Valley Brook TeaBlog 146: What If Tea Plants Get Heatstroke? If people are exposed to high temperatures for a prolonged time, they can potentially get heatstroke, a condition caused by body...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 145: What’s A Strong Tea? It is a common sense that drinking strong tea and strong coffee can be bad for our health. But in terms of the definition of a strong...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 144: Steeping, Infusing, and Brewing: What’s the Difference? Enjoying a tea is fairly easy. We don’t need complex machines, industrialized equipments, or a time-consuming process. A kettle of...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 143: What Can Experienced Tea Makers Tell from A Cup of Tea? When I was very young, I once asked our tea maker Mr. Xue Sr.: natural talent and experience, which one is the more important quality of...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 142: The Beauty of High Mountain Tea FieldsIf you’re a regular tea drinker, you must have heard the term “high mountain tea”. To many people, “high mountain tea” is a just another...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 141: Why Should You Drink Hot Tea in Summer The summer heat peaks around this time. If you live in the northeast, you’ve probably experienced one of the hottest summers last week....
Valley Brook TeaBlog 140: Why Do Tea Plants Like Acidic Soil? In our opinion, Fujian is the most important tea-producing area in the world. Fujian is the birthplace of black tea (Tongmu Village/桐木关),...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 139: Making White Tea - Not As Easy As You Think Recently, one of our friends from Illinois shared a white tea product with us. He said that his local tea shop owner told him that this...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 138: How Do We Restore Tea Fields after A Flood? If you follow us on social media (@valleybrooktea on Twitter and Instagram), you might have seem pictures and videos of a recent flood...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 137: How Do Light, Heat and Water Content Affect Tea Plants? The heathy growth of tea plants requires a set of conditions. In an ideal growing environment, tea plants can grow stronger, live longer,...
Valley Brook TeaBlog136: Black Tea “Jin Jun Mei” - 4 Common Misunderstandings (Part II)In our last blog, we talked about black tea “Jin Jun Mei/金骏眉” and the first two common misunderstandings. (see last blog for more) Today,...
Valley Brook TeaBlog135: Black Tea “Jin Jun Mei” - 4 Common Misunderstandings (Part I) Happy 4th of July! Click here to check out our holiday sale! When it comes to black tea, we have to talk about “Jin Jun Mei/金骏眉”, the...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 134: What Wuyi Teas Are Available in Early Summer? The highest temperature in Washington DC today is 94F/34C. Whether we like it or not, this is only the beginning of the hottest time of...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 133: Tea Field Management - Why Do We Cut Old Tea Plants? Recently, many readers asked us that since we only have one harvest per year, what do we do after the harvest? Do we just focus on sales...
Valley Brook TeaBlog132: Tea Cultivars and Tea Categories There are two important tea knowledge that we cannot emphasize enough: 1. Tea plants do not make tea. 2. There aren’t any “green tea...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 131: Black Tea is Nourishing for the Stomach In tea drinking, black tea is always considered good for the stomach. This is not a groundless claim. As a fully fermented tea, black tea...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 130: The Origin of Lapsang Souchong’s “Smoky Smell”When we discuss the history black tea, there’s one black tea we cannot avoid: Lapsang Souchong/正山小种. To many tea lovers, Lapsang Souchong...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 129: Is Black Tea Missing A Crucial Tea-Making Process? The making of Black Tea is not a mystery. From the harvest, fresh leaves need to go through at least 9 stages of processing to become a...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 128: Tea Plant Crossbreeding/Grafting: How We Create New CultivarsTea as a beverage is incredible. The flavors and the aromas of an authentic tea product does not have any “ingredients”. All those...
Valley Brook TeaBlog 127: White Tea - What Is the Fragrance of “White Leaf Hairs/毫香”?In our previous white tea blogs, there’s one thing we never fully explained: the fragrance of those “white hairs” on tea leaves. Today,...