Martin Boháčik knew the name would start arguments. Most casual tea drinkers assume eighty degrees Celsius is the ideal brewing temperature — a universal rule for a universal drink. It is not. Every tea type demands its own approach: different leaf quantities, different water volumes, different temperatures. Naming his magazine Eighty Degrees was a deliberate provocation, designed to make people stop, question, and eventually learn. The conversation about temperature becomes a conversation about attention, which becomes a conversation about culture. That progression — from the specific to the philosophical — is the magazine in miniature.
Founded in 2018 and created in Lisbon, Eighty Degrees is published three times a year. Each 144-page issue examines tea as a cultural material — in restaurants, studios, workshops, private homes, and growing regions. The magazine commissions long-form interviews, field reports, and essays that place tea alongside design, craft, architecture, music, and daily work. Issue themes have included Stillness, featuring landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic and tea-and-hip-hop pioneer Mike Ortiz, and earlier editions that travelled to China’s Long Jing fields and documented sixteen generations of the Asahiyaki ceramics family in Kyoto. There are no brewing guides, no product rankings, no trend coverage. This is not a lifestyle publication. It is, as Boháčik puts it, a way of seeing.
The entire operation is run by Boháčik alone — he decides the content, sources articles and visuals from contributors, and assembles each issue for printing. The result is printed on heavy, uncoated paper that feels substantial in the hand, a tactile quality that Boháčik considers essential: digital things are disposable, he says, but a physical object can be experienced exactly as it was designed. The magazine has attracted readers far beyond the tea community — design enthusiasts, architects, and anyone drawn to a publication that treats slowness and specificity as editorial virtues rather than commercial liabilities.
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