Rocky Mountain Tea Festival
The 20th anniversary Rocky Mountain Tea Festival takes place July 28 and 29, 2018, at the Dushanbe Teahouse, 1770 13th Street, Boulder, Colorado.
Tea Marketplace takes place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 28 and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. July 29. Booths will be set up to offer tastings and sales of premium teas, tea ware, and other tea related goods.
Tea Workshops will be offered both days. This year’s topics include: Cooking with Tea, How to Brew, Elephant Friendly Tea, Exploring Herbal Teas, Poetry and Tea, The Best Teas for Health, Taiwanese Oolong Tasting, and the Japanese Tea Ceremony.
The 2018 art exhibit – The Teabag Art of Ruby Silvious (an example is pictured above, left). Ruby Silvious is a visual artist and graphic designer whose recent work includes experimenting on recycled and found materials. January 3, 2015, she started a project called 363 Days of Tea, a visual daily record of her impression of the moment, using the emptied-out tea bag as her canvas, and altering it to create a new work of art every day for 363 days. She draws, paints, prints and collages moody, evocative and sometimes whimsical art on used teabag paper.
The annual four-course Tea Dinner with all dishes prepared with tea takes place July 28 (obviously, a Road Trips Foodie needs a reservation for this special event).
Afternoon tea July 29 features oolong, which will be served with dim sum. Each dish will be based on a traditional type of dim sum, but has the added ingredient of tea. Served as a seven-course, small plate indulgence, each course will be accompanied by one of three premium loose leaf oolong tea selections. And, yes, you’ll need to make a reservation for tea.
Also set for July 29 is the Children’s Teddy Bear Tea Party.
The Rocky Mountain Tea Festival was started 20 years ago as a way to learn more about premium, loose leaf tea. The goal of the event is to offer a non-competitive forum for lovers of tea to come and learn, taste, and discuss their favorite beverage.
The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, located alongside Boulder Creek in Central Park, was built by hand without the use of any power tools. The Teahouse was constructed in Dushanbe, Tajikistan as a gift to their sister city, Boulder. It was disassembled, crated up, and rebuilt in Boulder as a symbol of friendship and cultural exploration.
(Photos courtesy of Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse and Susan McKee)
