Bruce Richardson

Bruce Richardson has been a leading voice in America’s tea renaissance for nearly thirty years. He and his wife Shelley are the owners of Kentucky’s Elmwood Inn Fine Teas. As a tea blender, he receives numerous commissions to design signature blends – often based on artistic themes - for museums such as The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Yale’s Museum of British Art. In 2017, he was commissioned to design a full line of signature tea for the Chinese fashion house HPLY Fashions. He helped launch those colorful teas at the brand's 2018 runway show in Shanghai.
Bruce serves as Contributing Editor for TeaTime magazine and is the author of a dozen books, including The New Tea Companion, The Social History of Tea, The Great Tea Rooms of Britain, Tea & Etiquette, and The Book of Tea. He appears regularly on television and is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and tea, art, and literary events across the globe. In January 2019, he taught a college course on Japanese tea’s influence on American art and architecture before travelling to Japan in March for his second lecture tour in that country. In 2011, he was named Tea Master for the new Boston Tea Party Ships Museum where he continues to define the significance of tea in that city's iconic historical event of 1773.