Staying Tea Drunk Overnight

I've had the experience of waking up tea drunk a handful of times now, and it's an incredible feeling!

I work a second job to support myself while I help out at Floating Leaves. It's a barista gig, and that means I have to get up much earlier than the 'crack of dawn' to open the shop and start pulling espresso. And on certain mornings I have to do that after a long tea session at the tea shop. A generous tea friend comes in to share really excellent tea, usually one night a week, and I always jump on the opportunity, even when my day will start at 4 AM the next morning.

This has lead me to many very sluggish espresso mornings. But occasionally I will vibe just so with the tea we are drinking, and it will not keep me awake to long and still have me feeling wonderful, floaty and flexible the next morning. Last time this happened, we drank a really extravagant 30 year Dong Ding from Wisteria Teahouse in Taipei. Man, is that tea spectacular! The mouthfeel has this slow-burn of a development. It lasts so long! And it's very intricate in the mouth. The tea still has a lot to teach me, but every time it is an education. And the way it gets me feeling, it's just so calm and so grounding. Like I said, I can sleep (even though it's only for a few hours) through the night and wake up still feeling the tea in my body and head. Also, the dreams are often fantastical ;)

As you might imagine I've drunk a lot of tea, and I've gone to sleep many times. It seems that, for me, older teas are more likely to give me this feeling. Young teas tend to keep me up. And if I can manage to sleep on them, I won't wake up still feeling tea drunk. The kinds of teas that I'm talking about are hard to find and very expensive. But if you're lucky an excellent tea friend will share with you. Gotta appreciate those tea friends! I hope that someday I'll be that tea friend to somebody. It's just one more reason to always be on the search for the next better tea!

NOAH

Taiwan and US Tea Philosophies - a Dang Mini-Essay

I was chatting with a buddy over the weekend about tea and economics. Tea is a different kind of product in Asia than it is in the West. Particularly, as is dictated by my location, I understand tea in the United States is a luxury good. And in Taiwan, as dictated by my personal connections to tea people and my affinity for the culture, I understand that tea is a necessity - maybe more like a monthly expense. This means we treat tea differently. If a season is not to one's taste, the US drinker will more often than not choose a different season's or location's tea to drink or perhaps drink a different category tea than they would have usually drunk. But a Taiwanese drinker will generally drink 'with the season' and learn to appreciate (or at least come to terms with) the seasonal shift in tea quality. The ideal US drinker knows what they want, and the ideal Taiwanese drinker knows what is going on.

With this in mind, I see the difference in terms of contrastive tea philosophies. In the US, with the food systems that we have we can pick up strawberries at the grocery store any time of year. Tea is a luxury that we examine, subdivide and choose the teas which best fit our personal, favorite taste profiles. In Taiwan, different fruits and vegetables cycle through seasons as short as two weeks - for example, when the mangoes are a perfect balance of sweet and tangy, a week or so after they start to come to market, they are priced the highest. This is when they are considered most delicious by those who are considered to have the most developed taste in mangoes. We drink the tea of the season because our tea merchants explain to us that is the best tea to drink. They teach us what is going on with the weather, why a tea tastes the way it does, and often choose for us what we will drink and purchase. They treat us like clients rather than customers. The philosophy that I extract from this Taiwanese way of tea drinking is one of communion with nature. i.e. "We will be drinking tea no matter what (because we are tea people!!) and that means we'd better learn to appreciate the way the tea changes. Because it ain't gonna stop changing for nobody."

*Quick Update - Volcano Pot

The pot I got last week I have been seasoning and drinking cooked oolong from. I thought maybe the clay just hadn't finished seasoning, because the tea kept coming out muddy - really vibrant nose notes, but body was both unclear and sharp.

I just got a text from a buddy drinking some really tasty Qian Jia Zhai puer from 2013, and it sounded so good I went to try it. I grabbed that volcano pot... it really kills! This pot is gonna be for young shengcha, I bet. Really digging the milky soup, and the notes shine through very well!

Damn, that's a tasty shengcha!

NOAH

Taiwanese Volcano Pot

I've been minding the store on my own the last couple weeks at FLT. Shiuwen has been in Taiwan meeting the farmers and general teafolk she works with over there. And she returned yesterday with all kinds of goodies!

She brought me a generous and fantastic little gift, an unglazed pot made by Lin Studio. And it's made out of Taiwanese, homegrown, volcanic clay. Beautiful and strange!

The texture is grabby like fine grit sandpaper. The shape is very cute. But what I noticed when I got it home and started to season it was the smell. It smells strongly of some mineral, but  I can't place it, and it's only when I get it very hot. I circulated through it some Tie Guanyin soup, and it smelled wonderful as the last of the liquid evaporated off the clay. I haven't tasted a brew from it yet, but I'm dying of curiosity. I'll probably try it in the next couple of days.

I think it's really exciting to see all the different kinds of clay people are using to make unglazed pots now. I've used a Taiwanese clay pot (light grey color) for Dong Ding quite a bit, and enjoyed it. I also occasionally use a pot made of Japanese red clay (not Tokoname) for High Mountain Oolongs, which is really fun. It will be fun to see how the clay teapot market develops as it grows, and more diverse clays become teapots. Woohoo!

NOAH

Struggles of Being a Weird Tea Guy

This week was not so much a tea week as a lack-of-tea week, but I felt like posting something for my grumpy tea brethren. Continue for grumblings of a grumpy tea addict. Topic: scarcity of hot water.

I traveled a bit for the holidays this year, and it made me realize how inconvenient my addiction to tea is. Decent tea is certainly not ubiquitous in the US, but neither is solidly hot water. I always bring along my little tea thermos, but I was staying in a hotel for a few days without a stove or kettle. When in desperation I eventually turned to the microwave, I found the leaves didn't appreciate microwave boiled water at all. It's not easy having a strange and highly specific addiction. But it feels so damn good!

I think I may start carrying a simple stove, fuel and kettle with me. A good way to complete the crazed, tea addicted alchemist aesthetic.

NOAH

Drinking with the Seasons

I don't reach for High Mountain Oolong as often as more oxidized, aged or roasted teas. But I must thank my relationship with seasonal green oolong drinking for teaching me some serious lessons. The idea sprang from drinking the winter harvest High Mountain Oolongs at FLT, and learning about their connection to the weather in Taiwan. The new season's teas came in a couple weeks ago and I've been drinking them, trying to get a solid handle on them since then. It seems they have been affected by Taiwan's especially mild winter this year.

So now, a couple days ago I was having tea with a scotch loving friend and realized something about the way I drink tea in contrast to the way he drinks scotch. Besides I get tea drunk while he gets drunk-drunk ;) It seems to be the case that from the earth to the tea table, tea takes a very clear and traceable path. In my own drinking, I strive to understand the leaves in terms of cause and effect. What was the cause (farming, processing, weather, aging, etc) that gave any particular effect that I feel in my mouth, nose or body. It's very interesting to me to read the leaves and broth like a story.

I realized this when my scotch buddy was giggling because I brought up 'dong qi' (winter “energy”). In describing what I meant, it turns out the feeling of dongqi is actually an amalgamation of a lot of different feelings which together point to the weather being sufficiently cool in the tea mountains during winter. But his experience as a scotch drinker is more analytical, perhaps, in that he would rather identify each feeling on its own. In scotch this makes sense, as the path of whiskey from earth to glass is hugely complicated by intricate processing, long term aging and storage. I think they're both very sexy drinks. Their contrastive natures seem to at least imply contrastive approaches in tasting. I'd appreciate input from the scotch-heads!

NOAH

A Thought on Tea Classification

I have a theory I'd like to test out on the wonderful tea geeks of the internet. I've been thinking about the way we classify tea. By this I mean the generally observed classification spectrum of green, white, yellow, oolong, black and puer. I don't mean to exclude the other possible iterations of that spectrum, that's just an example.

My idea is that it may be more useful to identify teas by their geographical, cultural and historic contexts. For example, although the Western tea market generally classifies Cliff Tea and Tie Guanyin as oolong, I've heard many Chinese tea drinkers call these by their own names and consider oolong also something unique more limited in scope. Same thing with Pheonix Teas. The context that got me thinking about this was when I was asking questions about the origin of Cliff Tea and Pheonix Tea. I don't think that the tea producers from each region got together and decided what they were making was oolong, they more probably were just making tea that fit their geology, geography and culture. I propose this kind of lens because I think it may get us as tea drinkers closer to the tea and its origins and help us look past abstractions.

I'm not saying we should do away with our characteristic/processing based spectrum concept by any means. I'm just thinking this is an interesting point of discussion. Please feel free (or obligated) to comment ;)

NOAH