Tag: taiwan

Tea as Daoist Meditation, with Robert Coons

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

After nearly a year hiatus from releasing new episodes, and nearing what’s hopefully the end of a worldwide pandemic, we’re very happy to welcome back Robert Coons to talk with us about tea as a medium for meditation and health, from a Daoist viewpoint. Robert is a well-known teacher and writer on Daoist meditation, a tea vendor, an acupuncturist and practitioner of qigong and martial arts,  and was our guest two years ago in our episode “Tea & Daoism: Adjacent Connections”. He’s about to launch an online course on tea meditation, so we took this opportunity to get an overview of Robert’s perspectives on tea as a meditation practice.

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Tea & Daoism: Adjacent Connections

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

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Today we’re exploring connections between tea and Daoism, the millenia-old Chinese religious and philosophical tradition that has had such a profound influence on culture and history in and beyond China. We’re joined by Robert Coons, who straddles both the tea world and the world of Daoism. Robert is a well-known tea vendor based in Canada and China and is also a writer, teacher and podcaster on Daoism, qigong and Daoist meditation.   Read the full show notes

Chemistry, Climate Change, Bugs & Tea

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes, Uncategorized

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Today we’re exploring a bit of tea science on Talking Tea. We’re joined by Eric Scott, a tea scientist and researcher at Tufts University, to chat about some of the ways a basic understanding of the science of tea can benefit us as tea consumers and tea professionals, and to get a glimpse into the research Eric is doing on the effects of climate change on tea and tea markets. Read the full show notes

A “Tea Cave” in Vermont

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

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Today Talking Tea is in Middlebury, Vermont, at Stone Leaf Teahouse, a unique tea space in this bucolic town. Joining us is John Wetzel, founder and owner of Stone Leaf.

The town of Middlebury may be best known for being the home of Middlebury College, but since its founding 10 years ago Stone Leaf has also become well-known in and beyond Middlebury for the quality of its teas and for the warmth and tranquility of its teahouse.  Read the full show notes

Pairing Tea and…Cheese?

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

 

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Most everyone is familiar with pairing wine and cheese, but pairing tea and cheese is much less well known and less understood. (By the way, that’s tea in the glass in the photo above, not wine.) Some tea drinkers may even find the idea of tea and cheese pairing a bit counterintuitive, if not a bit, well, odd. But at Talking Tea we’ve experienced some delicious pairings of tea with cheese, so we wanted to explore the issue more in depth.  Read the full show notes

Chaxi: Harmony, Art & Expression in Tea

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

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We’ve been wanting to explore chaxi on Talking Tea ever since we visited the Tea Institute at Penn State University back in 2016. Tea was prepared and served to us by students in the Chinese tea track at the Institute with a degree of artistry and calm precision we had never quite witnessed anywhere else, and when we asked some of the students where they learned to prepare tea in this way, they suggested we speak with one of their teachers and mentors, Stéphane Erler, to learn more about chaxi, an artistic expression of tea originating in Taiwan.  Read the full show notes

Dong Ding: Everything Taiwanese Tea Has to Offer

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

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Today we welcome back to Talking Tea Shiuwen Tai of Seattle’s Floating Leaves tea to chat about one of our favorite teas, Taiwan’s celebrated Dong Ding oolong.

Shiuwen believes that Dong Ding represents everything that Taiwan has to offer in terms of producing tea, and we chat about the qualities that make Dong Ding unique in this capacity. We discuss three basic styles of Dong Ding – traditional, fragrant and charcoal roasted – and together we taste and compare both a traditional and a charcoal roasted Dong Ding.  Read the full show notes

Bitten By the Bug: Oriental Beauty, With Té Company

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

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To kick off Talking Tea’s fourth season, we’re at Té Company, an exquisite teahouse in New York’s West Village, talking about an exquisite tea – the aptly named Oriental Beauty.  Read the full show notes

Learning Tea With Babelcarp

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

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We’re calling this episode “learning tea” because learning about tea can be like learning a language – like learning English, or French, or Chinese, or any other language. There’s a vocabulary to tea, and the world of tea is so vast, with so many words, facts and concepts to learn and keep track of, that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Compounding this in the English-speaking world is the fact that tea terms are often actually in another language – most commonly Chinese or Japanese. So what’s a tea drinker to do?   Read the full show notes

Arriving At The Source

by Talking Tea, posted in Podcast Episodes

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Most tea consumers never have the opportunity to visit the source of the teas we drink – the tea growers and tea makers in the various tea-producing regions around the world. So here at Talking Tea we’ve been wanting to hear an insider’s take on sourcing trips, to get an idea of what sourcing trips are like and what tea retailers look for when they source their teas.  Read the full show notes