Tea Blog - Learn All About Tea — Teaware

Do you have a favorite tea?  Something that you drink every day?  Something that people who really know you know is your tea?  A Lapsang Souchong to your Sherlock Holmes?  An Earl Grey to your Charles Grey?   If so, you may be interested in Yixing.  Yixing is a traditional porous Chinese clay, which has been used to make tea pots since the Song Dynasty.  The point of Western teaware, and ceramics in general, is that, when it is washed, all of the tea which was brewed in it is washed away.  Yixing absorbs some of the tea which is...

You may have noticed, either or in our shop or online, small, odd-looking dishes, always with lids, and sometimes on saucers.  While these dishes can range from primitive and earthy to ornately decorated, they all seem to have one thing in common-- they intimidate tea novices.  Something about the traditional Chinese gai wan feels foreign, like you’re going to use it incorrectly, offend someone, and probably burn yourself in the process.  In this post, I’d like to ease those fears, and explain exactly how simple and not-at-all scary gai wans are.   Gaiwans can be used to both brew and...

Tea leaves needs room to steep.  Related Blog Post Why Does My Tea Get Bitter? How can I avoid it?   When you steep high-quality, loose tea leaves, they expand.  In order to allow these leaves to brew to a high-quality tea, they need to have space to expand fully.  In general, the larger your infuser is, the better your tea will be.   With most tea balls and novelty infusers, tea leaves are packed too tightly to expand fully.  This means that the water cannot circulate around them properly, and the flavor of your tea will be lacking some of...

We get a lot of questions in our shop about tea storage.  People want to know, when they buy in bulk, or if they don’t drink tea all that often, how long their tea will stay fresh for, and what happens to old tea.  Here at Good Life Tea, we thought we’d make a master list of all of the major questions we get regarding the storage of your tea. Will my tea go bad? Unless your tea gets wet in some way (moisture is the enemy of tea), it will not go bad.  You will never open an old...