Chinese New Year Tea Customs – Gold Ingots Tea, Sugar Tea, Four Ingredients Soup…

Wenzhuo Liu

The Chinese Lunar New Year (Spring Festival) is coming again. What are the interesting New Year tea customs around China? In the south of the Yangtze River, people will entertain guests with Gold Ingots Tea during the Spring Festival, implying the blessing of wealth. The new year tea custom in Zhejiang Province is from the first day to the third day of the first month, and a bowl of Four Ingredients Soup is offered to the guests. Hunan Province serves brown sugar tea first, and then salty tea Six Ingredients Tea, cup after cup until the guests are full. Fujian Province has a tradition of drinking tea in the New Year as a blessing activity during the Spring Festival. Drink a bowl of Sugar Tea, people can have peace, happiness and good luck.

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Tea Mobile Application – Myteapal App

Wenzhuo Liu

Liu Jie, a young man from Chengdu China, registered a company in the United States and developed a tea mobile application (app), MyTeaPal. During his study in the United States, he began to organize activities to drink Chinese tea in the campus community to promote Chinese tea culture. Before and after graduation, he decided to start his own business independently, continue to develop his beloved tea business, combine with his computer major, design and program himself, and launch a multi-functional tea app, set up online tea community and tea club. In the future, he may build his own tea brand and become an American brand specializing in promoting Chinese tea.

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Creative Christmas and New Year Drinks – “Dragon and Tiger Fight” – Tea and White Spirit

Wenzhuo Liu

The Christmas and New Year holidays are coming. I believe many people will go to all kinds of parties and celebrations. Here recommends interesting and creative tea and wine blending drinks, which have both traditions to tell guests and winter health care effects. The Naxi ethnic minorities in Yunnan like to drink a kind of tea and white spirit drink called Dragon and Tiger Fight. The blue flames in the tea cup are like roaring tigers, while the hot tea is poured into the cup like a swimming dragon. This lively drink is very suitable for winter holidays, it can also cure and relieve cold symptoms. However, traditional drinks can also be improved to be closer to modern people’s eating and drinking habits. Traditional pottery can be replaced with glass wine glasses, combined with cool cocktail technology, to make holiday drinks more eye-catching.

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Dutch Tea Plantation- Het Zyuderblad

Wenzhuo Liu and Linda Cebrian Rampen

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in the July 2021 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-Het Zyuderblad茶园:分享一杯荷兰好茶”. 


Het Zuderblad tea plantation is the first tea garden in the Netherlands. Linda Cebrian Rampen is the owner of this tea garden. The tea garden is located in Soerendonk, in the south of the Netherlands, near the Belgian border. Linda’s family has run the farm for generations. As the only daughter of her parents, she inherited the farm and developed a tea garden through her own efforts. After a lot of reading research and travel investigation in the previous two years, Linda successfully achieved the first goal of the tea garden in 2015, planting 120 tea trees for outdoor experiments. In 2017, she planted 2000 tea trees in the second batch, and continued to expand in 2018, planting 1000 more tea trees in the garden. The next batch of tea seedlings of different varieties are cultivated in the greenhouse in order to select tea varieties that are more suitable for the Dutch climate. Linda is confident about the future of her tea garden.

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Tea Magazine in German- Olaf Tarmas

Article Wenzhuo Liu

Photo Odile Hain

Olaf Tarmas is a professional journalist in Hamburg, Germany. As a student, he worked in a tea shop and became attached to tea. During his career and personal travel, he visited several tea producing places and traditional tea drinking areas in Asia and Europe. He, together with some tea people in German speaking areas and several organizers of Berlin Tea Festival, launched the first German tea magazine t-Magazin in March 2022. In April, C*Space, a shared space in Berlin, Germany, held a press conference for the magazine. In October, it helped organize the Pop-up event Berlin Tea Festival.

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What kind of tea set is suitable for drinking tea and meditating? – Czech ceramic artist Petr Novák

Article Wenzhuo Liu

Photo Raneta Coolakova

Petr Novák, a Czech, has been making teawares for 20 years. In the strong tea drinking atmosphere of Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, about 25 years ago, Petr happened to visit a tea house, so he began to like drinking tea, and can socialize while tasting different teas. Through his own researches and visit to the ceramic art rooms, Petr’s tea sets have gradually become famous in Czech Republic and many countries. Out of curiosity about mysterious Asia, he slowly learned Zen and became a Buddhist, focusing on the combination of tea drinking and meditation, and making tea sets that are convenient for meditation.

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the Tea Road of German Product Designer

Wenzhuo Liu

German product designer Maurice Eric Zacher fell in love with drinking tea many years ago. He was familiar with tea sets, and has designed and transformed many tea sets. After studying and working in Japan intermittently for many years, he was not only keen on tasting tea, tea and tea food, but also visited many tea houses and collected tea sets. At the end of 2020, he returned to Germany and began to plant tea trees, now there are hundreds of tea seedlings of different varieties on his big balcony. This spring, he also picked fresh tea leaves and made steamed green tea. In the future, he will launch more design projects related to tea, establish a tea garden in Hesse, Germany, and produce Japanese green tea or Chinese white tea.

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Will ceramic craftsmen who love drinking tea make better tea sets?

Wenzhuo Liu

Although Marcel Karcher has seven years of professional experience as a business consultant and financial analyst, because he likes drinking tea, he once had the idea of making tea trade. Finally, he found a more suitable one to make ceramic tea sets, and began to sell his works three years ago. Ordinary people are not particularly picky about the ceramics used to make tableware, but the tea people are different. They brew different kinds of tea and use tea sets with different materials and functions, which have relatively fine requirements for ceramic craftsmen. Marcel felt that Western ceramic artists did not pay attention to the later trimming of the ceramic body after throwing the body, while he liked to make thin body and trim to very details.

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Slash Career “/” multiple career Tea Potter

Wenzhuo Liu

Nowadays, more and more young people are no longer satisfied with the lifestyle of “single career”, but begin to experience a richer and more diversified life through multiple careers. More people define themselves with identities related to hobbies and spare time life, not just positions at work. One can have more than one profession and method of living. Karina Klages would talk about her multiple identities and how tea and ceramic making have influenced her diversified life.

 

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New Chinese Teaware made by European Ceramic Artist- Inge Nielsen

Wenzhuo Liu

Inge Nielsen was a graduate student studying Chinese contemporary literature. She was once obsessed with the poetry of Chinese contemporary poets such as Bei Dao and Gu Cheng of the misty poetry school. She studied and lived in Beijing for many years. Coincidentally, when she lived in Taiwan, she turned her hobby of ceramic art into work and successfully turned her appreciation of the beauty of shapeless literature into her love of the beauty of tangible ceramic artifacts. Although Inge now lives in Belgium, her creation is always inspired by Chinese elements, such as traditional Chinese window lattice, ginkgo leaf pattern, celadon, blue and white porcelain and so on.

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