Download Your Copy Infused: Adventures In Tea Written And Illustrated By Henrietta Lovell Available In Audiobook

of my guilty pleasures is to read snobbish connoisseurs talking about their highly sensual subjectsperfume, food, coffee, wine and yes, tea,

Henrietta Lovell is the founder of the Rare Tea Company sitelink com/, whose mission is to bring handmade tea from small farmers all over the world to consumers in the West, and to change, no, to revert, the westerners' tea habit from tea bags to loose leaf tea.
She has successfully introduced teapairing to many high end restaurants,

Infused is a mix of Lovells memoir as a business woman and a tea connoisseur, It includes a lot of descriptions of different types of tea and tea infusing recipes, A mustread if you want to expand your tea experience, I give her extra credit for using gaiwan tea sets,

As recently as in, onlyof UK households drank tea from tea bags, “Interestingly, the best CTC machinemade tea grades are often bought by the poorest nations: in North Africa, Afghanistan and the Urals, In places where tea is drunk and life is hard, they drink the highest quality tea they can afford, Ironically, the British can afford the best but for the last seventyodd years have mostly drunk the worst, ” I forgive her for being snobbish, for I too think tea bags are a ridiculous idea, You cant drink coffee beans directly, so instant coffee makes a bit of sense, But for tea, all you need to do is to infuse the leaves with water,

What makes me like her is this: “I often have to pick dishes from a menu written in Chinese entirely at random, I just point at a line of characters and hope for the best, There is no expectation at all, Some trepidation, but mostly it is a huge delight, ”

And this: “My advancing age and grey hairs, along with perseverance, have served me better in recent years, But as a young woman at the outset, the way into the Japanese tea world was often marked by humiliating rebuffs, ” It is always hard to make a breakthrough in a mendominated field,

But not this: drinking tea with a monk in Kyoto“I asked him what advice he had for people like me, city people, who were always rushing.
He didnt reply. He looked at me calmly and waited for the next question, When I pressed him, he became annoyed and said it was a strange thing to ask him because he wasnt one of those people, ” So much orientalism! I really enjoyed this part memoirpart tea history part travelogue, I think one needs to enjoy tea and know a bit about it to like this book, though, I dont plan to make teadrink recipes she offers and her instructions for brewing a pot are more detailed than I am inclined to do but the details helped to present the author as an expert.
Her descriptions of her travel through Asia and Africa are perfect to my own memories of the trips Ive been on and miss during pandemic purgatory, I love tea and I loved this book, Henrietta Lovell takes you around the world to explore tea in all its forms through the eyes of a tea buyer, She specializes in small artisanal farms, Each chapter includes brewing tips for a variety of tea types, Ive already started some new methods and plan on branching out in my tea drinking life, I adored this book. I learned so much about my hot beverage of choice, Not just its history, but what goes into growing, harvesting, and producing a sublime cup of tea,

Does every cup of tea need to be a sublime experience No, but once youve allowed yourself to experience a quality tea in a way that brings out the best flavor, you will find the slap dash making and drinking of inferior teas to be a major disappointment.


The author makes an analogy towards the end of the book, If a chef makes you a steak from an animal that has been lovingly cared for and humanely slaughtered, if the steak was aged to perfection, and mindfully cooked so that it was served at its optimum for flavor and texture.
. . would you then find eating a mass produced thoughtlessly cooked piece of meat to be enjoyable, or merely a means of quelling your hunger

I am not saying that I will never drink an overstepped cup of tea made from a mass produced bag.
I just wont do so with much pleasure, It will be because it is the best option at hand at the time that I do it, a self indulgent read for tea lovers :, Honestly I like drinking tea, but I found this book dull and repetitive, . . though she describes places and people she meets, really the book is all about her, She is an extremely privileged person, and she loves certain types of tea she describes the experience of drinking these teas as almost erotic, While that had novelty value for the first few chapters, it wasnt enough to hold my attention through the whole book,

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Beautiful and lyrical, mixed with splashes of humanity, pretention and esoteric wonder, Well worth the read. Love tea Then you've got to read this memoir and romp around the world by the founder of sitelink rareteacompany. com/

Each chapter is a deep dive into specific tea and the location of that tea or sometimes a thoughtful essay about tea or the life Henrietta Lovell has lived as a selfappointed "Tea Lady.
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For example, there's a chapter set in Cederberg Mountains, South Africa that explores rooibos tea that comes from the tiny town of Clanwilliam, The chapter is only five or six pages long but talks about the "lilac mountains, umber fields of dry earth, and bluegrey grasses, " The chapter closes with a brief 'recipe' for rooibosg perml boiling water, steepedminutes, And then, she also suggests trying rooibos with maple syrup and lemon, or perhaps milk, sugar, or a thin slice of ginger,

Every type of tea and/or infusion you can imagine is included: green, white silver tip, jasmine silver tip, almond blossom, sencha, pu'er, English Breakfast, . . Sigh.

This book is a teadrinkers paradise that you can sip a little bit from each night, What a lovely book! Part tea primer, part memoir, part travelogue so descriptive and sensual, I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author and it was transformational, If you love tea, this book is for you, Highly recommend the audiobook! This is an unexpectedly delightful read! Henrietta is a “tea lady” who makes her love of tea feel infectious, Tea is not just tea, but an entire global experience made up of all of the people around the world who grow it, pick it, source it, prepare it, blend it, infuse it, and serve it, and I feel like I got a delightful peak into each component.
As a bit of a traveler myself, I really enjoyed seeing the world through her eyes, as she pursued her passion, And I am feeling convicted to ditch the old tea bags
But seriously, I enjoyed this, I thought her writing style was lovely, too, The strong points of the book for me were learning a LOT more about tea than I thought I would, The book is broken up by type of tea and Lovell gets really in depth about the varieties, their flavors, the farms and plantations she sources them from, and how to brew each type.
I appreciate her deep knowledge of tea and she writes well about all of them, She takes us through white, green, oolong, black including english breakfast, chai, and sri lankan, pu erh, rooibos, and herbal, I got to learn about the origins of afternoon tea, high tea, and milky tea to offset the tannins of lower grade tea or over steeped tea which I thought was really interesting.


I liked the travel adventure aspect of this book because I got to live vicariously through her as she traveled around the world to source tea, We went with her to China, India, Malawai, South Africa, Japan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South America, Mexico, and more,

The parts I didn't especially care for were the long winded passages about pairing tea with food and her work in the restaurant industry as a tea consultant for high end restaurants.
I can fully appreciate that a high end restaurant should serve high end tea, but I felt the descriptions of food and her thoughts about how to properly pair tea

with the endless dishes was too much.
There's only so many descriptions of food I can take, I also thought the recipes for how to brew each type of tea were too long, and I would have preferred them all compiled together at the end instead of at the end of each chapter.


.but rounded up because I really appreciate what the author is trying to do to preserve small scale, environmentally and socially responsible tea growing, A fine memoir, and a passionate argument for using loose tea instead of tea bags, She writes well, and you should read what Simon Winchester had to say:
sitelink nytimes. combo
Sample: "I had initially thought the book might be little more than an extended advertisement for Lovells business, But then I found myself quite caught up in her infectious enthusiasm as she ventured twice defeating her own cancer, which tried in vain to slow her down out into the world in search of the green tea hills in China, Japan and India, of course, but also in Malawi, Nepal and South Africa.
On occasion, her style can be a little exhausting, with her bursts of Pete Wellsian polychrome, but one can excuse her, This is a love letter, after all, "

She's quite a storyteller, I think my favorite was a tea tasting for the "A" list at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood which pretty quickly became a Jasmine Martini tasting, Also included was her Hangover Rescue recipe,

She gives careful instructions for making a perfect pot of tea, which I'll bet are also at her website:
sitelink rareteacompany. com/pages/
I'll have to try it, I do keep loose tea on hand, but also use Trader Joe tea bags for everyday, which are pretty good and very easy, I know, heresy but try their Irish Breakfast! And I do need to order more loose tea, . A traveldiarylike account of one womans lifelong love affair with tea, Henrietta Lovell started a company Rare Tea Co, to source the highestquality teas from around the world and waxes poetic about the people, places, and teas she encounters, She sometimes gets carried away by her own fancy prose, but she is persuasive on the merits of looseleaf tea over the “dust” I have been drinking in tea bags all my life.
I guess I am going to have to become a tea snob now, This memoir of loving tea should have been so fascinating, but I kind of lost interest towards the end, While her tales were interesting, her expertise were so deep, it kind of came across as super long winded and too wordy, Could have used some good editing, It took me almost a year to finish this book, I enjoyed it in small sips rather than gulping it, There were sections that were magical, I loved hearing about tea being plucked and processed, Reading about the authors travels was interesting and beautifully described,

I stalled in my reading a few times, There was more alcohol talk than I was expecting in a book about tea, Also a cringeworthy moment where the author encourages everyone to complain in restaurants if their tea isn't the best, Her reasoning being it will encourage restaurants to carry higher quality tea, My take on this was maybe don't complain to waiters about things they obviously have no control over, Its making you seem like a jerk, I love tea, so it was a great book for me, I do hope to read it again soon! Very well written in a beautiful language, Henrietta is able to write a very personal story without coming off as selfcentered, She takes the reader on a journey all over the world, painting stunning pictures of the landscapes where tea and other fascinating foods are found, Some parts may be less interesting depending on your personal interest in the culinary world, but there's something for most people in this book, Not sure what I was expecting but this missed all points for me, This book has changed my life and my tea habits! Tea is no less important/diverse than wine and coffee and other complex beverages, and the rest of the world knows it! Tea has such a rich history that we need to catch up with in America.
Excited to use this book as a reference, her recipes are phenomenal, From cold infusions to teainfused liquor, tea is such a world of wonder and pleasure, Honored to be a part of it, Part memoir, part history of tea, part recipe book for good tea, This whole book was a love letter to tea, I think it was greater than the sum of its parts, an of which on their own would not have held my interest, Highly recommend the audiobook as the author reads it herself and has a voice as silky smooth as a delicate cup of Earl Grey, I've already adjusted some of my tea habits and seen good results! Because I know very little about tea, I decided to read Henrietta Lovells Infused, As the subtitle, Adventures in Tea, suggests, these are mostly memoirs about how Lovell built a business convincing expensive restaurants to teach their customers to pay more for tea from distant places.
However, readers of Infused will also learn some basic tea vocabulary, theyll receive an overview of different teas, and theres even a bit of history about tea production.
There are worse deals. Further, Lovell encourages readers to cultivate their understanding of tea in many forms, so if youd like an invitation to be more enthusiastic about loose leaf teas, tea martinis, iced tea, and various blends, Infused is the book for you.
It wasn't my cup of tea, sadly, Given the moderately raucous tone of much of the writing, which includes curses and hangover teas, Im surprised that Lovells story became a book rather than a reality TV show, especially since Lovell regularly hobnobs with minor celebrities and nice locals from distant lands.
I found the writing initially charming but over time words like 'exquisite,' 'wash,' 'infuse/ infusion,' and even 'leaf' became bitter from overuse, And Im not sure it convinced me to drink a fancier tea, When Gandalf says “just tea, thank you” or when Agnis Hamm from The Shipping News says “teas a good drink, Keeps you going,” I think of them as basically saying a black tea blend thrown in a pot would be nice, .