Re: Traditional teaware from India?
Here in Mumbai, the most common teaware I see on the street is crappy, flimsy white plastic cups that then end up scattered everywhere. The clay cups cost more money, so instead of a natural resource, they've switched to plastic cups that then (hopefully!) end up in landfills. Alternatively they just end up in piles of rotting trash in vacant lots, or in water bodies or the sea. *sigh*
Jun 23rd, '14, 08:46
Vendor Member
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Joined: May 27th, '12, 12:47
Location: Boston, MA
Re: Traditional teaware from India?
Jay, for iced tea are plastic bags used w/ a rubber band? For a disposable I prefer that to the plastic cups that use (waste) more.
Re: Traditional teaware from India?
ethan, they don't do iced tea here (not commonly anyway). I keep getting milk tea pushed on me and I don't even drink the stuff! They think I'm extremely odd for not drinking it. 
Jun 26th, '14, 15:24
Posts: 470
Joined: Jan 23rd, '07, 14:50
Location: Philadelphia
Contact:
Evan Draper
Re: Traditional teaware from India?
Sup junkie, I almost bought you a case of Ting, but B says you have a local source.
Victor Mair's "The True History of Tea" is my overwhelming favorite tea history. It's an exhaustively researched academic survey somewhat shoehorned into a consumer text. My blog post here. I think Waren Peltier's translations would probably be a good supplement, but for some reason I've never bought it.
If you're interested in the Indian side of things, Piya Chatterjee's "Time for Tea" is an off-the-chain feminist ethnography of tea plantation labor. Maybe one day I'll get "The Hot Brew: The Assam tea industry's most turbulent decade 1987-1997."
From the Anglo perspective, J Norwood Pratt's "Tea Lovers Treasury" and Agnes Repplier's "To Think of Tea!" are musty but fun reads if you go in for burnished anecdotes and clipper ship races. Read Robert Fortune's stuff; it's probably online, and if you can get it, there's no reason to read Sarah Rose's digested version.
There's a ton from the Japanese perspective (see "Stories from a Tearoom Window" for chanoyu anecdotes) but I'll highlight two forgotten-slices-of-tea-history: Patricia Graham's "Tea of the Sages: the Art of Sencha" (sneakily, a tea ART history) and Norman Waddell's book about Baisao, "The Old Tea Seller."
Oh, and Robert Gardella's "Harvesting Mountains" is an impeccable economic history of the tea trade in Fujian. Dense but worth it.
I have the books from the Heisses and the Camellia Sinensis guys; some good stuff in there, but just all over the map. They make me tired just to look at them.
Victor Mair's "The True History of Tea" is my overwhelming favorite tea history. It's an exhaustively researched academic survey somewhat shoehorned into a consumer text. My blog post here. I think Waren Peltier's translations would probably be a good supplement, but for some reason I've never bought it.
If you're interested in the Indian side of things, Piya Chatterjee's "Time for Tea" is an off-the-chain feminist ethnography of tea plantation labor. Maybe one day I'll get "The Hot Brew: The Assam tea industry's most turbulent decade 1987-1997."
From the Anglo perspective, J Norwood Pratt's "Tea Lovers Treasury" and Agnes Repplier's "To Think of Tea!" are musty but fun reads if you go in for burnished anecdotes and clipper ship races. Read Robert Fortune's stuff; it's probably online, and if you can get it, there's no reason to read Sarah Rose's digested version.
There's a ton from the Japanese perspective (see "Stories from a Tearoom Window" for chanoyu anecdotes) but I'll highlight two forgotten-slices-of-tea-history: Patricia Graham's "Tea of the Sages: the Art of Sencha" (sneakily, a tea ART history) and Norman Waddell's book about Baisao, "The Old Tea Seller."
Oh, and Robert Gardella's "Harvesting Mountains" is an impeccable economic history of the tea trade in Fujian. Dense but worth it.
I have the books from the Heisses and the Camellia Sinensis guys; some good stuff in there, but just all over the map. They make me tired just to look at them.