The Tea Curious Podcast

What does a tea want to say?

Is there something there, beyond just flavor notes, that's embedded by the teamaker, the roaster, and the place where the leaves are from?

Today's guest is Noah from Floating Leaves Tea, a shop based in both Seattle, WA and Taiwan that specializes in Taiwanese teas. More than just a tea dealer, they also share a way of approaching tea that's a little more intuitive -- asking us to listen more to the leaves, and to ourselves, to find whatever joy and lessons may be in the leaves.

In this episode, listen in as Noah guides us through a tea tasting, Floating Leaves Tea style. This was an absolute treat of a tea session to have: Noah is an incredible tea host, and he holds space here (in a Zoom call!) in a way that makes you feel like you're back at their tea table in Seattle.

Along the way, Noah also talks about his journey as a tea roaster, learning to roast and refine teas from beloved teachers in Taiwan.

This episode was recorded in Fall 2021. We taste an early version of Noah's Heartwood Hongshui, which he first released as a finished tea after another year of roasting practice, in Fall 2022.

How does a tea expert become an expert?

Today's guest is Jeffrey Mcintosh, my friend and go-to source for pu'er tea information. He's a pu'er tea especialist, financial advisor, and host of a YouTube channel about pu'er sourcing and evaluation.

He speaks fluent Mandarin, and has also spent most of the last decade building and consulting for business ventures in tea.

It's quite the resume, but before there was tea expert Jeff, there was... just Jeff, at the beginning of a long and bumpy road to tea confidence.

In this episode, Jeff generously shares his personal story of getting into the pu'er industry. We get to meet some of the key figures in his journey, review some hard lessons learned, and also get some advice from Jeff on thinking about tea from the investment standpoint, a perspective that's not uncommon to find in China's often speculative pu'er market.

When I first approached my friend Ting to record this episode, I asked her to teach us about mindfulness. As amazing as she is as a tea host, I could have sworn she had some kind of powerful mindfulness practice to share.

But as we find out during the recording, Ting, who is the founder of the non-profit tea community Tea Arts and Culture, has arrived at her beautiful tea practice in more everyday ways -- and after a lot of challenges and lessons.

We hear about how she stumbled into tea in New York after having little interest in it growing up in China, how she found out what people truly wanted in a tea workshop, and how she shares tea with her children in meaningful ways.

This and more in this incredible episode that feels like a lesson in real-life grace and patience for us tea brewers. Thank you Ting!

Who knew tea grew in Argentina? Not us, until we met Kim Wong from, a passionate advocate for Argentine tea and the owner of Tienda de Te, a small tea shop in Villa General Belgrano in central Argentina.

I think so many of us want to run a tea shop someday, and so we wanted to know how Kim, a Londoner with Hong Kong roots, found herself running a proudly Argentine tea business so far away from home.

She shares the real-real here. Among them: how she maintains her business on the side while running a restaurant, how she's decided to happily market to a Spanish speaking audience instead of a global one, and how she deals with the comparison-itis many of us experience when being on tea social media.

Kim also introduces us to what makes Argentina's tea special: an industry that began more than 100 years ago!

If you want to share about tea, how do you get the hard sh*t done to actually make it happen?

Faced with the prospect of a whole new podcast, that's what I wanted to learn from my friend Martin Bohacik. He's the guy behind one of the most beautiful works in the tea world, Eighty Degrees Magazine, and he single-handedly curates, arranges, and publishes each issue from his home in Portugal (he's now on Issue 10).

We talk about the inspiration behind Eighty Degrees and the everyday techniques Martin uses to make sure his vision can be shared with the world -- even as a down-to-earth introvert who has never published a magazine before!