I can’t handle too many accounts and constantly forget essential login information :-p
Gingko
,@gingkoseto
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Too some degree it can be very true. But everything is relative. A farmer’s tea in a bad year can be better than another farmer’s tea from a good year. A farmer’s lower grade tea can be better than another farmer’s higher grade tea. A farmer’s tea in a drought, high-price year can be less expensive than another farmer’s tea from a low-price year.
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It looks cool and definitely more handy than regular metal tea strainer. But am I right it’s $20 each? That’s not a price that I’m willing to pay.
The whole kati system (basically a beautiful mug and a metal strainer, if you wonder what it is) costs only $15, and I got mine with some super good deal discount (I think I bought a tea and got the kati system for free). 😀
http://www.teaforte.com/store/tea-accessories/other/kati-tea-brewing-system/
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As for comparison of the two companies, I haven’t tried either seller’s tea but like Adagio a lot better, partially influenced by tea communities and partially due to the properties and styles of the two businesses.
In terms of advertising and public relation, I feel Adagio aims at grabbing more returning customers (just see the teachat effects!) and Teavana aims at grabbing more new tea drinkers – many of whom would graduate to buying from other tea companies eventually – and this is also why I think no matter how people feel about Teavana, it’s making positive contribution to the tea market 😀
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*I feel tea gurus and tea masters are often very vague concepts. Probably one of the few places where it’s not vague is in Japanese tea ceremony, because the “tea masters” in Japanese tea ceremony must hold some certification issued by non-commercial, cultural organizations deep-rooted into tea history. In America, the two of my favorite Japanese tea masters whom I met are both women. Every detail of their behaviors embodies what a “master” might mean, which has little to do with knowledge or even intelligence.
Besides that, it’s hard to define what’s a tea master. Are they tea workers, tea scientists, tea authors…? The best of above genres whom I’ve met, almost none of them call themselves tea masters. I just hope tea master doesn’t mean a diploma of master’s degree, or less than that :-p (there is nothing wrong with a master’s degree, but it has nothing to do with how much of a tea master one is…)
By the way, my favorite tea book in English language so far (The Story of Tea) is also authored by a women (Mary Lou Heiss, and her husband is the second author). So maybe we can say there aren’t many women out there but they are the best :-p
I agree with what Peter says about some common differences between men and women in their personalities. There are always individual differences, but averagely I feel men are more excited by achievements and profits than women.
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*But your post also makes me think of this. I do believe there is gender prejudices among tea drinkers. Most of them may not even aware of it – a lot of people, more than what we realize, don’t aware their own prejudices, as pointed by the author of Blink…
For example, more than once or twice, in online tea forums (both in China and US), I saw some (supposedly) *male* tea drinkers commented such and such flavored tea, or such and such tea with showy fragrance lacking any depth, or such and such (supposedly) “low level” tea-related stuff, mainly cater to female tea drinkers.
When you extract the sentences like this, it’s quite obvious, right? But I bet most of those involved in the discussion at that moment didn’t realize they had any gender bias.
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* I think about half of the Chinese tea vendors I know are females, but for some of them, it’s because the man in the family is responsible for making more money, and the woman would take some more casual, freelance job like tea selling.
But generally it’s hard to define what’s tea industry, because tea used to be an agriculture, like apple. See, we rarely consider how well women is represented in apple trade, right :-p
I have some conversation with other friends about the gender of most famous chefs. But overall I feel famous chefs don’t represent the best chefs, and most of the best chefs are known only among their families and friends (for example, my mom, haha~) So I suspect famous wine critics don’t represent people who know wine the best. And for tea, I guess we can be sure that people who talk the most are not those who know the most. Nothing against talking a lot though (you can see how talkative I myself am haha).
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* @bram I think if it’s basically commercial promotion event, then it should be free, and should have free gifts for people to be advertised on. But that’s just what I think. People are paying for tickets of these events all the time, so I guess I’m only one of those who are not willing to pay :-p
The activities I’m willing to pay for would involve cultural exhibition and/or performance and/or significant amount of tasting experience. But interestingly so far most of this kind of activities I’ve attended (mostly in museums, colleges or local markets) are free to visitors.
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*Now you’ve got me started… :-p
I would like to see more tea shows and tea festivals. But I absolutely HATE it when they charge admission, especially when the event is basically about promotion and advertising booths. I think it’s reasonable that the organizer charges participating vendors a fee. But I don’t think it’s reasonable they charge visitors a fee, unless it’s a big event as those in China or Malaysia, where you can surely get good deals of tea that justifies the admission charge. If they don’t think they can afford a event without charging visitor admission, they had better figure out a way. I like the set up of World Tea Expo. They don’t charge retailers admission, because retailers are the “customers” of the B2B event.
I went to a Wedding trade show (to help out a friend in the industry) that charge a big visitor admission. But the “visitors” there are captive audience and they had to find certain services for their weddings. But for tea, I myself wouldn’t want to spend $20 on a trade show that offers no more than small samples – unless I want to sell things to people there, but not as a potential buyer.
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*Once a group of friends of mine were talking about what you are going to do if you won $10M lottery. A friend said, I would still be doing what I’m doing now. At the time he was merely a graduate student living on a small stipend. But he knew he would become a good scientist and he is now. Sometimes I would think of him and think if I’m asked the same question, whether I would have the same answer as his.
On the other hand, if somebody is a starving artist who also has a family to raise, I feel it’s hard to tell him “do what you like and forget about the money…”
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*Very interesting!
I’ve got quite a few people asking me when I’m going to have a bricks and mortar store. But so far I’ve never had such intention. It would be too expensive and involving too much dish washing type of work. My ideal tea business is let tea be the major business cost and let tea cost be the major component of prices (both are rare in business practice). So it sounds pretty much like an online business 🙂
I buy my coffee online too, and it’s by an American dealer who gets the coffee directly from a plantation in Guatemala.
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@riccaicedo your blog is very nice! I think it’s a good idea to have a site on teatra.de. My blog has its own site but I enjoy having a blog at the same pace on teatra.de. Because teatra.de is a society of tea drinkers and promotes communication of tea bloggers, I often get unique valuable feedbacks on my teatra.de blog site.
Your blog has nice topics, and nice photos. You probably would just need some time to let your audience size grow. I didn’t see a date record of each of your blog post and usually I would like to see a date on a blog. Generally I’m more motivated to comment on a recently written blog so I would need to know the date.
@jackie I think you should write more. Don’t be too much of a perfectionist and don’t wait till you must get a “whole piece” of something. I think you can have fun writing smaller pieces and we can surely enjoy it!
That being said, I’ve written less frequently than I would like to recently. I guess my biggest challenge now is too many other things are going on. But I hope to keep the blog going, maybe a bit slowly.
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Just remember this and would like to give some updates.
I think I got my first fraud payment through paypal – or am I lucky to get only the 1st till now? :-pBut it’s pretty much my own fault. I shipped a package before the e-check payment was cleared, while paypal strongly warns against it. Therefore I’m not covered by paypal’s seller protection. But overall paypal is not to be blamed and they do have sort of seller protection.
So like I said before, so far paypal is still the best means of paying and receiving payment for me. And hopefully this won’t happen again!
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I hope they can beat starbucks, and they have good chance!
You know that some affluent people in China have been making themselves miserable. They couldn’t bear with the tannin taste of wine, and couldn’t bear with the taste of coffee. But just for the sake of being fashionable and wasting money, they force themselves into drinking expensive wines and coffee, which that they can hardly appreciate and terribly waste. If there is some foreign luxury that they can actually enjoy the taste (such as expensive French tea), what a bliss! :-p
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* There is a popular saying among some Chinese contemporary tea drinkers that, “It should be you drinking tea, not you being consumed by tea.” 🙂
This saying especially targets on the phenomenon that sometimes people could be intimidated by expensive teas, or sometimes people are “influenced” (in a rather aggressive manner) into liking a tea or liking a specific way of tea, or faking a desire :-p I guess such phenomenon happens not just on tea, but in other fields too.
Usually if I don’t like a top grade or expensive tea (as it happened on the “purple beauty” and “red jade” which are blogged about here), I would try to think of it in a positive way such as: Woohoo! Won’t buy it anymore and will save a good deal of money on this one 🙂
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*I didn’t know you are this anti-health :-p
I thought it was fine saying “Additionally, as
Americans have become more health-conscious, they have looked for
alternatives to sugar-rich carbonated beverages.” That’s quite true. I think there is a strong correlation between healthy life style, awareness of food health and the capability of detecting delicate complex tastes featured by tea.I would use my husband as a bad example. Basically all green tea are “tasteless” to him. In my opinion, it’s because histaste buds have been numbed with high sugar food. After intentionally reducing sugar use for some days, I feel his taste buds have improved 🙂
But I have to admit I have my anti-health side as well. There were a few times after eating in a “healthy” restaurant or cafeteria, my comment was “Too damn healthy! I want my cholesterol!” 😀
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*There was a time that I didn’t feel like to write much. But later I decided to make it a venting site and just dump out whatever I have in my mind :-p
But I think a lot of good stuff you put on forum discussions you should collect them and make them into blog posts. Sometimes there are very good discussions that you don’t easily re-locate after a while. But when you put it in blog, it’s more systematic and easier for both you and other people to retrieve.
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