2023 NW Tea Festival Seattle – Hooty Tea Travels

Tea Festival season is back, peeps! The NW Tea Festival was held on September 23 and 24th in Seattle Washington. 2019 was the last time this festival was held. NW Tea Festival is the biggest tea festival, likely because the PNW tea scene is strong. This year we had a few from outside PNW in attendance. Unfortunately, I could only attend the Saturday as I had other engagements on Sunday. NW Tea Festival was packed with a long queue to get in. There were times I couldn’t walk down an aisle as it was just full of people. From years… Continue reading, hoot!

Hoot Tea Travels – 2023 Cascadia Spring Tea Festival

Tea Festivals are back! Cascadia Tea Events has been doing small local tea festivals in the absence of the big NW Tea Festival. Rest assured, Northwest Tea Festival is coming back in September 2023, but Cascadia Tea Festival is a smaller, intimate event. The recent Spring event is their 2nd tea festival, the last one being the Autumn Tea Festival in 2022 that I unfortunately missed. I was planning to go, but I had a group knitting event at a Mariners baseball game a few days prior where a number of my group got covid. The Cascadia Spring Tea Festival!… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – 2019 Northwest Tea Festival Seattle

The Northwest Tea Festival is my favorite tea festival of all time. It was on September 28 & 29th, at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. There is so much to do, see, meet, and learn as this is a large tea festival that is open to the public. This year was their 12th year and was especially full as there were 59 vendors, 2 stage presentation areas, 5 workshop booths, 1 tea bar, and an intimate tea tutorial and tea guest table, with two days to do it all. 2019 Northwest Tea Festival was the highest level of chaos and… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – Traveling Gongfu Tea Style

During my last few cruises, I had a few readers ask that I go into more detail on my teaware set up. I just came back from (yet another) cruise through Alaska, so I have my travel teaware already set up. 2019 also brought some new tea gadgets so traveling with tea is even easier.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Char – Oolong Owl (@oolongowl) on Sep 10, 2019 at 2:04pm PDT Traveling Gongfu Tea Style – Hot Water When I road trip I take an electric kettle if I know my final destination… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – 2019 Teafest PDX in Portland Oregon

The 2019 Tea Fest PDX was in Portland Oregon on July 20th at the World Forestry Center. Compared to last year, the tea festival had 8 more vendors (48 total) and a couple of bigger vendors rented larger spaces. Portland also has the most amount of vendors that also have a table that you can sit down and have tea with. Like the previous two years, Tea Fest PDX sports a large range of vendors from Japanese teas, British tea time style, expensive puer, and kombucha. 2019 Tea Fest PDX Vendor Booths Minto Island Tea Company grows tea in Western… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – 2019 World Tea Expo Haul

2019 World Tea Expo Highlights | 2019 World Tea Expo Trends Now for the most important part of my trip to the 2019 World Tea Expo, the tea haul! Be sure to check out the World Tea Expo Highlights as I go more into detail on some of these teas. Oolong Owl’s 2019 World Tea Expo Tea Haul The big eye drawing items in this haul is the stuff I purchased – 2018 800 gram Fu brick, the 2015 heicha log, and a 2019 puer cake. All these teas I bought quite inexpensively and strangely. There were shenanigans of me going out… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – 2019 World Tea Expo Trends

2019 World Tea Expo Highlights | 2019 World Tea Expo Haul What was Trending at the 2019 World Tea Expo I go into more detail about some of these teas I mention below in my World Tea Expo Highlights. 2019 is a Rough Year A repeated topic during the World Tea Expo was the 2019 teas weather. Most regions are late or poor yield due to bad weather. A lot of stuff is now crazy expensive as there isn’t much tea out there. The overall message is the tea hits are dazzling, whereas the misses are dreadful. I heard the same… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – 2019 World Tea Expo Highlights

  2019 World Tea Expo Trends | 2019 World Tea Expo Haul  The 2019 World Tea Expo was in the Las Vegas Convention Center from June 11 to 13. If you are unfamiliar, the World Tea Expo is the biggest tea industry tradeshow in North America. The World Tea Expo is the place to check out the newest tea gadgets, trends, and teas. This is the place to network and learn about tea. This is my 6th World Tea Expo, so I’m no stranger to the three day tea bender in the desert. I took a lot of Instagram Story videos… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – 2019 Mediterranean Atlantic Cruise 2 – How I Tea on a Cruise Ship

My Mediterranean Atlantic cruise was a 12 day trip with a day or two on each end for travelling and time zone craziness. Previous cruises I brought simply a travel tea tumbler to do grandpa style, along with a double walled stainless steel tumbler to double as hot water storage for tea or ice water for non-tea use. I’d often use the travel tea tumbler as a pseudo teapot. I found after a couple of days I got really bored with grandpa style and cold brew tea, so for this trip, I brought a teapot. I looked for a few… Continue reading, hoot!

Hooty Tea Travels – 2019 Mediterranean Atlantic Cruise feat. Ports and Hauls

I recently came back from a long, well-needed vacation from Rome to London. I stayed in Rome for two days, then hopped on a Princess Cruise ship from Civitavecchia, then sailed to Livorno, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Gibraltar, Lisbon, Normandy, and Southampton for 10 more days. To make it confusing, I did a tour bus up to Florence from Livorno, a day in Nice from Monte Carlo, and finally a day in Paris from Normandy. Along the way, I looked for tea but mostly found food. I ended up buying all flavoured teas this entire trip. All the shops I went… Continue reading, hoot!