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Hello Tea Friends! Welcome to our special Christmas blog filled with ideas for the festive season.  We understand that this time of year means different things to different people : so whether you are interested in knowing when you can call in for a calming cup of tea before the festive break [see the bottom of this blog] or you are looking for a gift for a Tea Lover [or yourself!] then you are in the right place.   At Comins we have been busy putting together some of our favourite tea ideas & recommendations which you can read about below.  We also want...

As the Tea Houses re-open we feel really sad that we will no longer be able to host our Saturday morning sessions on Instagram Live.....so, for our online tea community we are introducing a couple of new ways to connect with us virtually.  The first is our Monday Tea Club which will take place every two weeks with Michelle, on a Monday, on Instagram Live at 6pm.  The second will be Robs 'Tea House Topics' which he will host on Fridays on a more ad hoc basis.  The details of both these sessions are below!  We hope you can join us -...

TAIWANESE TEAS AT COMINS : OUR APPROACH Our last exploration of Taiwanese tea on the blog was our exploration of Taiwanese cultivars - you can read more on that here.  As we start to bring you some new season teas for 2021 we thought it would be a good time to update you on our approach to sourcing great teas from Taiwan for you to enjoy! This short blog covers :- - Tea agriculture in Taiwan [taken from our book tales of the tea trade]- Building Long Term Partnerships for Change- Important Clarification on 'Organic' in relation to our Taiwanese Partners- Paying...

Extract from our book : Tales of the Tea Trade  One Oolong tea worth a special mention due to its unusual processing is GABA tea. This relatively new type of tea was first produced in 1987 in Japan by Dr Tsushida Tojiro while researching food preservation. GABA stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid, an amino acid that occurs naturally in the human body (as well as the tea plant) and is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter found in the nervous system. The tea involves a unique processing method instead of the traditional ‘kill- green’ stage, which increases the levels of GABA in the tea...

One of the many rewarding experiences of drinking tea is the savouring of the flavours in each sip. The true appreciation of the depths of flavour in a tea and how it begins, how it develops and then how it lingers afterwards is a never ending learning experience..In this series of blogs we will look at flavour in three ways. In our first blog we examined how we experience flavour when we drink [how we detect and process flavour in different teas].  In our second we explored why different teas have certain flavour [examining how the chemical makeup of the leaf and the processing it goes...