In the course of several years spent writing about tea at this site, at my own site, and various others, I’ve read and reviewed quite a few tea books and have encountered a lot of other titles in passing. On the whole they seem to fall into a few main categories. There are the broad… Continue reading

Having written about tea for a while, I’ve discovered that one of my favorite aspects of the process is seeing how perspectives have changed (and sometimes stayed the same) over the years. One of the volumes I examined recently is William Andrus Alcott’s Tea and Coffee, which first appeared in 1839 and which is available… Continue reading

Are there more poems devoted to the joys of tea than to its cousin in the hot beverage field, coffee? I haven’t done the research and thus concede that I might be wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that there are. There’s just something about tea that inspires devotion and praise in a way that… Continue reading

As I noted in a recent article in these pages, the massive Google Books archive is a treasure trove for anyone with an interest in history, casual or otherwise. That includes tea lovers too. That article took a look at a volume from 1882 called The Tea Cyclopaedia. But there are tea books in the… Continue reading

Say what you want about Google’s ambitious plan to digitize every book in the known universe (and perhaps in all parallel universes too), but you can’t say that it hasn’t been a boon to tea historians and anyone else who has an interest in seeing how tea used to be produced and consumed. A cursory… Continue reading