2013 World Tea Expo

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2013 World Tea Expo

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jun 4th, '13, 01:06

Greetings everyone!

I am preparing to leave for the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas that begins this Friday (June 7, 2013) and am curious if anyone whom has previously attended the World Tea Expo has any suggestions on how to make the most of the time while there or has any other inside info for the trip. I'm open to any suggestions.

I've enrolled in some very interesting seminars and workshops and am looking forward to meeting new friends but I am guessing the expo is quite a lot to take in.

Blessings!

Scott

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by Chip » Jun 4th, '13, 01:28

Been to the Vegas Expo twice including last year's (also the East show twice). In order to best answer your question, why are you going?

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jun 4th, '13, 03:49

Chip wrote:Been to the Vegas Expo twice including last year's (also the East show twice). In order to best answer your question, why are you going?
The complete answer is complex and long. So I'll keep it short:

1. business development
2. honoring a teacher's request
3. to meet and connect with other people within the richness of tea
4. further self-education
5. to deepen my awareness of the American tea market and evolving American tea culture...I came to tea primarily and first through Chinese/Taiwanese culture. My education in tea has been primarily in Mandarin and accompanied my studies of East Asian philosophy, gong fu practice, and guqin within the context of Taiwan yi1 shu1(藝術) culture. As such, there are other areas of tea and tea region that I am more or less ignorant of and am looking to open my understanding to.
6. adventure
7. to have a week away with my wife
8. definitely not for strippers and gambling :D

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by MEversbergII » Jun 4th, '13, 10:18

We have a tea expo here in the US? Alright, I know where I'm going next summer...

M.

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by Chip » Jun 4th, '13, 12:06

MEversbergII wrote:We have a tea expo here in the US? Alright, I know where I'm going next summer...

M.
Unfortunately, the WTE is for "trade only." What is trade can be pretty wide open however. For instance, bloggers from TC have shown up.

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by Chip » Jun 4th, '13, 12:19

茶藝-TeaArt08 wrote:
Chip wrote:Been to the Vegas Expo twice including last year's (also the East show twice). In order to best answer your question, why are you going?
The complete answer is complex and long. So I'll keep it short:

1. business development
2. honoring a teacher's request
3. to meet and connect with other people within the richness of tea
4. further self-education
5. to deepen my awareness of the American tea market and evolving American tea culture...I came to tea primarily and first through Chinese/Taiwanese culture. My education in tea has been primarily in Mandarin and accompanied my studies of East Asian philosophy, gong fu practice, and guqin within the context of Taiwan yi1 shu1(藝術) culture. As such, there are other areas of tea and tea region that I am more or less ignorant of and am looking to open my understanding to.
6. adventure
7. to have a week away with my wife
8. definitely not for strippers and gambling :D
OK, this could be very helpful to you. Usually the WTE is what you make it to be. It is certainly a good place to make contacts. Some seminars may be helpful as well, though I did not look at the line up for this year.

The floor in Vegas is pretty big, so I first do a quick walk through to help loosen up after the long flight ... also noting must see booths. I always see a lot of old and new names.

You can best make use of your limited time by then focusing on seeing particalar vendors who most interest you. It is amazing how quickly the time flies by. So avoid making too much eye contact with vendors not of interest to you. This is not being rude, just not wasting their time nor yours ... everyone (including you) there has expenses of being there, so everyone's time is valuable, including yours. However, any vendor will talk with you.

What amazed us last year, of the 20 or more booths from China (all lined up in a row), almost all were completely unmanned. It was weird. There may have been a few items thrown on the table to make it look like they were there, and then they split. :shock:

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by tenuki » Jun 4th, '13, 13:02

茶藝-TeaArt08 wrote: 7. to have a week away with my wife
I first read this 'week away from my wife', what you actually wrote is much better. :D

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jun 4th, '13, 15:37

Chip,
Thank you for the suggestions!
OK, this could be very helpful to you. Usually the WTE is what you make it to be. It is certainly a good place to make contacts. Some seminars may be helpful as well, though I did not look at the line up for this year.
Chip, thank you, yes there are a number of really interesting seminars that I am looking forward to. The offerings seem to cover territory from trends/issues in tea to skill building workshops to informative seminars. It looks like the selection of courses is rich.
The floor in Vegas is pretty big, so I first do a quick walk through to help loosen up after the long flight ... also noting must see booths. I always see a lot of old and new names.
You can best make use of your limited time by then focusing on seeing particalar vendors who most interest you. It is amazing how quickly the time flies by.
Good suggestion. Having not previously been, I didn't think of the floor as overly big...so, I imagine it is all a lot to take in, especially if one sits to spend any time at all with certain vendors. Truthfully, I hadn't anticipated that having three days to be in the exposition hall would fly by, but when you say it, it makes sense.
What amazed us last year, of the 20 or more booths from China (all lined up in a row), almost all were completely unmanned. It was weird. There may have been a few items thrown on the table to make it look like they were there, and then they split. :shock:
Haha :lol: Wow..really? Honestly I wondered about this because when our friends visit from Taiwan they often request for us to take them to Napa for wine and to the nearby (Lake Tahoe) casinos for gambling.
tenuki wrote:
茶藝-TeaArt08 wrote: 7. to have a week away with my wife
I first read this 'week away from my wife', what you actually wrote is much better. :D


Tenuki, careful, you could get me in trouble. :wink:

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by Math » Jun 17th, '13, 10:00

Hello Teaart, hope you had a good time.

Did you document your trip to the world tea expo? Would be nice to see some photography and hear some details and stories for all teachatters who couldn't be in Las Vegas?

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by Chip » Jun 17th, '13, 10:20

I have heard from a few attendees now that there were fewer origin exhibitor vendors there this year ... seems the Expo is evolving somewhat. Only time will tell if this is a positive trend or not.

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by Evan Draper » Jun 17th, '13, 12:15

Wow, that is a pretty circumspect answer from Chip. It seems there have been a lot of political dustups lately in those spheres which I know very little about....

Did anyone go to the aroma workshop at the expo? I'm really curious how that one went. If someone was like, "here, smell these vials of pure linalool and damascenones" I want to know where I can get some. But if it was just "here is some rose water, do any teas smell kind of like that?" I'd be doubly glad I stayed home.

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Re: 2013 World Tea Expo

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jun 18th, '13, 02:17

Math wrote:Hello Teaart, hope you had a good time.

Did you document your trip to the world tea expo? Would be nice to see some photography and hear some details and stories for all teachatters who couldn't be in Las Vegas?
Math,

Thank you and blessings! It was a rich experience. I made wonderful new tea friends from around the world. It was good to spend time with friends from Taiwan and immerse for a moment in shared perspectives of tea, from a Taiwan chayi viewpoint. I tasted many teas and gained a strong sense of the transitions and trends in the American tea market throughout the various classes I took and within multiple discussion/reflection sessions.

Some of the best teas I had were Korean teas from Hankook teas: really wonderful teas prepared by very friendly staff. I particularly enjoyed and purchased a nice Jaksul green tea that I look forward to pouring when its time comes. As I mentioned to Chip, the Taiwan teas were good but I felt that we have better Taiwan teas at home in our tea closet than we generally sampled at Expo, though there were some good teas (one Wenshan Baozhong in particular). The Nepali teas, specifically their first flush tea, were very good. They are doing some wonderful things with gender equality in the tea farms there as well as keeping the ownership of the farms in the hands of the growers/pickers, and really attempting to grow with sustainable methods.

I spent a fair amount of time talking, sharing, and being educated more deeply to Yixing ware with Master Tang Zhaoxia. It was nice to sit face to face with a generations long Yixing potter, located in Yixing, and discuss some of the myths and misinformation on Yixing and how to discern fine pots, the true state/availability of Zisha clay in Yixing, to discuss build methods and Yixing making, underlying philosophy, as well as to watch Tang Laoshi so easily construct a pot during her Yixing demonstration. There were great and warm connections made and much laughing and sharing discussing tea and Chinese culture and the present development of chayi. (Here I was very grateful for speaking Mandarin and grateful to have my wife's translating assistance if the depth went over my head :) )

I did acquire some new teaware (an Yixing pot, a nice pottery tea boat, some cups, as well as a fair amount of tea). I was told that The Art Of Tea magazine should soon be available in the U.S. more easily, that distributorship difficulties were on their way to being resolved in the U.S.

Unfortunately the show is so controlled that no pictures are allowed; I would have liked to document the trip more deeply but we were repeatedly told to not film or photograph, even voice record in our seminars.

The Taiwan Tea Assoc. had a special tea baking unit, small and custom built for the show, brought to the floor. Here they performed tea baking and tasting experiments with one of the government tea researchers from Taiwan (Huang Laoshi). I sat in on these tastings and it was amazing to see what Huang Laoshi could do with the flavor of a moderate tea to bring it to a much better quality through baking. There was talk about making machines like the one they brought available to small sellers, distributors, teashops so that people could custom bake their teas to new specifications. However, Huang Laoshi detailed that the development of the tea's characteristics while baking are not linear and that the compounds in the leaf fluctuate at unpredictable moves making the baking process, even when monitored by a Ph.D tea scientist, difficult to calculate and, hence, an art.
Did anyone go to the aroma workshop at the expo? I'm really curious how that one went. If someone was like, "here, smell these vials of pure linalool and damascenones" I want to know where I can get some. But if it was just "here is some rose water, do any teas smell kind of like that?" I'd be doubly glad I stayed home.
Evan,
I did attend one aroma/tasting workshop primarily because the workshop was supposed to present and use an "internationally standardized" aroma/clarification chart. However, even though the presenters are well known in tea circles, I personally felt the seminar fell flat. It was the one seminars that I judged not to deliver. One participant next to me mentioned that he buys the wine sommelier tasting scent kits to train his employees and that they work well, bypassing the need for the workshop.
Also, in the workshop, while sampling a tea, one person detected lychee notes in the tea while sampling. The presenter said not to think of tea in this way and to find a quality already on the presenter's provided list to describe the tea. While this is fine, I must admit this personally bothered me slightly because I judged the presenter to boxing and packaging tea in their way, potentially without respect or knowledge of tea point-of-origin cultural/tea perspectives/descriptors. Being that the presenter was not from a Chinese or Asian background they were excluding key terms that are used in the places where the tea is grown. Lychee is an well-liked fruit in East Asian cultures and some teas do present a lychee characteristic. For me, I studied tea in Taiwan, in Mandarin, and their are terms for which English has only poor approximations when describing tea, specifically given, for example, Chinese/Mandarin root radicals in Chinese characters used for description. It makes more sense to me to deeply know and research the cultures where tea has been under long, arduous, and artistic development, to embody and assimilate fully their deep perspectives and descriptions before projecting one's own external box on tea. While I understand the logic that would try to create an international standard for tea description, I also celebrate each person describing tea in their way, as well as knowing the descriptors in the cultures where tea is grown and is already a longstanding practice/art form. To me, the presenter's list needed to be expanded; it was not that the drinker whom detected lychee notes needed to abstain from "lychee" as a descriptor.

Lastly, there were a fair number of Chinese vendors but they were often playing with their phones, appeared disinterested or just blatantly sleeping at multiple booths. Even my wife, whom is Chinese from Taiwan, found the Chinese vendor "energy" a little odd.

Overall, the experience was immensely rich and too much report upon easily. As Chip warned before I left, the expo floor can be overwhelming.

Blessings!!

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