Let’s start 2026 with a new category addition to the shop dropdown: “Daily Drinkers” A term many of you are already familiar with, a daily drinker is a workhorse tea that reliably delivers that good tea thing so dear to us while not breaking the bank in the process. What price range constitutes a daily […]
東方美人 Dōng Fāng Měi Rén Eastern Beauty tea is distinguished as one of the most classic connoisseur oolongs, globally celebrated for its unique and refined qualities. Due to its limited precious supply and widespread acclaim, the higher prices it commands has given rise to the proliferation of imitations from various regions, in other areas of […]
Traveling can be an opportunity to witness one’s own cultural conditioning and bias. Whether or not we gain the entire picture of what is actually happening in these new contexts (we can’t ever fully), the process of dislodging one’s own well-worn assuredness in the face of fresh and even surprising experiences grants us deeper reflections […]
Good things take time, they say. And we'll quickly take up that adage now that the long awaited autumn harvested teas from Yunnan have made it to US soils. This project got started — talks, first-time arrangements, artwork conception, etc. — way back in June; I’m now writing this commencement in late December, finally welcoming […]
It feels like quite a while since I've blog-posted here. And while this may be the case, fortunately I can state that Rivers & Lakes as a whole has not been neglected one bit, and is quite a vibrant source in creating this omission. This year we sourced more tea than last year, expanding our […]
White Tea or 白茶 Bai Cha, perhaps the most basic, unassuming, yet often misunderstood and recondite styles of tea. Enigmatic as it is, white tea has experienced a recent boom in popularity, boasting a steady increase in annual sales since 2008, with this increase becoming exponential within the last few years. In tandem with this […]
I finished Part I of this series signaling to folks that in part II there might be some inspired speculation... You've been warned. In Yiwu, most of the actors hold such a staunch belief in the superiority of Yiwu teas that it could be likened to the intensity of a football team rivalry. During our […]
易武 Yiwu is one of the main towns in Mengla county, the most eastern county in the prefecture Xishuangbanna, bordering Laos in Southern Yunnan. It has a long history of Pu’er production, having been cherished as a source for imperial court tea by government officials, and stands as one of the main origin points of […]
Tea scholar, educator, and Rivers & Lakes community guest writer Miles Cramer pens an essay providing a tasteful glance at tea's journey through time as a ritual communion.
This essay is a short linguistic analysis of the myth, “Chinese is the most widely spoken language on earth”. In recent years, along with China’s rise as an economic and political superpower, more western students have begun to take an interest in studying Chinese, the language with the most native speaker according to several online […]
