A Tea Addict's Journal

Tenmoku chawan

November 4, 2009 · 6 Comments

Haven’t posted any teaware porn for a while, so here goes

I love this bowl.  The only flaw is that the brown colour on the exterior is probably a tad bit too much.  These bowls are great for matcha, because their dark colour provides a sharp relief for the lightness of the tea.  The Japanese then adopted it wholesale and kept using them, while Chinese moved on from these to lighter coloured bowls because taste in tea changed over time.  They won’t be any good making tea that is brewed, because the colours won’t show properly, but when whisked, that’s a totally different story.

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Gendered consumption of tea

November 1, 2009 · 19 Comments

One of the topics that came up a week ago in class was the gendered consumption of tea, and the perception in different places of tea’s proper role.  It’s an interesting subject that I notice sometimes in my own drinking as well.

In Japan, for example, the tea ceremony now is almost entirely practiced by women, with some men involved.  For the most part, it’s seen as a girly thing to do, along with ikebana and other womanly arts.  When I visited Japan and had tea in any setting, I have never had a man prepare tea for me.  This was obviously not the case a few hundred years ago, when tea was reserved for samurai.  Anybody else practicing it was seen as intruding on an exclusive territory, and women were certainly not welcomed at least until the Tokugawa period.  Something happened in the next three hundred years so that now, we have the complete opposite of what used to be.

I think a similar thing can be observed in China, although with a twist.  If you go to public places, you’re more likely to find women in shops and stores to be preparing tea for you.  However, among tea fanatics I’ve met in China, almost all were male.  I’d say only about 10% of the true tea enthusiast in China are female.

What’s more interesting is that among Westerners I know, a similar ratio exists.  There are, relatively speaking, fewer serious tea drinkers who are female than those who are male.  Yet, in common perception, tea is seen as a drink that is more feminine, whereas coffee takes the masculine role.  Whenever I go out to a restaurant with my wife and we both order something at the end of the meal, I sometimes get the coffee and she gets the tea, even though our preferences are the exact opposite.  Waiters who don’t know often would assume that I am the coffee drinker, usually based purely on my gender.

I can’t quite explain why it is that the tea enthusiasts I know tend to be all male.  I’m pretty indiscriminate in meeting people who are fans of tea, but the ratio of tea drinkers seem to hold up even if I account for people who I only know by reputation or online presence.  I also wonder if the general perception that tea is “weak” or “feminine” has any real impact on its consumption and acceptance in the general public.  I would imagine it must, but how that actually takes place is very complex and difficult to pin down.  At any rate, it’s an observation that I’ve long held, and until now anyway, it still seems to hold up quite well.

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What are you tasting?

October 24, 2009 · 1 Comment

On Thursday for class I brought in some of my testing sets, and went about showing my students how you might test for different teas when you’re a buyer.  We were talking about the commodification of tea, coffee, etc, and this, I thought, would be an interesting way to show some of the things that go on behind the scenes, so to speak.

This is the second brewing already, as the first one was consumed and commented on.  The one on the right is Yunnan Gold, the one in the middle a Darjeeling, and on the left, an Assam.  I figured it’s probably better to use different kinds of teas, so to highlight the differences, rather than going for, say, two or three stripes of Keemun that are difficult to tell apart if you don’t know what you’re drinking.

The “not knowing what you’re drinking” is quite a common thing though.  I noticed, for example, that many times their reactions are very different from mine. First of all, the teas were all intensely bitter to them, while for me it was really only true for one of the teas.  The nuances that we generally taste are not detectable to others, because the bitterness is overwhelming.  It’s quite interesting actually, because these are things you no longer realize or think about when you’re drinking tea all the time.

I do think sometimes that when we get picky about teas, we’re really chasing a never ending tunnel of taste.  As we get more experience drinking and achieve a better level of judgment in our ability to differentiate tastes, we demand more of our tea.  That, in turn, means that tea growers and sellers will try to satisfy this desire with more interesting products, but ultimately, it can only get worse and worse over time.  Whereas a newcomer to tea might be entirely satisfied by a good assam, I’m not sure I can be, at least on a daily basis.  That’s why sometimes when I find a tea I particularly like, I will now buy lots of it, for fear that I will no longer see it and run out.  This, of course, contributes to a large stash of tea sitting around, which will take forever to finish.  This is the joy of tea drinking.

Anyway, sorry for the long delays in update.  Life teaching is quite busy, so not much time to post….

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The information age

October 7, 2009 · 9 Comments

I used to write a lot of “tea reviews”, if you can call it that.  For maybe two years, this blog was mostly one review or another.  Sometimes it’s an oolong, others a puerh, but generally, this blog was a daily report of what I was drinking that day.

In the past year or two, that has changed.  I no longer talk about specific teas so much.  I find it meaningless, at least for myself, because most of the time, the teas I drink are not interesting enough for me to talk about them.  Other problems and issues, such as techniques, names, varietals, or teaware seem much more interesting.  That, I think, has been largely what I have discussed for the past year or two.

These days, since I’ve been teaching a course on tea history and been translating some of the older texts on tea that are still unavailable in English, I’ve been thinking more about problems of history and how tea, as we know it, evolved over time.  Reading some things from the Ming (1368-1644) today, it is remarkable to see that some of the places, such as Longjing, were already named as great tea producing areas.  However, the Longjing that the author talked about is distinctly small scale — only a handful of tea was produced every year, and mostly the wealthy and influential get to drink it.

In many ways, that’s not unlike how tea still is today in China.  The good stuff — the really good stuff, go to the top.  Ordinary people, even if you have the money, often can’t buy such things, for they are of such limited quantity that they simply do not provide for the whole market.  This is why, again and again, I say that places like Lao Banzhang do not produce teas to satisfy the general market, and that almost all Lao Banzhang old tree teas out there are fake.  They just don’t make enough every year, and there is always an eager line of customers waiting for such things.

The same can be said of the best of the best Longjing, or Tieguanyin, or any number of widely sought after teas.  This leads to the second thing that struck me — that fake teas already existed way back when.  Of course, this is only natural, for there is money to be made in such a business, and lots of it too, if you’re any good.  Fake tea and teaware are the bane of our existence today, but they have always been part of the problem for the tea fanatic.  There is simply no way around it.

What is new, I think, is the speedy spread of information in our digital age, and to go along with that, the ease with which to spread misinformation about certain teas or teaware, or to hype up products that simply do not match their description.  A friend remarked to me recently that in the online tea world, what passes as fact is usually snippets of information that most people seem to agree upon, even though “most people” includes many who are simply echoing what they have heard elsewhere.  This is not an indictment of the general population of tea drinkers who post online.  After all, when most of the sources available online about teas come from vendors, there is simply no way for the consumer to know what is marketing and what is good information.

There is good information out there.  I had my students do a project where they had to use only online sources to find information on the six classifications of tea.  The quality of their work was higher than I expected, and they mostly relied on vendor sites for the exact reason I stated — there just isn’t anything else out there, at least not in English.  In Chinese or Japanese, you can often find hobby sites that are devoted to good information on topics such as tea or teaware.  Even there you usually find plenty of disagreements, and are quickly overrun with vendors of various types who try to push their wares.  Ultimately, tea is still a commodity, and whenever you talk about it, you will attract those who want to sell it.

What troubles me is when somebody says “XXX is a trusted vendor”.  Trusted for what?  Few vendors “know it all”.  Some are more knowledgeable in certain areas, others only repeat what their supplier tell them.  Most, at least among the online vendors, have had probably less than 10 years of experience in the tea world, sometimes much less.  Their information is probably coming from whoever is supplying them with tea or wares.  Many don’t know Chinese or Japanese, or at best, know bits and pieces, not really enough to carry on a meaningful conversation about the nuances of various kinds of tea they are dealing with.  I get a lot of questions along the lines of “where should I buy my zhuni pot?”  I have met yixing collectors who have been at it for four decades, and still tells me they occasionally buy fakes because they are hard to tell.  If someone with that much experience can’t tell, then I must say I don’t really trust any sources online for such a thing, at least not among those who deal with such things in English that I’ve seen.

Of course, I am lucky in that I am native in Chinese and have access to people and places that allow me to bypass the online channels.  The other thing I often hear is “well, unlike you, I can’t find those on my own”.  I completely agree, and even in my case, many things are hard to find on my own, because I am not in Asia and don’t have the time to go very often.  I too buy from online sources, but I generally am very cautious, some might say too cautious, in my approach.  I don’t buy anything expensive, I don’t touch anything claiming to be old, and I don’t buy in bulk before trying the tea.  Even if it is tea from a person whom I’ve dealt with before and know I can trust, the tea can still be no good for reasons having nothing to do with the vendor.  It could simply be that I am not interested in that particular type of tea.  It could be the season, or the region, or a number of other things.  Buying things sight unseen in the tea world is really asking for trouble.

The Longjing story comes back as a good illustration of this problem — if the top grade Longjing is all locked up by the wealthy and powerful locals, why would anybody bother to sell it at a lesser price to foreigners?  The same can be said of a lot of things, be it tea or teaware.  I sometimes see pots on sale that do not look credibly old for the claim that is made, or for prices that are far too cheap, as a certain eBay vendor is well known to do.  Why would anybody do that?  There’s only one good explanation, and that is that the items in question are fakes.

I suppose what I want to say here is that a certain amount of skepticism is good, even if it is throwing cold water on a nice hobby.  I love tea as much as anyone, but I don’t think we have enough of skepticism around in this world of tea vendors.

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Troubles with a bush

September 30, 2009 · 10 Comments

Recently there’s been some discussion of the nature of dancong online at various places, and one of the topics of discussion was the proper nomenclature of dancong itself.  I was not too convinced by what was being said, simply because some didn’t sound right, so I went and investigated.

The discussion centers around the word “cong” and which character should be used and what it should mean.  I first went to my trusted source, the Hanyu Da Cidian, which is a 12 volume monstrosity and is the Chinese equivalent of the OED.  I first looked up 叢.  Its basic meaning is “group”, and can also mean “a bunch of plants growing together”.  No surprise there.

Then I looked up 欉, which, to my surprise, is NOT in the Hanyu Da Cidian.

Now, of course, since 叢 simplifies into 丛, one would assume that 欉 simplifies into 枞, and it is extremely common to see 单枞 being used as the phrase for the tea we know as dancong.

However, there is a problem, because æžž is also (or perhaps, only) a simplification of the word 樅, which means fir.  When you search for æžž in the dictionary, you’re going to find the definition “fir”, but that’s because you’re actually looking up the word 樅, not 欉, which is what you should actually be looking for.  People write æžž for 欉 because they assume that’s what it is, and indeed it might, but they are two distinct characters and when you search for words using simplified characters, you always run the risk of it returning erronous results because there are multiple “source” words for one simplified character.

Since the Hanyu Da Cidian doesn’t have 欉, I thought I’d look up 單欉 or 單叢, but it seems like the editors of Hanyu Da Cidian are not tea drinkers, and they are not in the dictionary.

So I went to another useful resource for weird words — the Kangxi Zidian, which was edited in the 1710s.  Here, we do find a reference to 欉, and the definition given is quite simple — In Jiangdong (an area roughly corresponding to the region around Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, etc), a group of plants growing together is called 欉.  The word, interestingly enough, is recorded as 4th tone in the Kangxi Zidian.  As for its definition for 叢, it is essentially the same as the Hanyu Da Cidian.  There’s no difference, basically.

I think what is clear is the following:

欉 has absolutely nothing to do with the fir tree.  We can strike that from the conversation.

欉 or 叢 have essentially the same meaning.  叢 has a wider range of meanings, but they are unrelated to plants.  For the definition that has anything to do with plants, they are synonyms.  In that sense, you can probably see 欉 as a variant of 叢.

There is absolutely nothing in the definition that implies anything growing from the same root or coming from the same plant.  The only definition given has to do with growth in groups and bunches.  One tree cannot be a 叢 because it is not part of a group, especially if it’s a taller tree that’s growing by itself.  It must be a number of plants, or a bush.

So to get back to our problem then — what exactly does dancong mean?  Aside from the very great possibility that it is simply some romantic, nice sounding name, as is so often the case in Chinese teas, we have the characters to work with.  “Dan” generally means lonesome, single, but can in some cases also mean thin.  Normally, we translate dancong to mean “single bush”.  Perhaps owing to the relatively rocky nature of the growing areas, dancong, as originally harvested, was indeed a collection of leaves from lonely bushes growing on their own.  That, to me, seems like a better explaination than some “single origin” theory, mostly because plants don’t work like that, nor do farmers who plant these crops.  So, instead of translating it as “single bush”, perhaps an alternative would be “lonely bush”, denoting the way the trees grow in the rocky setting.  Unlike tea farms in some other places, dancong trees don’t grow quite so closely and densely.

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Lotus flower tea

September 25, 2009 · 3 Comments

I think a lot of us “serious” teaheads tend to dismiss flower infused tea as inferior and bad, and for good reason.  For the most part, these flower infused tea (along with orange peel tea, etc) are made with relatively inferior tealeaves and generally are not very good.  These days they are also often infused with artificial or “natural” flavourings and that sort of thing, further compromising their value.

However, even in the Ming dynasty, people were already doing such things, except their procedures were much more elaborate and difficult, and certainly not meant for large scale commercial production.  Consider the following for a “Lotus flower tea”:

When the sun is not yet risen, open the lotus flowers that are only halfway to full bloom, and put a small amount of fine tea into the center of the flower, and tie the flower loosely with a little raw hemp, and leave it overnight.  Next morning, pluck the flower, pour out the leaves, and use paper to wrap it and roast it dry.  Using this process again, pour the leaves back into another flower, repeat this a few times, and then finally dry it and store it for use.  The fragrance is incomparable.

Try that at home.

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Boiling with charcoal, part 2

September 24, 2009 · 5 Comments

So here it is

My brazier with one of my tetsubins on top.  Ideally, I’d use a kama, but kamas are a pain, because then you need all the right tools to use it with — from the rings you need to lift the kama up, to the ladle, etc, and using a tetsubin is just so much easier.

Last time I tried boiling water with charcoal it took a long time — almost an hour.  One of the problems was that the charcoal was not hot enough.  I bought myself a charcoal starter chimney, and it worked like magic — the charcoal was red hot after a few minutes and was ready to go.  The water still took almost half an hour to boil, but not nearly as long as last time.  I could’ve probably made it even faster if I used more charcoal today, and next time I might do just that.

The largest constraint today was the number of chasen available — one.  I only brought four bowls with me today, because I decided that with one chasen, it doesn’t really matter how many bowls there are out there.  With fourteen students, it turns out four bowls was plenty — by the time the first person was done drinking, the fourth person isn’t even starting to whisk yet.  Some students are quite good at the whisking, while others are learning the difficulties — creating foam, getting rid of lumps, etc.  With usucha, it’s not so hard to get rid of lumps, and I’d imagine with koicha it could be much more of a problem.  We’re not even going there.

Obviously, it is quite impossible to follow any protocol or rules when you have a group of students making matcha for the very first time (except one or two with previous experience).  Then again, they do experience the one thing that definitely happens when you drink tea in a group — you start talking, excitedly.  The caffeine, especially in the powdered form of matcha, can do wonders.

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Charcoal boiling

September 22, 2009 · 7 Comments

I tried out my brazier today, outdoors, with charcoal.  The result, I must say, is mixed.  It took a long time for the water to boil.  I think at first I didn’t add enough charcoal.  Then, it was the relatively cool temperature keeping things slow.  Then, there’s the issue of making sure the heat is funneling up to the kettle and not dispersing on to the sides, since I have a large-ish brazier.  Originally, I wanted to use it to boil water for a class on Thursday, but perhaps, I would have to resort to using an electric kettle to boil the water and then just use the charcoal to keep the water warm…..

Sigh, compromises.  I think the cold air really makes a huge difference to how long it takes to boil.  I remember even using my heating plate outside, it takes a lot longer to boil a kettle than inside.  These are the little things that reminds you how making tea in the old days took considerably more effort than it does today.

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Small bowl, big bowl

September 16, 2009 · 1 Comment

Well, one of the students volunteered to try making whisked Song dynasty tea in class today.  The student has, as far as I know, no prior experience with making whisked tea, and we tried to follow the orders of Cai Xiang and Song Huizong to see if we can get something going.

The problem is, these manuals, if they are treated as such, as really bad manuals.  They are for people who already know quite a bit, and are really not useful for those who don’t know anything to start.  For example, they never mention how much tea to how much water.  How much is appropriate?  It’s not obvious.  Of course, we know, because we’ve done it by experience, but if you are starting out cold, it’s tough.

The whisking also gets difficult, and in Song Huizong’s case, very cumbersome.  Adding water in seven steps means that each individual step of water is really quite small.  It’s not an easy feat to control such pouring, because for the most part, we are not practiced in such things.

We did try our best though, but the student reported that the tea didn’t taste like much — slightly grassy hot water, I think.  The issue, of course, is that there wasn’t enough tea for the water used.  It still begs the question of how much water is really used, and consequently, how much tea.  Enough, of course, to make it frothy, but not too much so it’s too thick.  It’s a fine balance.

Next week we’ll try making tea with a brazier outdoors, and I hope everybody can make a bowl for themselves.  That should be interesting.

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Tasting blind

September 13, 2009 · 7 Comments

Felix Salmon is a great finance blogger, and I’ve been reading him for a while now.  He also writes about other things from time to time, and his latest entry, on tasting wine blind, is quite insightful.

He describes, with pinpoint accuracy, the problem with tasting things blind — you’re always trying to guess what it is, you always wonder what’s going on, and you always gravitate towards the few (usually not very subtle) clues and use that for guidance in the guessing game.  I think in addition to the problems he already presented, there’s another issue at hand with puerh (where much of the blind tasting occurs) as well — unlike wine, many of which were made to be drunk within a few years, relatively fewer people are buying puerh for immediate consumption.  Even for those who enjoy the taste of a new puerh cake, the assumption and expectation is that the cake will age, and hopefully, age well.

This presents a problem, because most people have no clue how a tea will age in five, ten, or twenty years’ time.  If there’s any doubt, one could turn to the “expert panels” that are sometimes assembled by various shops or magazines who review a number of teas — the differing opinions on teas among them will tell you right away that there is simply no agreement as to what is or is not good.

What has happened in the past few years is an increasing number of cakes that seem to be geared to the “drink it now” community, and much like the lament in Salmon’s blog entry, among aficianados of puerh we often hear the same thing, that so many cakes are now made for drinking now, rather than age later.  Immediate pleasure becomes more important than longevity, and depth sacrificed for ease.

To the extent that this is simply an individual choice, it does not really matter.  If you knowingly buy teas for a “drink it now” purpose, then there is no problem at all.  Just like people who buy Beaujolais Nouveau expect to drink it fresh, there are many out there who buy their puerh fresh and drink it fresh.  The only issue happens when you buy it fresh and expect it to be great in ten years.  In my experience that has generally not been the case for many teas of recent vintages.  Rather than turning better, many simply become flat, or worse.

The question of how to spot such things is a constant struggle, and one that I’ve yet to come up with a good solution.  What I do know is that price and make have basically nothing whatsoever to do with ageability.  What I also know is that I trust the opinion of those who have tasted, say, Yellow Label or Red Label while they were younger teas much more than the others, oftentimes newcomers to the tea-making scene.  The almost unanimous opinion of those teas, when they were younger, is that they were harsh, strong, bitter, had depth, and were hardly a pleasure to drink.  It’s hard to find such things on the market these days.

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