Author Archives: Xavier
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From one cliché to another
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I wrote some times ago a post about how sometimes tea people were wrongly perceived as being old grannies drinking their tea at 5 o’clock. I “just” found now about another cliché but a more positive one. To be more precise, it just came to …
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Winter is coming
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Winter is coming and no, this has nothing to do with Game of Thrones or with the season. Yes, in both cases, winter is truly coming but in tea, you could say that. But first we need to take a step back in time and …
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Teasing…
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Winter is coming, More tea will be brought. A ship is docking.
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That’s how it goes; Everybody knows
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I travelled a little bit these last days and I heard on radio two things that made me think about tea. The first one was an interview of a famous cook (whose name I never had heard and I don’t remember) that spoke about bakers …
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There can never be surprises in logic
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Following my latest post, I dug a little more into the plantation concept and I received some more information from a couple of people, so here is the follow-up. According to the Tea Board of India, there are 833 small tea farmers in Darjeeling. I …
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There was no doubt that it paid to make the gardens
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As quite often these days, this month article was inspired by @lazyliteratus or rather by him being quoted by the Nikkei Asian Review in an article on Nepal and Darjeeling teas. Even if Geoffrey’s article was not focusing only on how the tea is produced …
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Who needs a strategy for picking new teas?
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I was a few days ago in Germany in a tea shop/saloon (or lounge as they called it) and I went through their catalog to see what they had in stock and to compare their newest teas and blends with what I had seen in …
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Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black
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Everybody has heard this sentence by Henry Ford that is usually misunderstood to mean something like “we don’t care about customers, we know what they want”. The truth is that because of the development of assembly line (which allowed for a drop in price), black …
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Still something to say
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No rainy writing A month with sad news I’ll just pour a cup
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They were looking for unicorns
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This title comes from an essay by Umberto Eco, the famous Italian writer (among many, many, many other things). In it, he argued that when two different cultures meet, there are 5 solutions: conquest (either to make them like us or to destroy them), cultural …