L’uomo beve il Tè perché lo angoscia l’uomo. Il Tè beve l’uomo, l’erba più amara. -Guido Ceronetti Tea transcends being just a beverage—it’s a ritual, a tradition, and a bridge between nature and culture. With over 3,000 varieties, tea offers an incredible diversity of flavors, aromas, and benefits. Despite its vastness, every true tea originates from one remarkable plant: Camellia sinensis. The wide variety arises from how the leaves are processed, combined, or infused. This guide delves into the unique categories of true teas, mixed teas, and herbal tisanes, as well as the distinctions between Japanese and Chinese tea traditions. Steps to produce tea (stolen from infograph) ...

💭 Odor, oftener than any other sense impression, delivers a memory to consciousness little impaired by lapse of time, stripped of irrelevancies of the moment or of the intervening years, apparently alive and all but convincing — Roy Bedichek Some history first 📖 The physiological configuration of the sense of smell is a reminder of the primacy it once had for our predecessors, who walked on all fours with their noses close to the ground: the olfactory membrane is the only place in the human body where the central nervous system comes into direct contact with the environment. All other sensory information initially comes in through the thalamus. The sense of smell, however, is first processed in the limbic lobe, one of the oldest parts of the brain and the seat of sexual and emotional impulses. In other words, before we know we are in contact with a smell, we have already received and reacted to it. 🧠 ...