Canton Tea Blog

Multiple RHS Gold medallist, writer, broadcaster and herb guru, Jekka McVicar has joined Canton Tea in a venture to bring her passion and dedication to finding the best herbal infusions in the world. We are delighted to launch our new collection of herbal teas, now available on our website, packed in elegant tins with illustrations by Hannah McVicar. 

Jekka was blown away by this Lemongrass that comes from the same estate as the Ceylon (Week 18) - Amba Estate, Sri Lanka. Herbal tea isn't usually on the Tea Club agenda - but this one is too good to miss. Jekka tells us why....

Jekka: Mention Lemon Grass, Cymbopogon citratus, and it immediately... Read more

Named the UK's 'Queen of Herbs' by Jamie Oliver, Jekka McVicar is an RHS multiple Gold Medallist and a well known writer and broadcaster. Jekka has joined Canton Tea in a partnership to offer the world's best herbal infusions. With Jekka's unrivalled knowledge and enthusiasm and our expertise at sourcing and blending, we are confident that the tisanes in the range will be the best you have tasted.

So how did this collaboration come about?

It all started back in the summer of 2012 when Edgar got hitched to Charlotte at the beautiful garden – home to The Ethicurean. They know Jekka and suggested we might have some common interests.

So I met... Read more

A morning of serious tea tasting at Mr Li’s Da Fu factory – one of the region’s best producers of top class Puerh, followed by a visit to the puerh pressing room.

A shaky, hungover Mr Li, leaves us to indulge in some rare spring Purple buds in both loose leaf and cake forms. The leaves are beautiful in appearance, dark, glossy needles which look particularly impressive in cake form.



We also taste a cake of the Da Bai Hao (big white hairy buds). This tea was made in 2011 so has not had the eight years aging it needs to develop its full flavour palette. It’s good now but will be... Read more

Back in the town of Jing Gu, Jennifer and Ali get fully involved in a rather wet tradition.

The Buddhist Water-Splashing Festival (known as Songkran in Thailand) is the Dai people’s most important traditional event. Ancient myth holds that twelve women helped to rid the world of an oppressive demon-king by beheading him with a single hair from his own head. The Dai people showed their gratitude by splashing the women with water to rinse the demon’s blood from their clothes. Water in Dai culture symbolises emotion and wisdom and splashing people is a great expression of goodwill. Posters showed young women in beautiful traditional dress scattering drops of sparkling... Read more

Still in Yunnan, Jen and Ali meet Mr Li and visit his wild growing puerh trees.

The drive from Menghai to Jing Gu took eight and a half hours through spectacular tropical forest and mountain gorges. This is home to thousands of rare flowers, thronged with butterflies, monkeys and birds, among them the Bronzed Drongo. Supper is in an isolated roadside café above the Mekong River, beneath hills flaming with burning stubble. Our feisty leader, Xiao Yen, takes control of the kitchen. She bosses the cooks around and chops vegetables to create a good restorative noodle soup.

Our main objective in Jing Gu is to meet Mr Li, a top Puerh producer.... Read more

The first of three teas from Nepal to feature in the club is a robust black tea with similar characteristics to a Second Flush Darjeeling. We could be forgiven for assuming that Nepal has been producing tea for thousands of years, but this is not the case. Jane Pettigrew tells us more...

Given Nepal’s location to the west of the tea-growing mountains of Darjeeling and Sikkim, and the fact that it enjoys the same natural gifts – regular rainfall to water the slopes, Himalayan sunshine to warm the soil, swirling mist to protect the tea bushes from the exposed altitudes – as those neighbouring regions, it is easy to assume that... Read more

After Nan Nuo Mountain Jennifer and Alice head to Hekai Mountain to meet an astonishing young tea master.

The next morning brought a couple of hour’s drive in the other direction and on the way up the bumpy dirt track we stopped off to see our first 800 year old tea tree. At the top was a cluster of houses of the Laku people who welcomed us with the customary tea drinking.



At 1700m Hekai Mountain is less densely forested but has thousands of big old tea trees that were once cultivated but now grow wild.



They were abandoned many years ago but as the rare puerh tea market has... Read more

Lots of photos and videos to share from Nan Nuo mountain in Yunnan, the home of puerh tea.

Unrefreshed by a night’s nonsleep, Xiao Yen took us for breakfast (noodle soup) in the heaving, chattering market. The vivid colours and smells changed at every step, from raw meat to live fish and sacks of giant frogs, knobbly, technicolour vegetables Xiao Yen couldn’t name in Chinese let alone English.





Then our first real day doing what we came for – a journey over miles of rough road with Su Er to his traditional family home and tea farm up on Nan Nuo Mountain.



There are 20 villages on this famous Mountain and we were... Read more

Yunnan is in Southwest China but still feels pretty remote. Bordering Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Vietnam we flew first to Kunming where we had 4 hours to kill until our next flight on to Xishangbanna...

As Kunming is the home of Scott, one of our trusted puerh experts, Ali and I took a taxi to his house. 50 mins there, 50 mins back, 10 mins getting lost, 5 mins haggling with the driver who wanted to charge us double the fare on the meter - that left us just under an hour. Was it worth it? Oh yes.



Also visiting was the delightful Ned from the US company, Silk Road Teas and... Read more

In this week's box is a very exciting thing indeed: the first Chinese new season green tea. We explain a bit more about why new season green tea is so exciting for us avid tea-drinkers, and provide a brief calendar so you know when to expect each tea. 

Why do we get so excited about spring green tea? Every year at about this time one or two lucky Cantoners will visit China to experience the spring picking season and taste the teas that we will stock for the next year, while the rest of the team in the UK spend the whole of April and May turning our heads excitedly every... Read more