Issue 11

More Darjeeling is sold every year than is actually grown.

Issue 11 begins with that fact and doesn't let go of it — asking what the gap between the label and the leaf means for everyone in the chain, from the garden to the shelf.

Nalin Modha helps us understand why this particular tea commands such devotion and such deception. Then Watarai Toru takes us into the forest and shows us how he sees it — the colours, the structure, the light — and how that vision becomes ikebana in his hands.

We consider the small daily rituals that make tea worthwhile, and how easily they are lost. Chai in Tokyo. A lake in the Chinese countryside, and the ancient ways of doing things that the water quietly holds.

In South America, a national treasure evolved across centuries. Tea experts answer the questions readers keep asking. Japanese tea bowls, traced across time.

And Friday Elliott, poly-synesthete: a person who tastes sounds and hears memories, and who uses that to make tea.