For a while now, my non-tech-related passion has been tea. I enjoy learning, buying, and most of all drinking tea that most people have not experienced. None of the tea in my collection is bagged. I have no orange pekoe (although, it can be delicious at times). Instead, I have a plethora of loose leaf and caked/bricked tea that I infuse in a precise manner. If you know me personally and want to share a great pot of tea, let me know!
Until now, I have held off on joining a tea forum as too many are highly sponsored/owned by major tea companies – something I feel could skew the content of the forum. Luckily, I recently met, via Twitter, Tony Gebely (aka @WorldOfTea). Tony and another individual, Griffin Kelton, have put together, what I think is, an amazing open forum for tea discussion. Rather than ramble on, I encourage you to read the press release below and visit The Tea Roundtable – take a look around and if you see value please join! Lets help Tony and Griffin establish the premiere independent tea forum on the Internet!
The Tea Round Table Opens to the Public. We agree, twitter is great, but it has one problem. When topics that are important to a community are discussed, we need them to be saved, and to be accessible by all. Twitter is a great place for us to meet new people, but The Tea Roundtable is a great place for us to discuss the world of tea long term. The vision behind the Tea Round Table is to bring people together to network on a smaller scale, collaborate, and learn. By providing an online meeting place, the goal of The Tea Round Table is to create a closer-knit community you can come back to with questions, ideas, and even off-topic discussion with people who all share a love for tea.
Today is the first time the Round Table is open to the general public, so feel free to look around and sign up! As today is the first day, we have a special prize in store for a special member, thanks to Billy Shall of Narien Teas, the first member of the forum to contribute 25 topics to the forums will receive a one year’s supply of tea. In order for these topics to be considered valid they must be meaningful and be spread across multiple forum categories (moderators and administrators have discretion over this). Best of luck members and new members to be! If you don’t win this time around, don’t worry – there will be more contests down the line. Please share this new community with your friends.
As an in-experienced tea drinker, I find the tea grading system really confusing. I am especially perplexed by the fact that orange pekoe is not a type of tea, but rather a description on the size of the leaves. What are your thoughts on the subject?
Tea Grading
First of all, thank you for the comment!
It was probably irresponsible of me to post "orange pekoe" as I should have written "Red Rose" (everyone seems to know this brand!). From my, albeit limited, experience "orange pekoe" is generally used to describe largely generic black teas. I will stop there on the subject so that I don’t overstep my knowledge.
When it comes to grading tea, other than peccos, it is still just as confusing. Many Japanese teas will have words such as deluxe, supreme, superior and other descriptive words proceeding the name of the tea – it is hard to understand which are better, but I generally go with price as the indicator.
I hope this, at least in part, addresses your query.
~Cole