#tea-review

#tea-review

A Chinese silver-gilt tea service once leapt from a €50,000 estimate to more than €200,000 when auctioned by Sotheby's Amsterdam in 2011.

This booming teahouse chain specializes in Chinese flower and fruit teas, particularly jasmine teas. The brand is growing rapidly around the world—after launching its first location in 2021 in Shenzhen, China, it has grown to more than 2,000 worldwide locations. The soft opening for Molly Tea started at the end of October, and has been a popular addition to San Mateo's B Street promenade, drawing long lines.

Because AI is making the world faster - and rougher. This phenomenon, which he describes as "AI-driven coarsening," shows up everywhere: Social media posts are increasingly complete and polished, yet oddly lifeless E-commerce pages are packed with flawless copy, but nothing truly persuades you Product proposals from junior PMs are logically sound and well-structured, yet leave you thinking: everything looks right, but something feels wrong

Toast said the analysis is based on same-store restaurant sales from January 2024 through December 2025 across a cohort on its platform, which served about 164,000 locations as of Dec. 31, 2025. The biggest declines through 2025 were found in green tea (-4.9%), black tea (-3.4%), hot drip coffee (-3.3%) and regular soda (-2.3%).

Where larger, electric espresso machines generate the pressure and heat needed for espresso inside their massive housings, the Flair takes a different approach. A large lever sits atop a small stack of brewing equipment, and you use that lever to create the bars of pressure necessary to get espresso. There's a chamber for your grounds and another atop it for hot water.

"Fresh spices and proper simmering time make all the difference," instructs Chan. As tempting as it might be to sprinkle powdered spices into a pot, Chan directs chai lovers to first simmer your chosen whole spices with black tea. Use all or some of an assortment of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger, and peppercorns and warm them up in a pan with the tea, then steamed milk and sweetener can then enter the picture.

A good cup of coffee (decaf included) delivers on all fronts: Flavor, acidity, body, sweetness, and balance, aka The Pleasure Principle. The infamously-snobbish coffee élite might maintain that decaf drinkers aren't "real coffee fans." But, as a veteran barista, I would argue that the opposite is actually true: Only the most diehard bean-heads tread decaf domain.

When Japanese sesame oil brand Kadoya Seiyu demonstrated that combining sesame oil and coffee is an option, foodies took notice. The unexpected addition can lend a creamy, smooth texture to a regularly prepared cup of Joe, and the smell of this combination will greet you before the first sip reaches your lips. As added incentive to experiment with this unique duo, sesame oil boasts a line-up of promising health benefits.

If you were a frequent coffee shop-goer and Instagram scroller in the mid-2010s, chances are you remember when a certain grassy green beverage started to pop up on café menus, grid posts, and Tumblr feeds. (Of course, we're talking about matcha.) Now, some ten years later, another type of Japanese green tea has made the jump over to the U.S. market: hojicha.

If you, too, down a bottle of kombucha every chance you get, we are one. Well, maybe not every chance (after all, you can definitely drink too much kombucha), but you get the picture. I adore the fizzy, probiotic drink, which is on the very long list of things I'd like to make at home eventually. But until I have enough capacity to embark on a homemade kombucha adventure, I'll stick to the store-bought stuff, preferably from Health-Ade.

Going out for coffee every day can be pricey, which is why we usually stick to making our own coffee at home. That's easy to do if you like simple, black coffee, but it can be trickier to pull it off if you like more flavor in your cup. You could spend hours trying to learn how to make viral TikTok coffee drinks, or you could just snag yourself a good creamer from the grocery store for instant flavor and creaminess in your cup.

Iced coffee is a morning must for most people. However, those regular trips to Starbucks, your favorite local coffee shop, or even making it from pricey beans at home may not be doing your wallet any favors. Luckily, you don't have to cut iced coffee out of your life cold turkey to save a couple of bucks; you can just switch to a thriftier and more convenient alternative: instant coffee.

Whether you prefer a classic flavor like caramel or want something a bit more unique like French toast, we tried to cover the gamut of flavors. We ranked each latte based on how accurate the flavor was to its description and its overall sweetness level (meaning, was it a pure sugar bomb or was espresso the only flavor present? - balance is key) to crown the best of the best.

Coffee brimming with lemon myrtle cream. Matcha banked with strawberry-lychee foam. Cold brew with choc-orange froth thick enough to stuff a pillow. Every caffeinated drink I've ordered in Sydney recently has the appearance of a generously frosted cake. It's a trend you'll see or sip across Australia, from Toasted Carine's iced latte with maple cold foam in Perth to Le Bajo's chilled oolong tea with raspberry cream in Melbourne.

If you're a coffee drinker, then you know how much fun it can be to venture to one of your favorite coffee shops to order a special coffee beverage you can't make at home. Unfortunately, that's an expensive habit to keep up every day, which is why it's nice to have the ingredients you need to make flavorful coffee at home.