The Tea Book by Linda Gaylard | DK Hardcover, 224 pp

Most tea books tell you to drink more tea. This one teaches you to taste it. Linda Gaylard’s The Tea Book is a hardback world tour of the leaf – where it grows, how it is picked, why two cups from the same plant can taste nothing alike, and what to do about it in your own kitchen.

What’s inside the tea book

Across 224 pages and 75 recipes, the book moves from the plantation to the cup. It opens with cultivation: the growing regions that matter, from the estates of India and Sri Lanka to the highlands of Kenya, with maps that make the geography of flavour easy to follow. From there it works through leaf varietals – how to recognise what you are looking at, and how to tell a good example of each type from a poor one.

The middle of the book is where it earns its place on the shelf. There is a guided tasting course that trains your sense of colour, aroma and taste, the way a sommelier is trained, so that “grassy” and “brisk” stop being adjectives on a packet and become things you can actually detect. A section on the Japanese tea ceremony walks through the implements and the order of the ritual. A chapter on green tea and health sets out what the research does and does not claim. And there is a proper chai method, not a shortcut.

The last third is practical: herbal, plant and fruit infusions beyond Camellia sinensis, plus the 75 recipes – hot, iced, spiced, milk-based – so the book keeps working after you have read it once.

How to use it

Keep this tea book near the kettle rather than on a coffee table. Brew a tea you already own, read the matching section, then brew it again with the steeping notes in front of you. The difference is usually immediate, and it costs nothing. The tasting course is best worked through over a few weeks, two teas at a time.

One practical note on working through it: the book reads best in small sittings. Choose a single tea you already own, read the two or three pages that cover it, then brew it with the notes in front of you. Most people find the steeping guidance alone – temperature, quantity, timing – changes the cup more than the equipment does, and it costs nothing to test. The tasting course is best spread over a few weeks, comparing two teas at a time so your palate has something to measure against.

You can check the book’s full details at the publisher: The Tea Book on Penguin Random House. More brewing guidance sits in our tea education archive, and the books we stock are listed under tea books.

Where it comes from

Linda Gaylard is a certified tea sommelier, educated at George Brown College and certified by the Tea Association of Canada, and writes about tea as a working professional rather than an enthusiast. The tea book is published by DK, whose illustrated reference format – clean layouts, annotated photographs, information carried by the design as much as the text – suits a subject that is fundamentally visual. First published in 2015, it remains a standard recommendation for anyone starting a serious tea shelf.

How it fits your day

It is a reference, so this tea book fits wherever you keep the tea. Beginners get a structured path through a confusing wall of names. Anyone already deep in the hobby gets a tasting vocabulary and a set of recipes worth keeping. It also makes a sensible gift alongside a tin of loose leaf – the book explains the tea the recipient is about to drink.

What you get

One hardcover copy, 224 pages, 19.5 x 23.3 cm, ISBN 978-1-4654-3606-1. This copy is ex-display stock: it has been on a shop shelf rather than in a warehouse, so expect light handling marks on the cover. The pages are clean and the binding is sound. If you want a pristine sealed copy for a gift, message us before ordering and we will tell you exactly what we have.

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