Early spring cleaning

It is time to do some early spring cleaning...or is it a late New Year's decluttering. Not sure. The bottom line is that my tea stash has reached absolutely absurd proportions. As I've mentioned before, I rarely buy tea because I end up receiving so many samples and gifts of tea. What that means it that the tea cabinet fills and fills and overflows. I don't know what I have and I don't always remember to go back to some true favorites. The time has come to clean house.

Over the next weeks and months I'm going to make it my mission to try every tea in the house. At that moment I must decide: keep, throw away, or give away. I'll let you know what I'm trying and the decisions I make and, occasionally, I'll offer some of the old teas on the blog as giveaways.

This morning I tried an old Sungma Estate 1st Flush Darjeeling SFTGFOP1 from Upton Tea. It was as wonderful as I'd remembered even though it's quite old at this point. (I reviewed it in 2008!) What I discovered is that my opinion on 2nd Flush Darjeelings and 1st Flush Darjeelings has completely flipped. Give me a 1st Flush over a 2nd Flush any day. My decision was easy on this one - there was only enough left for one cup! One more empty tin. Mission accomplished. That was so easy I'll certainly give another tea a try later today.

I've received a few announcements I wanted to let you know about:
* T Ching has recently upgraded their website. Users should register to check out the new site and to subscribe to their RSS feed.

* NYC Coffee & Tea Festival approaches! This event has grown a great deal since I attended a few years ago. I'm looking forward to checking it out again - but that will have to wait until next year for me. If you're interested, the event is Feb. 19 - 20, 2011 at 7W New York. This year there is a special tea presentation and tasting sponsored by The Tea Gallery and the Mandarin's Tea Room. Tickets are extremely limited so check it out soon! ALSO, a HUGE note of importance, the Specialty Tea Institute will be offering Level 1 and Level 2 sessions this year. I hope this continues in future years.

* Finally, the American Tea Masters Association is doing a push to let people know about the value of becoming a certified "tea master." You can read more about their educational programs here.

Have a great week everyone. Next time I'll have a few books to tell you about.

Taken from http://teapages.blogspot.com/