there were some TV commercials for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Various respectable-looking adults found themselves restricted for choice at breakfast time, while camping or abroad, perhaps... Anyway, they were forced by circumstance to eat Corn Flakes. “I’d forgotten how good they taste”, they each said. And that was the tagline of the series. The implication was not that these adults had grown out of breakfast cereals; it was merely that they had spent years pursuing different kinds of breakfast cereal, neglecting the one that started it all. Rather than getting sick of...

They call it “herbal medicine”. And in this house, this week, it’s everywhere. I call it “horrible medicine”. But I actually quite like it.  It smells of fragrant-soil and it tastes like fragrant-soil-with-brown-sugar.   Apparently, it has an English name; Isatis Tinctoria. But, like the names for all those things popular only in China, that’s not really an English name.  The brew hasn’t caught on elsewhere; what Americans call root-beer is a completely different thing. But here it’s enormous. As I write, your local pharmacy is selling fast out. There’s no scientific evidence that...

Strainer readers may recall, about 3 years ago, reading about a new concept in tea preparation. It was called InWE Tea (因味茶). It exerted on the tea leaf high pressure as well as high heat, much like brewing an espresso. I was excited.  Maybe I was wrong to be too excited. While most of the company’s tea bars do still exist, my prediction that we would all start fracking our tea leaves has been unfulfilled; tea capsule machines have not become mainstream.   Except that aluminium tea capsules are appearing. Maybe you’ve...

I wrote last month about glossy teas; teas with a polished appearance, mostly from Japan. I also mentioned a pea-green variety from Sichuan’s Emei mountain range called Bamboo Leaf Tea . Now, let’s be honest. Sichuan is less famous for growing tea than it is for pandas, bamboo and spicy snacks. Were Sichuan and tea are ever connected in people’s minds, it is the tea houses and the tea-drinking culture that stand out rather than native varieties of leaf. Possibly that is just how Sichuan people like it. Local tea...