Issue 05

China's green teas have always invited comparison.

Issue 05 takes four of the most celebrated — the kings of a category that rewards close attention — and asks what makes each one irreplaceable.

James Hoffmann, the coffee mind with a genuine curiosity about tea, sits with us to examine the rivalry between the two drinks: where it comes from, what it reveals, and why it may be less of a rivalry than it appears.

Five businesses talk honestly about what the pandemic did to them — the losses, the pivots, the things they discovered when everything slowed down.

We look at how tea pairs with food, and at whether restaurants are ready to take it as seriously as they take wine.

A fifth-generation metal craftsman in Kyoto receives us. In the forgotten fields of a former Soviet country, a team of quiet renegades is doing something worth finding. And in the high-elevation gardens of the Himalayas, the altitude does something to the leaf that nowhere else can replicate.