Unlike most Americans, I’m not a coffee fan. I do love tea, though. I’ve been drinking it all my life, and I’ve developed a real fascination for tea and related tisanes (e.g., yerba mate, rooibos, honeybush).

In 2009, my wife and I began selling tea in our bookstore. We brought in a variety of tea, both loose and bagged, and it worked well. We soon grew frustrated, though, at all of the wonderful teas that are almost impossible to find in tins. We looked longingly at the mile-long lists of bulk teas, and finally decided to bite the bullet and open a tea bar in the store.

We sold the bookstore in mid-2016, and that didn’t end well. As I write this in September 2017, the people who bought it still haven’t paid us for it, and I’ve been saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of their debt. So in April 2017, my daughter Gwen and I chose to leave the retail book business behind, and we opened the Phoenix Pearl Tea Tavern.

Now that my hobby has turned to a business, I find that I have access to even more teas and more information. Thus was born this blog. It started as a section in my reading & writing blog, and I split all of the tea-related posts out into their own blog in early October, 2011.

For more about me, see the about page on my website.