Video interview with the Russian Tea Lovers founder

I just did a video interview with Alexander Vorontsov, the founder of the Russian Tea Lovers group (one founder, at least), with that video here.   I just realized that I'm sideways in that, checking it out to post about it.  It's always the little details.

I've met him before, and discussed Russian tea culture, most of which is summarized in this post.  It's a bit redundant to say a lot about the video since that content stands alone, but I'll introduce who that group is and what we talked about in order to help people determine if watching it would be of interest.

meeting Alexander at the one local shop I always go to, Jip Eu

That group holds local tea tastings, with members sharing both tea and information about exploring tea elsewhere.  Chinese teas have the most influence in Russia, I think, but there is local Sochi area production, and a deeper history of tea production in Georgia (with more on that history here). 

On my end we visited Russia a couple of years ago, with a travel oriented post about that here.  Russia is amazing, and the local tea culture runs deeper there than here in Bangkok, even though Chinese culture is the main influence on Thai culture, with Thais mostly descended from multiple waves of Chinese immigrants.  I've reviewed a lot of tea from Moychay, one of their main suppliers, who also runs tea clubs there (something different).  Their one Nannuo sheng pu'er I bought on that first trip was one of my overall favorite tea versions.

tea tasting in Moscow with Dasha and Alexander, the Laos Tea founder

In that video we talked about international tea culture themes, and how local perspectives go back in the US.  I mentioned what I'm up to related to tea, and my own favorite other tea blogs (Steep Stories, Tea DB, Tea Addict's Journal), and we discussed why Tea for Me Please is probably the most influential US blog, and how that subculture works out.  Then onto organic themes related to tea, online group culture, sourcing, and so on, pretty much all what one would expect.

so many cool places to visit there