Comments from the author, Jennifer Sauer
Sharing tea has for hundreds of years taken on a variety of expressions by different cultures, but there are also common threads woven into every tea culture. These "threads" include community, ritual, art, poetry, sanctuary, intimacy, and vitality. In my journey through San Francisco tea culture, I discovered that the Bay Area is uniquely situated at the heart of a newly emerging American tea culture, and that we have perhaps the highest concentration of keenly and divergently focused tea professionals in the world right here. In no other place and at no other time could such an alchemy of cultures and traditions merge into such a diverse, fun and intensely inspiring social phenomenon. I felt it was an event worthy of recording and celebrating. The Way to Tea is a creative tribute to and appraisal of an exhilarating journey through the labyrinth of San Francisco tea culture.