Book review of The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide

I listened to the audiobook version of The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide by Robert Heiss and Mary Lou Heiss, a couple who own a specialty tea store in Northampton Massachusetts.

The audiobook was long. Seventeen hours long. I'm not a fan of tea specially, my only interest in it was incidental, because it was a part of the international spice trade and it's also a drink like wine, plus it's a raw ingredient in kombucha, so I wanted to understand what the context behind the drink was. I now know more than I ever needed to.

The book is an exhaustive study of tea's history, production techniques, cultural traditions, and industries associated with tea, the terroir, regions associated, the international tea market, and a guide on how to find good tea and drink it. It was exhausting. Truth be told, much like that one guy on Goodreads who wrote he felt relieved when this book ended, I was so thankful that the book came to an end because it was getting a bit much. It's really an encyclopedia of all things tea and wasn't initially written to be read cover-to-cover, but it was offered as an audiobook so that's exactly what I did.

The saving grace was that I played the book at 3x the speed since I was okay not retaining most of the content I was listening to. I learned a lot about tea and it's unclear if I retained any information as I would still be hard-pressed to answer the different between white tea and green tea, or black tea and yellow tea. I know the vague generalities, the answer wily bureaucrats will give when foreign visitors are around, but no I don't know the details. But I do have a good sense of outline on how the various kinds are arranged, what filters might be used to make judgments on their type, and how this skillset of tasting and understanding tea might come to rescue at relevant times.