Self Introduction

Welcome fellow tea geeks and miscellaneous friendfolks,

As you can see, I’ve decided to start a blog (mostly) dedicated to tea stuff. I’m more than a tad obsessed with tea stuff and am needing an outlet. I’m recently graduated from a Chinese Linguistics program and am apprenticing at Floating Leaves Tea in Seattle. I have to thank the wonderful proprietress, my tea teacher Shiuwen, for creating a wonderful Cascadian tea style from this tiny beacon of tea culture, a little shop in Ballard. I also want to thank the other drinkers who have adopted and developed this style, as I will reference their knowledge often. And in the end, the primary source is the most important; those who grow and process the tea. The artists whose tea moves through Floating Leaves are my greatest inspiration.

Because of who I drink tea with and who I am as a tea drinker, I mostly focus on oolongs, and have a passion for more traditional leaves. The kind of teas that give you a warm feeling in your belly and set your throat abuzz. I do however venture outside of roasted, oxidized, stinky, sexy, funky Taiwanese granddaddy teas fairly often, so keep an open mind. I will occasionally play with puer and other ‘dark’ teas, and may even goof around with a green or a black now and again.

Tea for me is a practice of alchemy, both on the tea table and within my mouth and body. It sometimes develops into a meditation, and sometimes it’s just enough that I get sufficiently high so I can float through the city. It’s an ongoing learning process, and I hope that this blog will help me organize some thoughts and share with other drinkers. Feedback is generally very helpful, so be generous with your comments!

I plan here to post stories from my own tea experiences, explore themes in tea and review some teas. Thus, I have to make a disclaimer about tea reviews here: I don’t love reviewing teas and find that listing tasting notes can be profoundly boring. So if I get a little more poetic than scientific in my reviews, that’s why. I think that a tea (especially a good tea) is verbally evasive and always changing on top of that, so the only way I can think to write about them is to be linguistically acrobatic and sloppily literary.

So my goal is storytelling, sharing thoughts and developing tea literacy. Hope you keep reading and enjoy doing so!

Yours truly,

NOAH BA