Issue 07

Old things look different when you know what you are looking for.

Issue 07 follows white tea back to its origins in China — a category that asks for patience and rewards it. Sarah Besky joins us to ask what quality actually means in tea, and why the word has been stretched past usefulness.

We go looking for where speciality tea culture first took root in Central Europe, and find a story more recent and more contingent than the mythology suggests.

Earl Grey has an origin story. Most of it is invention. We look at what the evidence actually supports.

And we look at the economics behind the cheapest tea on the shelf — who picks it, under what conditions, and at what cost. The price of a teabag is not the whole price.

From Iran to Japan to Oregon: Sichuanese kettles, something singular made in the Pacific Northwest, and the gap between tea marketing and tea reality.