Here's a commercial from Herbaria Tea, a Hungarian company who apparently decided that the way to sell more of their herbal tea was to scare the crap out of potential consumers. As they put it, it's "a commercial that demonstrates the calming effect of Herbaria tea in an inventive and eye-catching way."
That's a masterpiece of understatement. Watch if you dare. If you're a sensitive sort you should pass.
(from a press release)
In classy bars and cocktail lounges across America, tea is making a big splash. Absolut has launched a line of tea-infused vodka, companies like Owl’s Brew are springing up with teas crafted specifically as cocktail mixers, and foodie magazines such as Saveur and Food & Wine are featuring hot chai toddies and gin-spiked iced teas. With Abigail R. Gehring’s Tea Cocktails: A Mixologist's Guide to Legendary Tea-Infused Cocktails (Skyhorse Publishing; April 7, 2015; ISBN 978-1-63220-449-3; $19.99) you can join mixologists across the US capitalizing on this trend by infusing cocktails with everything from chamomile to Darjeeling.
Teatulia has partnered with Gehring to provide a stunning collection of seventy-five unique hot and cold tea cocktail recipes sure to impress any mixologist or tea lover. Tea, similar to bourbon, tequila, and gin, offers a myriad of flavors: there’s rich, earthy pu-her; grassy and bittersweet green teas; malty black teas; sweet, spicy chai; smoky yerba mate; and delicate white teas, not to mention the variety of herbal options available. Learn how to balance the unique flavors of herbal and black teas with just the right spirits.
Teas Hope - Tea Shop
A travel style mini-documentary that uncovers the history, production and future of matcha tea. This spectacular journey takes you from amazing organic mountain tea fields, stunning forestscapes, and the natural spring fed wells of Kagoshima, to the bustling tea shop filled streets of ancient Uji City, Kyoto.
From The Virtues of Coffee, Chocolette, and Thee or Tea, Experimentally Known in This Our Climate. See the full version here.
Tea of the People - barrel aging teas like fine wine
Tea of the People - Innovative teas made with a higher purpose
The increased interest in tea in recent years has resulted in many great books on the subject, with many more sure to follow. After all, tea is a vast topic and hardly one that can be dispensed with in the space of a few volumes.
If you'd like to look back to what some authors of yesteryear had to say about tea, you'd do well to start with The Classic Of Tea, by Lu Yu, a Chinese scholar of ancient times. Although, the last time I checked, this pioneering volume wasn't all that easy to get your hands on.
A work by another Asian scholar, The Book Of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura, is also worth taking a look at and is not nearly so hard to locate. The book has been in print continuously since it was first published in 1906 and is still available in a variety of printed and electronic editions, including this one, at Project Gutenberg.
This is not the time or place to debate whether The Book Of Tea is one of the most influential books ever written on the topic, but most observers will probably agree that it ranks high on the list. Okakura's work is a slim volume that introduces readers to his opinionated notions and his concept of Teaism and takes a look at how tea became such an indispensable part of Japanese life, both as a beverage and as aid to spiritual contemplation.
Not surprisingly, given the role of tea in Japanese culture and the Japanese tea ceremony, much of what Okakura discusses in this modest work has to do with this link between spirituality and tea. Among the topics covered, great schools of tea, prominent tea masters of yesteryear and the link between tea and Taoism and Zen (which the author refers to as Zennism).
