Welcome to Leaf House Tea! We are pleased that you’ll be coming along on this journey of tea exploration.
There will be two paths on this journey. On one path, our tea reviews, we share our knowledge of the many varieties of the ancient beverage called tea. We’ll take a close look at the many different types of teas, explain the production processes involved in their manufacture, and then point you in the direction where you can purchase teas to sample.
Our tea reviews focus on beverages made from leaves of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. All of the true teas such as black, green, pu’erh, and oolongs are made from leaves of C. sinensis. And though we occasionally review intriguing herbal teas, our passion here is for camellia tea.
On the other path of the Leaf House Tea journey, we engage the do-it-yourself impulse of tea drinkers. Not content with just brewing their own tea, many aficionados are nowadays keen to grow their own Camellia sinensis plants, harvest tea leaf, and craft homemade teas. To assist nascent tea growers, we take what we have learned in the Leaf House Tea Garden and help others get started in the ancient craft of tea. There’s more to growing tea camellia than you might think, and our experience working with this fascinating plant is shared at this site.
So those are the two paths at LHT: the product and the process, along with you, the reader, as part of the expanding American tea community.
More about our tea reviews
We understand how challenging it can be to find the right teas for daily indulgence and special occasions. Our philosophy is to keep things simple. This means that we:
- value teas that are easy to prepare;
- prefer teawares that are simple to use;
- and demand price points that don’t break the bank.
We also reject the stuffy pretensions that often come with tea culture. Tea is the people’s drink and we’re going to keep it that way!
In our reviews, we drill down on specific brands of tea and direct you to good deals available online. We also review teawares and other gizmos and gadgets that can enhance your tea experience.
What We Do
Our service to you is pretty straight-forward. We like tea, we want to drink tea every day, and we want you to do the same.
The problem is that there are so many choices that the ordinary tea drinker can quickly become confused and not know what to buy or where to buy.
We don’t want tea confusion. We want tea consumption!
To help you to choose the right tea at the right price, we do three things:
- Drink a lot of tea and keep careful notes of our impressions;
- Comb the web for other people’s tea impressions; and
- Combine 1 and 2 to distill detailed tea reviews.
Number 3 is challenging because tea drinkers are a chatty lot and they can also hold strong opinions.
It takes time to sort ego-talk from the truth.
But reviewing tea is our job and we’re determined to share with you, dear tea drinker, what we have learned.
How to grow tea
Our tea garden is 100% organic, and though it’s a lot of work, organic methods are more rewarding to experience and also produce a higher quality tea leaf than conventional methods. This means that we know how to work the soil, germinate tea seed, make our own compost, and nurture tea plants.
We take our own tea leaf and then apply time-honored methods of crafting finished, drinkable teas. Tea manufacture ain’t easy, but we love it.
We also share we we have learned about new technologies that are useful for gardeners and growers who have specific interests in tea or more general interests in working the land. We hope that you share what you have learned as well, as part of our tea grower’s community.
The Leaf House Tea Difference
Our working knowledge of the tea industry is valuable to you as a tea drinker because we can see through some of the smoke that gets blown regarding methods of cultivation and production.
There’s also lots of biology-nerd stuff involved with tea framing and tea making. So it might help a tiny bit that Leaf House Tea founder and life-long bio-nerd, Mike Loeb, has a PhD in the biological sciences.
We think that you will see the benefits of our first-hand experience.
If you have any constructive input, please contact us. We would love to hear from you.
Happy steeping!
PS – Are you wondering what a leaf house is? A leaf house is a sheltered space where freshly harvested tea leaf is held for several hours to wither and soften. Of course, the leaf house for our website is a virtual one but try to imagine the beautiful scene that unfolds as the leaf prepares itself for a journey to delight your taste sensations.
