Life in Teacup - Featured Tea Blog

In the past I have reviewed and recommended some tea websites, and today I decided it would be good to review a tea blog. I follow dozens of blogs, and I appreciate every blog that I follow or link to, so a review or feature does not mean that I want to favor one particular blog over another, just that I was thinking about one particular blog at the moment, or have some reason for wanting to share it.

One blog that I often enjoy reading is the Life in Teacup Blog, by Gingko Seto. Life in Teacup is a small tea company, run by Gingko, which specializes in Chinese teas. You can find a number of reviews of their teas, which I find consistently high-quality, on RateTea's page of Life in Teacup Reviews. You can also find Gingko Seto on twitter, where she is always eager to engage in tea-related conversation.



About the Life in Teacup Blog:

The Life in Teacup blog is rather atypical among tea blogs. It has long, detailed posts, and often goes into considerable depth. Gingko shows insider knowledge about Chinese tea, and at times, deep research, and there is a lot of unique information in this blog that you cannot easily find elsewhere. But what I most like about this blog is the personal twist or perspective that Gingko puts on the blog. Gingko, like me, is a bit of an experimenter who tends to seek out teas and aspects of tea culture that are novel, unusual, or interesting, while at the same time highly valuing tradition. I find this combination of traits refreshing and rather rare in our society (although more common among tea enthusiasts than the general population).

Although I do subscribe to this blog, it's one of the few blogs where I am less likely to read a post in full when it is posted, and instead, return to it repeatedly when I am researching a specific topic.

For this reason I want to point you to two sections of the blog, based on topics you might be interested in.

• The Discussion on Long Jing, which is currently in the middle of unfolding, is a serious of posts about Dragon Well / Long Jing, a type of Chinese green tea.


• Strange, funny, silly and scary teas - This collection of posts is just fun...what can I say?


• Some of the tags / topics, including oolong tea, and puerh, and the biggest category, chat, for the more chatty / casual / random posts (many of which are still quite informative and deep).

Gingko's Affinity for Mug Brewing:

Lastly, I want to point out one aspect of this blog that I like. Gingko is a big proponent of brewing whole-leaf green tea loose in a glass mug, and I would credit her as being the main source of motivation to get me to experiment with this method, which I think is an under-appreciated method for brewing tea, one often producing very good results. The Life in Teacup blog is full of photographs of a number of different types of green teas being steeped loose in a glass mug. This brewing method really lends itself to photography (and thus, blogging), and I find that you can see the leaf in this method in ways that you can't by any other common brewing method.

So, in summary, if you like Chinese teas, I'd recommend checking out both the Life in Teacup blog, and the store.

Did you know of Gingko and Life in Teacup before this post?

Were you familiar with Gingko's blog, and the Life in Teacup company, before reading this post?