Tea Talk Link Up #6

Hello and welcome back to the weekly Wednesday 'Tea Time Link Up'! 

For this week's link up I'm taking you on a little 'behind the scenes' tea tour. These bloggers shared tidbits of knowledge or insights on how tea is made or how to make your tea time more special.

1) Alex from the 'Teacology' blog talks about the effects of adding citric acid (i.e. lemon juice) to tea and herbal infusions. 
There's a bit of chemistry involved and this well-researched post will leave you with the question whether adding citric acid is a good thing or not. You might even want to experiment by adding some lemon to your own tea and see when it works well and when it doesn't. Of course, for many an Earl Grey lover we take its citric contribution for granted in the bergamot essence used.

2) Steph from 'Steph's Cup of Tea' shows us how to Gong-Fu brew a cup of tea with the simplest set-up possible. Once you have your Yixing teapot, you don't need much more. Sure, the wooden water-catching tea trays are a wonderful accessory but not strictly necessary. Just use a bowl and a cream pitcher instead and off you go, brewing tea in the historical Chinese fashion, allowing you to explore a whole new range of flavours. 

3) Handling your tea leaves? It sounds counter-intuitive. We are always careful to use tea spoons or scoops to scoop out our loose leaf tea so that the oils on our skin don't contaminate our tea. But Miss Tea Delight from the 'Miss Tea Delight Blog' suggests handling our tea with clean, soap-washed hands to improve its flavour (this works especially well for large leaf varieties such as Oolongs) because we allow the tea to warm up and release more flavours and aroma. Something to be tried at home?

4) The 'Tea Urchin' takes you on a spectacular hike through the Chinese province of Yunnan, to a pilgrimage of the oldest tea tree. It is thought that the very first tea came from Yunnan. Discover the beauty of nature and the history of tea on this adventure and learn about the ecological threats that are faced by this prehistoric forest. A journey into the heart of tea!

5) The excellent 'Wrong Fu Cha' blog has a very insightful post on how to hone your skills in tea tasting with both knowledge and mindfulness. He uses ancient Chinese tea philosophy to categorise a number of different tea 'experiences' such as aroma, taste, sensation and energy. Does this seem awfully sophisticated to you? No worries: the author merely reminds us to 'be mindful and enjoy the tea' :)

I hope you've enjoyed these five educational posts this week! In order to make the link-up experience a little more interactive, I would like to encourage you to link up. If any readers' posts  are particularly fun, beautiful, educational or inspiring, then I will share YOUR post in the next link-up! So share your best and brightest :)

Thank you for participating and look forward to reading your contributions.