There are a lot of types of tea culture, and for me, I find all have their mark on my own tea sessions. There’s the gorgeous minimalism of pu-erh.sk and essence of tea for example, and there’s the direct maximalism of white2tea on the other side (at least in a lot of the art, as w2t is minimalist in other ways), the quality-focused community of teaswelike and daxue jiadao, the friendly fireside tea sessions, the spiritual global tea hut community, the edgy, music-focused kuura, and it goes on and on and on. After going on Instagram and seeing the way people are drinking and talking about tea around the world in so many different ways, the question is always, what am I going to do today with my tea?
As natural as just grabbing a tea and a teapot on autopilot and drinking it while doing/watching whatever is, I find the nature of tea to be an opportunity to set an intention, using tea culture as an inspiration. For me, there is not just one ideal. I can decide to put on Laraaji ambient zither music and have a very meditative tea session, where the tea sparkles in the light through the window as I breathe in the fresh evocative aroma of incense. I can feel my body relax as I seem to suspend time. Where did I get this from? Was it participating in tea ceremonies at Puerh Brooklyn? Was it from drinking tea with friends? Was it from watching pu-erh.sk’s stories and reading the half-dipper and mgualt doing the same sort of things? I have to say yes, it’s all of that and more. But this is not my only way of drinking tea, and it’s not the only ideal either.
Sometimes I have a very different kind of session. I get a loud, huge chabu I bought from white2tea, with art I really don’t intellectually understand, pick a rough-looking pot, grab a high end tea, grab a cassette tape or a phone and some headphones and just blast a playlist. Not ambient music – just my favorite music, anything. Intense, energetic, noisy, whatever I want. Time doesn’t stop, but it seems to melt, as one track plays after another, one pot after another, the teaware seeming to be the architecture of some nightclub, tea in technicolor. Where did I get this from? White2tea stories, of course — but it’s almost as if it’s something I would have done anyway, but also w2t gives me permission to do this and feel like I’m not the only one.
There’s also beginner’s tea – just the first gongfu puer sessions I ever did – it was just making tea in a quiet room, that’s it – no frills, no distractions, no preconceptions, no ideals. I remember how powerful those experiences were, and that’s still something I like to return to.
It feels like tea would be inherently minimalist, as it’s such a slow activity, but it’s really not that simple. Tea drinking is very fluid, and there’s maximalism in minimalism and vice versa. In a quiet, simple, low-stimulus tea session, everything is amplified, and the complexity of the tea is revealed. And in a noisy, musically and visually overwhelming tea session, everything blends into one seamless whole. I’m thankful for the tea community being so diverse, as it brings continued inspiration to my own tea table and to my life.
I’ve been wanting to try Chinese tea with Chinese water for a long time, because it would be so cool, but only recently did I stumble upon some good data that I could use to replicate Chinese water at home. This water is a replica of the Xi River in winter (seasonal variation in natural water is significant, as TDS changes around 50% from winter to summer.) The main branch of the Xi River is located west of Guangzhou, but the basin of the river extends all the way to Kunming, in Yunnan. This water is rather difficult to make, and can not be made without a Sodastream. I used a new method to get silica into the water, and decided to test the new method by adding double the silica that was in the data. I don’t think it should make too much of a difference, but I wanted to note it here. Silica is not an ion, so it doesn’t have as significant an effect on extraction, only on texture (as far as I know now!)
After a lot of work over two weeks, here it is.
2750 ml
The water was distilled from my local tap water, which recently tested over the safe limit for PFAs, a pollutant that can cause health problems. I get a kick out of removing pollution from water by purifying it – distilling water removes PFAs entirely, and I distilled this water three times. Two of these distillations were in glass laboratory equipment dedicated to water. This resulted in my base water being some of the cleanest and purest I’ve managed to create, with the downside being 10 hours of distillation time to get only 2750 ml. I’m sure I can cut that time down in the future. I’m just really happy I can get pure tasting water at all, as it was a big struggle just a year ago. The distilled can go side by side with lofoten and hold its own! It’s not perfect by any means, but it is around the same level as very good natural waters bottled in glass.
Once I had this base water, I had to add the minerals to it. It wasn’t too difficult really, and took around an hour and a half to get everything measured and added properly. I’ve shared the water with friends and family and they’ve remarked that it tastes like water, nothing is wrong with it, and it’s rather dry (not drying, but referring to not too sweet). I suppose that is a success as water is concerned, though I’d love to make water that makes you go “wow!” I personally find the water quite voluminous in a nice way, but we will get to that later. The big curiosity is, does using (replicated) Chinese water “work” with tea grown near it? Does it express the taste as nature intended? Let’s find out.
Aimed for 34 ppm silica, tested at 30. Quite close!
Calcium
43
Magnesium
8
Sodium
7
Potassium
3
Bicarbonate
148
Sulfate
30
Chloride
5
Silica
34
Ions
Hardness
139 mg/L as CaCO3
Alkalinity
121 mg/L as CaCO3
Hardness to Alkalinity Ratio
1.15
TDS (calculated, will not measurenearly this high due to ion conductivities)
243 ppm
Electrical Conductivity at 25ºC (calculated, will not measure this high due to ion behavior)
350 μS/cm
pH (measured)
8
Electrical Conductivity at 25ºC (measured)
303 μS/cm
Stats
Testing the Water with Tea: White2Tea 2016 The Treachery of Storytelling Pt. 2
6.3g/100ml
I chose Treachery because it’s a tea that demands good water, all about power and subtlety, in an interesting stage of aging, just beginning to darken in leaf color. It demands a water that can bring out both the youthful and aging side of the tea. It also has an energy that I’d like to experience in a comfortable way throughout the session. Aside from those considerations, I’m open to any outcome here, as it would be interesting to see how water that may be similar in mineral profile to what the tea “drank” in order to grow will interact with the tea and the experience of it. I’m not sure that tea drinkers even use tap water in China, depending on the area, or if the tap water is not altered in mineral content from the river water, but it’s worth a try for curiosity’s sake.
The water hits the teapot, sending an immediate aroma of flowers and dried fruit upward. The rinse pours a pale straw yellow. Empty pitcher smells of sweets. The leaf in the pot is intensely fragrant, like sunscreen and leather.
After the first steep is poured, immediately scale is forming in the kettle. This water is rather heavy, so I expected this to happen. It is kind of strange how rapidly this occurs, but I think natural water of this heaviness would do the same thing.
The taste of the first steep – bitter. Watery. Smooth. Many subtleties immediately – I’m delighted! Oiliness focused on the front of the tongue, evaporating into many tiny flowers and fruit essences. This is the most clear this tea has ever tasted for me. A brilliant oily soapiness blooming into a rose flower aftertaste. ECA is mild.
Second steep – the mouthfeel is so very soft, the silica is making a huge difference. The tea sort of inflates in the mouth. Juicy. Qi hits here. Downward qi, clarifying. The wateriness persists, refreshing. Extremely smooth, a lot of rear activity, experience of drinking moving from front to back to front. Leather and tobacco fairly obvious here, but the body and watery quality make this steep seem almost crystalline.
The Pyrex pitcher has never been more relevant
Speaking of crystals, unfortunately there’s a colossal amount of scale forming unlike any I’ve ever seen, forming crystalline globs on the bottom of the kettle. Luckily they’re not actually stuck together, just powdery scale collected in various spots on the bottom of the kettle. I’m sure this is changing the mineral content quite a bit, removing calcium carbonate from the water. This scale looks different than usual, so it could be silica in the scale too.
Lots of scale.
Third steep was similar to second.
Fourth steep – great bubbles on the surface of the tea, meaning we haven’t lost too much bicarbonate to scaling. Beginning to be a more full-mouth-all-at-once-experience. Darker, deeper, tannins showing up. Something that reminds me of citrus, like deep tangerine, or bitter orange juice. Smoother than any water I’ve ever made by far. 30 ppm silica is a big difference. The water holds together nicely. Huge focused relaxed energy. In tune. Heating in back. Not very sweet, like a very dry orange wine (white wine with the skins kept on) or a wild ale. Big pollen huigan!!
Seriously.
Fifth – Under-lid aroma is flowery, in a settled way, not like a brand-new tea would be, balmy. The scale is not showing up in the cup at all, though, which is nice. I’m very happy right now, for many reasons – the base water is good, the tea is good, the mineral composition is natural, the result is somewhere in the liminal space between natural and… well, not artificial… what is this? I guess this water is a secret, nobody has ever tried it, let alone with tea, except maybe people in the Xijiang Basin have this running in their house all the time. That’s a secret from me, I’ve sort of taken this water out of context and placed it in a new context that reflects a reality that I’ve probably made up. Not the first time this has happened in tea culture. Please contact me if you know if this water is used by many people. I believe it is similar to Guangzhou tap water, which is taken from six tributaries of the Pearl river, and the Xi is one of the main tributaries. I’m aware of water pollution in china too, so if everyone uses bottled water, or if it’s a mix, I appreciate the info. Back to the session – I’m getting a woody-stemminess, and awesome petroleum power. The tea isn’t heavy though, it still floats and has structure.
Sixth – What is this water? I mean, when you have a beyond burger, it’s kind of natural, but it’s fairly obvious you’re having something that’s been built from something else. But with this, I distilled water, which is what nature does with clouds and rain. Then I added minerals, which is what happens when water flows over rocks. There are some things missing, like the volatile scents of rocks, which are a real thing, such as the many volatile compounds that cause the petrichor effect after it rains. But chemically, it’s nearly identical to natural water at this point. It’s more like a photograph, or a sculpture of nature.
artificial (adj.) late 14c., “not natural or spontaneous,” from Old French artificial, from Latin artificialis “of or belonging to art,” from artificium “a work of art; skill; theory, system,” from artifex (genitive artificis) “craftsman, artist, master of an art” (music, acting, sculpting, etc.), from stem of ars “art” (see art (n.)) + -fex “maker,” from facere “to do, make” (from PIE root *dhe- “to set, put”).
Earliest use in English is in the phrase artificial day “part of the day from sunrise to sunset” (as opposed to the natural day of 24 hours). Meaning “made by man, contrived by human skill and labor” is from early 15c. The word was applied from 16c. to anything made in imitation of, or as a substitute for, what is natural, whether real (light, tears) or not (teeth, flowers). Meaning “fictitious, assumed, not genuine” is from 1640s; that of “full of affectation, insincere” is from 1590s. Artificial insemination dates from 1894. Artificial intelligence “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines” was coined in 1956.
Sixth (cont.) – present. Roots, like fennel, parsnip. Dry huigan, dry mouthcoat, but not drying. Dry in taste in every aspect. Rather elegantly dry. The idea of sweetness is still there though, thank goodness.
Seventh – a 45 second steep, lighter than expected, too short of a steep. Taste is fairly mild here. I’m surprised at the slow extraction. Still has dried raspberry, creamy, qi. While the next steep is happening, let me talk about the chemistry of this water. High in bicarbonate, calcium and sulfate, higher potassium than normal, medium-low sodium. Low in magnesium. The potassium and sulfate contribute to the dry flavor and depth. The low magnesium and high calcium create a smooth and settled profile, and may cause the slower extraction.
Eighth – 2 minutes, good color, more present. Still quite watery in a way, but I’ve heard of this tea being like this. It’s watery but not underextracted. There’s plenty to chew on here. Oats and grains, definitely. I love the purity of the base water, free from plastic. My body is refreshed, back sweating, butter and bubblegum aftertaste. The tea is always shifting, elusive. Foresty taste, dense deep mouthcoat.
Ninth – Ripe peach. Only noticed this obvious note now, the florals were so distracting earlier! Getting more and more ethereal, focused on aftertaste, so vivid. There’s something natural and microbiological about the tea, as if some sort of fermentation is happening in the cup, like wine. It’s not close to sour or anything, but complex and active, alive.
Tenth – I am out of water in the kettle, let’s see if a fresh boil will revitalize it. A smell in the glass water container confirms that this water is indeed odorless, which is great. Tenth steep, still from the first boil, same boil as the last nine steeps, is a bit flat, but still nice. Suntan lotion, banana, bubblegum, irises, corn. Mouth is happy, not dried out at all. Pleasantly coated in tannins.
Eleven – fresh boil, 3 minute steep. Actually not enormously different. A bit more vitality and strength. This session overall is very relaxed, yet bitter, watery, yet potent. I love a good paradox in a cup! Sessions with other waters have been sort of similar, but not as bitter. It’s much less bitter than, say, the Truth Serum water recipe would make this tea. Grape skins, red and white.
Twelve – Final steep, ten minutes. Still so smooth, mild, chewy. Tobacco, simmered root vegetables, oils, coconut. Such an endlessly interesting profile and cohesive texture.
Session rating – 8.8/10
Water rating for this tea – 8.5/10
Reviewing the Water Itself
Drink up!
55ºF. Odorless, it hits the mouth, very thick and full for water. Holds together well. Mildly sweet, can taste the air in the water. It really is smooth and dry in the same way that the tea made with it is. Aftertaste is pure enough, could be more pure. Extremely slight CO2, not as much as Saratoga. The sulfate expresses itself with a thickness and presence. Really smooth, not particularly crisp, heavy but empty. Satisfying water with a sort of plain, ordinary and natural character. Could be more thirst-quenching.
Water rating – 8.1/10
What did I learn?
First, Xi River is really heavy. Unless there’s something I don’t know about how to get scale to stay in water and not precipitate out, it’s just a water that scales aggressively. I feel like the time investment that it took to make this water was worth it in the same way that the money investment for Treachery is worth it. I learned that silica makes a positive difference. I also learned that I can make good base water now, albeit with great effort. I got to know Treachery more, the qi was extremely comfortable and beneficial. This is good tea water in my book. I thought it could be a bit more present, but there was a sort of authenticity to what I was replicating here, or at least my idea of it, having never tried it. It tasted ordinary yet elegant, and seemed to express the tea in a beautiful, rather emotional way. I want to improve my process and make more water – I have plenty to replicate and even more water to create and design. I really enjoyed this session and process – it is like reverse-engineering nature.
I’ve come across a lot of analogies when talking about water for tea. A memorable one is: tea is the music, water is the speakers. Thats pretty close to how it is, but maybe tea is the music and water is the orchestra playing it. Both of these analogies involve the reproduction of music, but with the orchestra analogy there’s more responsibility given to the water. Furthermore, the orchestra would have a conductor, which would be the human brewer. But then, is the teapot the first chair, the best player in the orchestra? Or would that be the dominant flavor? No, the dominant flavor is part of the musical composition. Then, the cup must be the acoustics. But isn’t the acoustics the actual space that the tea drinking is happening in? The teapot might be the instruments that the orchestra is playing. So the water is playing the teapot, which is playing the tea into the cup; all led by the brewer.
I’ve gotten feedback on discord from people who tried a different water and were struck by how big of a difference it made, more than teaware, brewing temperature, ratio, or any other parameter. Water can be heavy, light, vibrant, muddled, astringent, subdued, dense, spacious, fluffy, metallic, smooth, and more. Water can, by the way it extracts, cause tea to be any of these things. You can even have a smooth water that makes astringent tea, so there can be a mismatch. That’s like how a shy violin player can play quite loudly and with great presence on stage.
The point is, there are many different kinds of water, and different levels. You wouldn’t yell at a 6th grade orchestra for not sounding like the Vienna symphony. So, either you have to accept your water as it is, with its flaws, or you have to figure out something better. I’ve found that there’s not much you can add or change with a bad water to make it better, just like there’s not much you can do with a not-so-talented orchestra to make it world-class. For the orchestra, you basically have to kick out all but the best players, and then replace them with better ones. With water, it’s similar. By diluting the water, you make room to introduce a better group and balance of minerals. Since every water is different and mineral content reports are so spotty and often incomplete, it’s hard to know what to add to the diluted water. So, it’s often easier to simply throw out the old water and get a new one.
With the modern recycling crisis and the expense of water transport, coupled with the non-availability of good water in glass bottles for any reasonable price, and the difficulty of making 0ppm TDS water to make recipes with (home Reverse Osmosis filters make 10ppm usually, depending on starting TDS, and distillers don’t make good tasting water, at least that I’ve tried) we as tea drinkers have to get lucky with our tap, or make do with a difficult and imperfect solution for the time being.
I was recently featured on Crimson Lotus Tea’s livestream show, Between Two Teapots! I got to talk about water with Glen, founder of Crimson Lotus Tea and with Arby, my friend and water collaborator. We drank the same tea with the same water recipe that we created, Truth Serum. Two hours long, I feel like we only scratched the surface. Here it is for you to watch!
I found it amazing that Glen noticed an obvious difference in the tea brewed with Truth Serum compared to his normal water. This is due to the Hardness to Alkalinity ratio (see the WIP Water Guide) being twice as high as his usual. The sensory overload of extraction that you can get with TS is really quite fun to explore! I can’t wait to make more waters that are a bit more subtle and subdued, while still delivering plenty of power. Feel free to message me on IG @teasecretsblog with any water questions – I’m here to help you dial in your tea.
This is a project for a book club I am in. We read the essential tea book, Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic. For this project I took photos of every tea session I had for a couple weeks. I tried not to do anything special and just take a quick photo – these sessions were not set up to be special for these pictures. I will then see if there’s any patterns or observations about them that link to ideas in the book.
The first session presents itself as a global chaxi – jianshui teapot from yunnan, jianshui bowl from the czech republic, teacup from slovakia, mat from siberia, rock from walden pond, pyrex from USA. Surrounding the chaxi are hints of the personal context of me, the experiencer.The duck cup, made in Jingdezhen, says on the bottom, “made in the ming dynasty, LOL!” joking about the idea of authenticity. In the book, authenticity plays a central role. This duck cup reminds me of White2Tea’s Treachery Pt. 1, which reads “This tea is fake” on the wrapper.“‘being loyal to one’s senses’ is actually mixed up with conscious and unconscious acceptance or rejection of external influences” (Zhang 202). Would I ever use a pyrex if not for White2Tea? No! The name of this mat from Tea-Masters is “dark connections” and I like to think about all the connections present underneath the circumstances and setup of the tea session.hua – transformation, gradual change (145). Light illuminates the chaxi, different every time. Also notice what changes and what stays the same. “it is upon bad fortune that good fortune leans, it is on good fortune that bad fortune rests” (Lao Tzu, Zhang 145)Occasionally you’ll see accumulation of teaware in the background. Sometimes sessions are messy like this.The book discusses how it was said that if you don’t buy lots of puer tea early on, you’ll regret it later. This was a big idea in the Puer bubble of 2007, which is discussed in chapter 5. I think about the sheer volume of tea produced in that time, and the sheer number of tea sessions I’ve consumed – maybe there’s sometimes a similar problem? This picture is a bit blurred in places, but the tea in the pitcher is crystal clear.Look at the contrast from the last picture. I think I had just been on a hike, opened the windows, switched cloths. Light shining from the left, lonely teapot in the back right. Jiri lang cup and pot. “a return to the original vague ‘raw’ situation” (Zhang 119)Puer tea is valuable, but what is the true value of Puer tea?“The yunnanese themselves said that yunnanese things were “earthy” (tu), rustic, or backward” (Zhang 94). Here the earthy things are from europe. The tea itself here has been “made elegant” somehow. Or has it?Flavorless flavor was mentioned in the book somewhere. An idea that’s hard to pin down. Some body, some body, some body, somebody (TwoDog 2020). Do you think puer tea is somebody, like it has a personality? Or is it just Some Body, just plant matter?“One such tourist, a nostalgic woman from Guangzhou, had imagined before her journey that she would be able to sit on the flagstones of the Tea-Horse Road in Yiwu, fantasizing about caravans ringing their bells” (72).I really like this quote (on the kindle)A switch to a more “traditional” porcelain pitcher. The jianghu of puer tea, a central concept in the book, is basically – puer tea is contextualized and defined by multiple actors. Even me and you. To me, even a teapot is an actor in this jianghu, this space where wandering knights battle it out and debate, a highly individualized space. More jianghus and jianghu actors – tea shops, blogs, instagram, discord, vendors. Not forest tea, but tastes like a forest.Regular dinner plate, now a tea plate. Two favorite tea books on the left.puer tea close up, when you look in this way, you don’t understand at all.Reading The Time of Tea, a similarly academic tea book. By comparing different contextualizations, you can begin to understand. I don’t think you can understand puer tea from one point of view, just like there isn’t one chaxi here that is the most correct. I do like the sunny ones, though.Another session lost to time…“Imagined originality” (53) I feel like I stopped looking for Puer tea’s authenticity in a historical context long ago, or was never interested in the first place. Traditional handcrafted tea processing is a technique passed down, and as long as the basics are right, it’s more interesting to have your tea here and now.“these connoisseurs’ standards suggest that both the raw and the aged are authentic” (54).End?
Thanks for reading! Remember, tea never ends… I’m having more right now!
Sometimes there are tea sessions that just aren’t good. People don’t talk about them usually because they just aren’t notable or interesting – they are moments of failure. Usually, the explanation for these sessions is “I just wasn’t in the zone.”
During tonight’s ripe session, after a full day of water research (yes, I’m diving deep into water for tea), I was kind of bouncing back and forth between the computer and the tea table, sort of half focused. Suddenly, a song came on: Mind Mischief (The Field Remix) by Tame Impala. I have been listening to both Tame Impala and The Field for years, but didn’t discover this song until I heard it repeatedly on White2Tea’s Instagram and Snapchat stories. When I kept hearing it there, I started to wonder, “yeah, it’s a cool song, but what does Paul see in it that makes him listen again and again?
This is a pattern of thinking that I believe is central to modern tea culture. What do people see in Yang Qing Hao that makes them buy it by the tong? What do people see in old Yixing teapots that make them obsessed? What makes people buy those $130 samples of old Liu Bao from Essence of Tea? And on and on.
I closed my eyes as the song played and suddenly I was lulled into a sense of happy peaceful nostalgia (yes this reads like a bad college admissions essay but it’s the truth) where my old neighborhood flashed before my eyes, the cul-de-sac with its fresh mulch, the happy feelings of freedom so different from what I find most of the time in my young adult life.
When I opened my eyes, I saw everything with startling clarity – I mean to say that colors were more vivid, details were more pronounced. The texture of the modern zhuni teapot contrasted against the plate, the whiteness of the porcelain, the waste bowl, the chabu (tea mat), everything. I suddenly felt like I was capable of greater things, to transcend my everyday life.
When you invest time and or money into tea and or teaware, you are buying opportunity for moments like this. It’s not about always having the best tea session; that can be taken away, but nothing can take away the opportunity for an incredible, eye-opening experience.
In the world of tea, what do we gain with experience?
What’s the difference between an experienced tea drinker and a relative novice? I’m not an expert, but I’m closer to being an expert than I used to be. I’ve also interacted with many people I would consider to be experts, especially in certain areas. Here are a few things people seem to collect along the way.
Tea and teaware
I’ve not met any tea enthusiast who does not have a sizable collection. From people with over 100 teapots to those with entire rooms full of tea, there exist tea-fans so obsessed that they have gone beyond practicality. The more you learn about tea, and the more tea you learn about, the more temptation there is to buy it. Marketing is getting better and better, limited releases are everywhere (white2tea, pu-erh.sk, others), and the selection of teaware is unbelievable. It is very difficult to purposefully reduce the size of your tea/teaware stash over time, and the best way is a sale or swap.
The ability to relax and enjoy
In order to fully enjoy tea, one must drop everything else (aside from possibly a good book or album). I mean to say that worry and tea don’t go well together, especially not worry about tea. I see most (not all) beginners quite concerned about if they are making the tea “right.” Eventually, an expert learns to let the tea make itself. This is done partially through development of personal style and habit, and otherwise learning how to relax and make tea at the same time.
The ability to make good tea
Of the ten thousand ways to make tea, not all are good. Making good tea is about maximizing good qualities and minimizing bad ones. It is an iterative process that comes from many attempts. The more pots one has, the longer it takes to learn their nuances, and the worse the available water is, well, you gotta figure out a solution. The better the water is, the easier it is to make good tea. The point is, people usually get better with experience, or at least develop some character and style in their resulting tea.
Positive memories
Some tea sessions stick out over others for various reasons. With experience, the list of memorable tea sessions lengthens. That time I had HK Henry after a long, stressful day. The outdoor session at the pond in the woods. That six-tea marathon session. The tea masterclass where the puers just got older and older. That time the tea made me tear up (it happens to more people than you think!) That first bitter-turning-to sweet taste of raw puer. And the list goes on.
Friendship
I’ve met some people online and offline in the tea community. Some of these friendships go beyond tea, but it’s perfectly possible and okay to have deep friendships entirely about tea. There are one-sided relationships too – some people serve as the experts and others as the novices. The best way to put your own tea journey in context is to show others what you are doing and compare with what they do. This is not to say that people with more experience are necessarily correct, but that they may have reasons for what they do that you can think about as you decide what to incorporate in different ways.
Personal opinions / the (dis)respect of others
The tea culture is a generally polite place full of different opinions. Most tea-learning is confirmed by experience, and people don’t easily let go of that which they’ve learned from experience. There are usually reasons for differing opinions but they are not easy to figure out. So, there are commonly long arguments about, for example, tea storage, unglazed vs. glazed clay, vendor choices, whether a tea is good or bad, and water (this one seems especially contentious). This is what makes tea so exciting to an expert, especially one who is willing to change their mind.
Appreciation of non-tea
The more one learns to enjoy tea, the more that enjoyment spills over into non-tea elements. Whether it’s the world of alcoholic beverages, from single malts to wine to beer to eaux-de-vie, or just appreciation of nature, tea is about exploring the richness of the world to the fullest extent. Eventually, one learns to enjoy simply living and breathing.
Patience and its rewards
Patience is a virtue, and tea requires patience. Waiting for the water to boil takes patience. Waiting for the hot tea to cool a bit takes patience. Waiting for those loooong steeps at the end of a session takes patience. And all that patience is rewarded with a slow, steady adventure. It’s quite uncomfortable to wait so long doing nothing when you are a tea novice, but eventually it becomes clear that doing nothing is the gateway to a clear experience of reality, or something like that.
Learning from mistakes / Beginner’s mind
It’s easy to mess up a session, or brew a tea for a significant other that evokes the reaction of disgust, or spill tea all over your pants. It’s also incredibly common to have your most expensive tea with your favorite teaware and be completely let down by the result. This is learning, and why the best approach to tea is not as an expert, but as a beginner, open to whatever may happen in the current circumstance. The tea experts I respect the most don’t have any pretentious attitude, but simply know how to enjoy and share tea in their own way, and especially are good at listening to experts and beginners alike.
at puerh brooklyn
P.S. I’m doing a lot of hard, time-consuming, mildly expensive work with water, and plan to share it with the world around March 2020. Sorry for the wait, but distilling water takes many hours, and my glass lab equipment is in customs. Thanks for reading!
I went to a tea party! We had twodog from white2tea serving a whole bunch of us. I won’t say too much about the tea; it was great. I got to serve some Yang Qing Hao 888 at the end, but it didn’t come out too well. I still consider myself a tea novice among this sort of company. Anyway, it was good people, good tea, good music, good food, good drink, what more can you ask for?
I work at a tea shop, but it’s not really like a Teavana or a davidstea. There aren’t a lot of fruity blends, except for a Hibiscus-Berry herbal blend. The selection is mostly pure teas with nothing added, and the shop gets them from all over the place. Some are wholesale from yunnan sourcing, some are from a brooklyn-based performance artist from Hunan, some were brought back in the owners’ suitcases from Taiwan, some are from this, that or the other vendor. I haven’t been on any of the china/japan/taiwan trips, because I’m the one who works the shop while they’re gone. The shop hosts Global Tea Hut and other bowl tea events/ceremonies, with the occasional gongfu thing or ceramics workshop. This is where I met Petr Novak, Wu De, and Gary Snyder’s housemate. More on that in another post.
Bowl Tea Downstairs
Working at a tea shop, you see people approaching tea from every conceivable angle. People want tea to relax, go to sleep, wake up, digest food, lose weight, taste floral, taste fruity, clean their house, walk their dog. Once I have that info, I tell them what they should buy, and if that doesn’t work, we might drink something, or I’ll tell them about puerh, or something else I’ve been into recently that they could try. If they leave, they leave.
There’s a lot of puerh where I work and it’s stored naturally mostly in big ceramic Novak/Randova puerh jars. Some of it just sits in drawers with rubber bands around it, but it’ll be fine because those cakes are drunk pretty quickly. Some of it is out in open air on puerh cake stands.
Kind of like this
It’s different storage than I do at home, so the tea comes out different. It’s more… natural. Storage in porous earthenware is very different from storage in boveda packs in a metal stock pot. One of the owners asks me sometimes if the metal affects the energy of the tea in a negative way. I have to say I don’t quite know. There’s no way to know.
At the shop, all sorts of tea enthusiasts collide, and the results are very often profound. As stuff like that happens, I’ll write about it.
Here is a picture of some tea. I decided to use this pot because it was my newest one. I decided to drink some 2005 Xiaguan 8653 because it was in a sample bag from a group buy and I figured it wasn’t going to age any more in the bag, so time to drink it up. It worked well with the pot, but that’s beside the point.
Did you know that Gongfucha, and/or chadao, and/or whatever this is called, is in some respects fairly new, and influenced by multiple cultures and dialogues between China, Japan and Taiwan? Famous tea blogger MarshalN wrote this, which is how I found that out: http://www.marshaln.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GFC1601_06_Zhang-3.pdf
I used to think there is “the chinese way” of making tea, and that it had been around for thousands of years. Now, things make a lot more sense. This way of making Chinese tea is not 100% Chinese and not that old, and that opens things up a bit so you can use whatever you want as an active participant in an ever-evolving global tea culture. We have in this picture a chinese teapot bought from a hong kong vendor, a chinese cup, a czech plate with japanese kohiki glaze style, a sake pitcher made by a ceramicist in brooklyn, and chabu (tea mat) from a French dude in Taiwan.
This isn’t anything particularly edgy, but it is worth noting that tea drinking is a global phenomenon and everyone does it in their own style. It’s pretty cool to have teaware from all over the world interacting together in one session.
Anyway, on this blog I’m going to try to explore the more abstract concepts in puerh and other teas because I’ve found it all to be very, very interesting.
Tea Secrets 