China is again experiencing record-breaking heat early in the crop cycle, impacting Yunnan and several other tea-growing provinces. The country has experienced several heat waves since March, with Yunnan in Southwestern China recording 40 Celsius highs. Northern provinces Jinan and Tianjin are seeing temperatures soar to 37C (about 98 degrees Fahrenheit).
This week, Lipton unveiled a trio of television and web commercials that state the obvious. The top-selling non-alcoholic tea brand recently launched a fresh-brewed line with 5% ABV (alcohol by volume). The new hard tea is blended with a triple-filtered malt base in four versions, replicating its best-selling flavored iced tea.
Statistics compiled from a survey of retailers following China’s unprecedented lockdown of 700 million people reveal that while international chains like Starbucks and Costa and big national chains, including Ten Ren and Luckin, experienced severe financial setbacks, independent tea and coffee shops suffered mortal blows. Now that the contagion has spread to Italy, shop owners…
Setbacks are not due to illness or deaths of tea garden workers; it is the result of a national effort to limit travel, close factories, ban public gatherings and shutdown bus, train, air, and subways to prevent the virus from spreading.
Qing Ming 2014 By Austin Hodge, President of Seven Cups Seven Cups is an importer of Chinese tea, located in Tucson, Arizona Filed April 6, 2014. An abridged version appeared in World Tea News previously. Read our previous story about Qing Ming and its meaning from our April 7 Need to Know post. I started…
