Issue 10

Gyokuro is shaded, slow, and almost impossibly green.

Issue 10 takes this rare Japanese tea as its starting point and expands outward — into the water you use to brew it, the vessel you pour it into, and the trees it came from.

Martin Riese, water sommelier, makes the case that water is not neutral. Its composition shapes what you taste, and most of us have never thought about it seriously enough.

Shunan Teng joins us to explain the difference between heirloom and clonal tea trees — a distinction that changes how you understand terroir, and how you connect to the people who cultivated these plants before you.

We follow the old trade races across the ocean, where speed meant everything and a clipper arriving first with the season's leaves could make fortunes.

In Lisbon, a tea alchemist works with aromatics. Twenty pieces of teaware, spanning continents and centuries, each with something to say. A curated soundtrack of thirteen songs — one per story.