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Jason Cohen

Jason Cohen

Master of Ceremonies here and on Tea Technique. Previously, Founder and Executive Director of the Tea Institute at Penn State (defunct).

http://teatechnique.org/

A fully updated CoQ!

The old blog was running on a self-hosted ec2 instance for at least ~11 years, becoming increasingly difficult to upgrade and manage. I've finally pulled the trigger and rebuilt the site here. This should make posting, commenting, and formatting easier. The new blog host allows for email signups

Pu’er Blend Off

The Editorial Team and our special guest Chris MacNitt, a tea formulator at one of the largest tea companies in the world, challenge each other to a pu’er blend off. The editorial team are all professional product developers, so this was fun, challenging, and high stakes.

The second season of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations has begun

We’ve published the first podcast for Season 2 of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations Book 2: Yixing Teapots – Knowledge, Connoisseurship, and Technique! All Editorial Conversation Podcasts are freely available on YouTube, Spotify, Simplecast, and teatechnique.org.

Announcing BOOK 2: Yixing Teapots – Knowledge, Connoisseurship, and Technique

I am overjoyed to announce that my 2nd book, on Yixing Teapots, has begun publication on Tea Technique. While the last chapter of Book 1 was published in December of last year, I was already about a year into writing Book 2 with research, notes, outlines, and experiments ready to

Satire of Gongfu Cha

The art of satire is in rendering the serious absurd. Good satire is the opposite of slapstick; the humor isn’t in the performance of something inherently funny – it’s in the serious performance taken to its logical extreme, such that the fans of the object of satire themselves find

Phenomenology and the Analytical Mind

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. – Monk Linji Yixuan (f. 851 CE) Phenomenology is the study of experience. The phenominist approach is the practice of creating and controlling experiences. Throughout our lives, individuals attempt to create a variety of experiences: birthday parties, dinner parties, dates, and

A Poem to Commemorate the Completion of Book 1 – On Theory, Meta Theory, and Culture

The Editorial team and I have just published the final installment of our first book in the series An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony. Please do check it out on www.teatechnique.org! To commemorate the publication of the first book, I’ve written a

A poem on how I study

I’ve been asked about my method for studying Chinese tea and culture many times, and unfortunately my answer has and always will be “time and patience”. While I don’t have any revelatory insights on faster methods of study, I do have a new poem that I hope inspires

A Poem to Commiserate the Long Recovery from Knee Surgery

After 10 years of waiting, the partial tear in my ACL (high-school fencing injury) finally snapped (rock climbing injury). Since the surgery a few weeks ago, I’ve been in a full leg brace and have very limited mobility, which will last for another 5 – 6 weeks, when I will

First AMA Thank you and Recording

Thank you to all the listeners and subscribers who attended our first AMA last week! You can listen to the recording of the event here: It was great to have so many of you join us, and we look forward to hosting the next one in a month or two.