promise of enlightenment

(The tea Buddha)


One of my pet peeves is people ascribing to tea qualities that it doesn't have. If I were to believe every claim made by tea advocates/marketers, I'd blindly accept that this plant was able to cure most any disease as well as cure a few geopolitical disturbances. The problem with many of these claims of tea's powerful properties is that they're just not quantifiably provable.




These preposterous statements sell tea and (more importantly) magazines, but they're disingenuous and irritating. To be clear, I'm aware there've been scientific studies to support some of these miracle claims. Nevertheless, I still question the validity of many attempts to extoll the health benefits of drinking tea.

A Promise

But there is one thing I can without any reservation promise that tea will do for you. Drinking good tea will ultimately bring you true and sustained enlightenment.

I'm sure you saying to yourself, 'He can't prove that.'

Oh, do you really believe I can't?

I'm sitting here in an ocean of fully-evolved enlightenment-type thoughts, and have come to the simple and lazy conclusion that trying to explain them would only lessen my own personal enlightenment.

To get here today, I chose to brew some Pu-erh fannings, and it's doing the job quite nicely. I doubt that you drinking the exact same tea is going to bring you anything even resembling enlightenment, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

thinking of an American teaseller

Although being in a little village up in the Bavarian Alps means I'm not personally visiting new teashops, the tea world gets more and more intimate partially due to the web.

Every year I say I'll do my best to make it to next year's World Tea Expo, which is wrapping up in Las Vegas, but things get in the way and I'm left promising myself that it's not the last one. I can always go there for the next one, right?

So here I am enjoying very mercurial mountain weather while browsing tea shop sites (If I can't be there in person, I can go there virtually). I've been meaning to write a glowing review of Upton Tea Imports since I had such a fantastic experience ordering from them back in the spring, but things kept getting in the way.

About that review of Upton Tea Imports? Well here it is. Everything about the ordering process was effortless, and it seemed as if the tea arrived much more quickly than was possible. But there it was. The hyper-critical among you will say, 'They're an tea seller who offers tea online. That's what they do. You order tea from them, and they send it immediately.'

Well, be that as it may. The website was easy to understand, and regardless of what some might consider service to be expected, it seemed above-average to me. I had it sent to my brother's house while I was travelling in the States, and upon my arrival my sister-in-law and I had some wonderful Pu-erh fannings, which I wrote about here: fannings aren't always teadust

With my tea the Upton Tea Quarterly was enclosed. There was a very interesting article about the history of Ceylon Tea. There's something similar, and much more brief, on the Information page of the above-mentioned website, but the in depth article seems to be only in the Quarterly itself. I'd read versions of the story in various places, but it was nice to see it compiled in such detail there on the page.

That's all I have for today. Need to get back out in the mountain air, but I wanted to mention the excellent experience I had. Were I more often in the United States, I'd definitely take advantage of this site/company more often.

Here's a photo of Bayrischzell. It's nearly as far south in Bavaria as you can go before you're in Austria.