Times Does Kung Fu, Gong Fu & Tea Bags

All the tea news that's fit to print?

It's apparently Tea Day at the New York Times. Two rather substantial articles on the topic appeared in today's edition.

Harris Salat's From a Long Tradition, Small Sips Quickly Brewed, is a fairly in-depth piece about the kung fu, or gong fu, style of tea drinking. Here's a line that jumped out at me:

"No matter how rarefied the leaf, it’s at the mercy of the person preparing it."

Also on board in today's edition is Florence Fabricant's Tea’s Got a Brand New Bag. This one takes a look at those "gourmet" or "pyramid" style tea bags that are becoming all the rage nowadays (okay, maybe not quite). At the time that I accessed it, the article was at the top of the 10 Most E-mailed List of NYT articles.

Another line that really leaped off the page (umm, screen):

"The tea bag, a clever enough idea at first, went terribly awry somewhere along the way, at least in the view of people who love to savor their tea."

As for the "tea bags containing long leaf teas" Lipton is supposed to start selling next month, one variety is called Black Pearl and it's already turned up in my local grocery store. I wasn't exactly blown away, but you can read my thoughts here.

As coincidence would have it, yours truly recently wrote an article about the humble tea bag for the Australian science magazine, Cosmos. As far as I'm aware, it has not yet seen print.

tea, green tea, food, food and drink, kung fu, gong fu, oolong

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