Lizzy's Corner — tea tasting

As you may have guessed, we enjoy pairing tea with different types of foods. Once or twice a year we host a Tea + Cheese flight at our tea shop in downtown Kirkland, WA. Here are the teas on a tea flight pairing we did a couple of year ago: White Peony, Sencha Fukamushi, Ti Kwan Yin Imperial, Kenilworth Ceylon and Yunnan Imperial. The cheeses were brie, parmesan, goat cheese, mozzarella, and cheddar. Participants were able to pair five teas with fives cheese for a total of 25 combinations. Surprisingly, the consensus among many of the participants was that the goat cheese...

I have been a tea drinker all of my adult life, but before I became a serious tea drinker, I didn’t give much thought to where tea came from. I assumed that tea bags and the contents were made in a factory. I never thought of tea as an agricultural product until I started taking tea classes. Once I learned that tea comes from the processed leaves of the camellia sinensis plant, a whole new world opened up for me. The various types of tea (black, white, green, oolong and puerh) are all made from tea leaves and for the...

Greetings from the LizzyKate construction office! After months of negotiations and planning with landlords, architects, designers and contractors, and approvals from the landlord and the city (still working on the Health Department, but that's very close and not yet due), we finally began constructon last week! As some of you may know, we are converting the space from a cafe style service to a tasting room with tea bar. We're doing this so that we'll have not only the ability to sell our teas and related products for making tea at home, but also so we can provide service in the...

We have some BIG news to share with you! After searching for almost a year, we have landed in a wonderful retail store location in downtown Kirkland. As our local fans know, Kirkland is a cute Seattle suburb located on the northeastern shore of Lake Washington. With boutique stores, sandwich shops, Pacific Northwest-theme restaurants, bakeries and art galleries, downtown Kirkland is a fun destination for an outing with friends or family. Marina Park is one block from our new location, and from spring through fall, the Wednesday Market and Summer Concert series take place there. After launching our online store...

In May I traveled to Japan to take part in a Tea Tour of Japan! Dan Robertson of World Tea Tours was the amazing organizer and guide, and the group was a mix of people from the US and UK tea industries. We started in Tokyo and our first stop was Shikuoka near Mt. Fuji. We visited tea fields, several processing plants, a tea museum and a tea auction. As you can imagine, we did a lot of tea tasting at each stop, learning about the differences between sencha, gyokuro, hojicha and other types of Japanese tea. From Shizuoka we...

We've had a busy holiday weekend with visitors from Minnesota, tea tasting and a very exciting football game. My cousin and her husband are visiting Seattle for the first time together, and in addition to taking in the usual Seattle sights (Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, Snoqualmie Falls, plus many more), they've been sampling and learning a lot about tea. They had their first formal introduction to tea at the "Experience Green Teas" class at the Experience Tea store in Issaquah. The owner, Roberta, explained how all true tea comes from the same tea plant (camellia sinensis) and that green...

Happy 2015! Thank you to our family, friends and fans for your support in 2014. It takes a village to launch a start-up! I spent my last morning of 2014 taking a Tea and Chocolate Pairing class at Experience Tea Studio. This was the first tea class for my teenage daughter, and we went with another mom and her teenage daughter. The studio owner and instructor chose five teas (white peony, Chinese green tea, Taiwanese oolong, Chinese black and Yerba Mate) to pair with five chocolates (white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate 70%, mint dark chocolate, and dark chocolate with crystallized ginger)....

Last week we hosted our launch party and invited over a bunch of family and friends to help us celebrate. Of course, we had a number of different teas for people to try and they all seemed to enjoy them.  We also had three different cocktails that we put out and many folks asked for the recipes. Here they are:   Blueberry Bomb Equal parts Grand Marnier and Amaretto Add approximately a 5-to1 ratio (mix to your taste) of cold brewed Blueberry Fields Add a generous splash of grenadine Add a less generous splash of Rose's Lime Juice Arnie's Slice Gin...

After the tea classes and World Tea Expo, I tried to synthesize what I had learned and gathered friends for tea tasting. For my first tea tasting I invited friends I’ve known for years and asked for their honest opinions. I got lots of great feedback – “this iced tea is refreshing,” “jasmine tea is best with Chinese food,” “chamomile is blah by itself,” etc. I also learned that everyone has their own taste palate and what tested great to one person was another’s least favorite tea. I also learned to limited the number of teas for a tasting and...

Once again I was at a spot where I realized I needed to learn more about tea from a professional. I searched for tea classes in the Seattle area and found a tea store called Experience Tea. Fortunately, the owner, Roberta Fuhr, is a Certified Tea Specialist which means she's taken the STI (Specialty Tea Institute) Level 1 and 2 classes plus all five of the Level 3 classes. The Level 3 classes are 1 or 2 day classes which focus on one or two types of tea (black, green, oolong, puerh, white, plus a cupping class). She has owned her wonderful store...