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 A Short History Smell has a direct line to the brain. The olfactory membrane is the only place in the human body where the central nervous system meets the outside world. Most senses route through the thalamus first; scent goes straight to the limbic system, an ancient region tied to emotion and desire. In practice, we react to a smell before we know we’ve smelled it. ...