone knows a good, reputable wholesaler that sells premium Japanese teas?

(x-posted to teafortwo)

Introduction and tea question
Hello, I am new to this community.

I joined not that long ago and have glanced through some of the posts made to see what kinds of tea everyone was suggesting for others.

I was wondering, what kind of tea would you suggest for someone like me whom lives in Scotland and adores herbal teas *especially twining's Camomile, Honey & Vanilla*?

I prefer teabags to loose leaf, due to ease of mind, however, I will take up any suggestions you give.

Hullo all! I'm surprised it's taken me so long to find this community but I am still exceedingly pleased to find it.

Let me introduce myself quickly- female, teen, lives in Texas... British father so I've always had 'tea time', so on and so forth. Only recently have I discovered the joy of drinking tea at all hours of the day.

Lately I have been getting slightly bored of drinking Earl Gray tea... any suggestions? I'm a real fan of bitter teas. Today I drove to a Korean market (without incident I might add) and picked up a box of green tea with roasted brown rice. Mind you I've been without tea for about a week but this was excellent tea with a real attractive smell.

I skimmed through some posts and found people had wonderful tea shops near them. Being in Texas the most common tea is iced (blasphemy!) so I am slightly sad now.

Looking forward to talking with fellow tea-addicts! :)

Current Music: Then Go-Damien Rice

Tempest Tea Circle - Tea has been shipped!
Hi all,

Just a little note to all involved in my Tempest Tea Circle: everyone's package went out today! I shipped with delivery confirmation to all U.S. addresses, so please feel free to ask me for your DC number if you'd like it. :) International folks, there's no DC, but I did ask to fill out customs forms on all of them (even though the post office assured me they were under the weight where it was necessary) just to help ensure that they get to you as quickly as possible.

Hopefully you will get your teas soon and can start enjoying them! The packages smelled so lovely in my car on the way to the post office... hopefully we can all posts some reviews and share the Tempest Tea love, too!

[X-POSTED TO A FEW COMMUNITIES]

Woman overpowers theif with tea and sympathy

I thought you would all appreciate this article:)

Current Mood: okay

Oh noes!
I am shedding a single, small tear right now...I just used the last of my Republic of Tea Harvest Moon Tea. I adore this stuff...that wonderful apple-cidery smell! And it's a limited edition, so IF I can get it again, it won't be till the fall. :/

If you drink Republic's Teas, which is your favorite? I need to make a run to the shop tonight anyway, and they carry pretty much the full line out there. :)

Growing your own tea -- problems.
I recently got a new job, and a few of my co-workers and friends surprised me with a camellia sinensis plant as a going away gift.

I don't have much of a green thumb, but I am an avid tea drinker, so I've spent the last two months carefully paying attention to the plant. Everything was going along very well. The leaves were looking healthy enough to start harvesting and processing. In fact, I was to do that today. Instead, however, I've spent the last two days trying to figure out what's infested the plant.

It seems that the gnat-like creatures are coming out of the soil. I thought they might be fungus gnats, but after looking at the description, I'm not sure that's quite right.

Has anybody raised tea plants before? Have you found any ways to deal with infestations? For obvious reasons, I don't want to use a spray. Cedar hasn't done much of anything. I'm going to try repotting in new soil in hopes that I don't kill the plant and get rid of whatever may have laid it's eggs in the soil. It doesn't seem that the plant is suffering much, but there are more bugs now than yesterday, and I'm afraid that they'll just continue to multiply.

For reference, I'm in southwestern Pennsylvania (not the best climate for tea, but passable), and the tea is in a large clay pot in a mostly shady spot on my front porch. It does get some morning sun every day. It was a two-year-old plant when I received it several months ago.

All I really wanted was to be able to dry out my first batch of home-grown tea today. Any thoughts?

Current Mood: contemplative

Questions
Hopefully this can both answer some questions I've got, get some different perspectives, and spark a bit of discussion here. :)

1) What do you store your teas in? Where do you store them?

2) Do you use sweeteners? If not, why not? If so, what kinds? Which types of teas do you sweeten?

3) Do you use cream/milk? If not, why not? If so, which one or something else? Which types of teas do you use cream/milk in?

Fresh Apple Mint Tea
I walked outside to my garden and picked some apple mint leaves this evening, and had one of the best cups of tea I've had in my entire life. The apple flavor almost overwhelms the mint, but it's there, just enough to be noticed.

I posted pictures here. So what do you have growing in your tea garden?

Current Mood: cheerful

Heavenly Oolong
"A really good tea must cost a fortune". Many believe this saying and, sometimes they are right. However, once in a while it is possible to stumble upon a tea that is not in stratospheric price range, yet it is absolutely great, in a league with $300/lb teas. It might be because the estate is not well known yet or because the vendor has financial problems or for any other reason, I don't know. I just know that I have found such tea. Heavenly Oolong, from Fujian Province in China. There are plenty of Oolongs from that area and was pleasantly surprised when this one turned out to be so great. The only Oolongs of that quality I have tried had a price tag of $300 and above. At first I only ordered it because a person whose taste in tea I respect greatly has recommended it. Had to wait 3 months before I got it. Now I just regret I didn't order more.

With my usual tiny markup I put it at $48/lb. Then increased it to $64/lb. However, I am seriously thinking that I should double or triple the price - some people just won't believe that it is great until they see a huge price tag.

Disclaimer: I am the owner or Apollo Tea store

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