Issue 13

Tea means different things to different people. Issue 13 stays with that tension rather than resolving it.

For some, it is the thing that gathers — a ritual of belonging, a reason to return. For others, it is a way of travelling through time: each cup carrying the flavour of a place, an ancestor, a world not yet visited. In other hands still, it is something closer to the sacred — venerated, protective, woven into the fabric of belief.

Hojicha, roasted and smoky, opens the issue. In Thailand, we find the farmers who have held their ground — literally — against considerable odds. In Zimbabwe, we ask why tea is central to the practice of Apostolic communities.

Peter Granser photographs the bridges that tea builds between cultures. The haiku form offers its own quiet argument. In Porto and Bratislava, two spaces where tea is taken seriously on its own terms.

Teaware from 1660 to today: the history of an object that has always carried more than liquid.