A Tea Addict's Journal

As a tea drinker, a very difficult thing to get asked to do is “just buy me something good” and then get handed some money. The motivation is basically the problem – friend (or family, or whatever) is going to China/India/Japan/Taiwan, and so, the asker thinks, why not get them to buy me some tea? Tea is everywhere in those places, what could go wrong?

A lot.

The touring friend may have no interest or expertise in tea. If they are not frequent visitors to these places, then chances are they are mostly going to be in the big cities, visiting the nice sites and interesting spots. Buying tea is fun – but on their own terms. If the friend is buying tea, and is not a tea drinker, the most likely place that’s going to happen is a tourist-trap shop or the big chains like TenRen. There’s nothing particularly wrong with those places, but is probably not what the asker had in mind.

Also, for someone with no real interest or knowledge in tea, buying tea is not an easy thing, especially in East Asia. There are a zillion choices and prices are opaque. The difficulty is that the shop owners will steer the friend to what they perceive to be tourist friendly teas. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it probably isn’t what the asker had in mind.

Also, these days, there are plenty of stores that sell online from those places, and the prices are not likely to be much higher. In Hong Kong or Japan, in the proper places anyway, the prices are not going to change depend on whether or not you’re a tourist – what you see is what you’re going to get. In China, and less so Taiwan, however, prices may or may not be what you’re supposed to get – I’ve heard prices quoted that are multiples of what I paid. It’s not a friendly thing to do, but it’s what they do. The friend may actually be buying overpriced tea that you can get online for much less. Going into a teahouse can also be quite stressful. Some places have high pressure sales tactic, especially if they are in a tourist area. It’s only really fun is the owners happen to be pleasant and the friend enjoys tea. That isn’t always going to be the case.

If the asker gives a list of things to let the friend get an idea of what he wants, that’s great – but that can also be a curse. If the friend is visiting a place that they might not go back to again, every hour spent getting the tea is every hour not spent seeing/hearing/experiencing things. And, the worse thing is, what they get can be wrong. So, they spent half an afternoon at a tea market getting the tea, but turns out it’s not quite right (say, a fall tea instead of spring, or a Fenghuang shuixian instead of a Wuyi shuixian – and we’re lucky if we got that close). Or, if they got a carte blanche, they come back with a bag of nuclear green TGY that is just plain nasty to anyone who’s drank tea for a while, but is really attractive for someone totally new. What then? The friend will feel terrible, the asker feels like s/he was cheated… it’s not a good situation when that happens.

There are actually a lot of choices out there to buy tea from the source. Not all of them are equally good, but there are definitely options. The only thing that is really hard to get overseas are the top end teas, and also some of the really rare things – but those aren’t likely to be found by the friend who is just visiting for a week. The rest, well, that’s what the internet is for.

I’ve been asked before to buy tea for people, and I found it hard to do even though I actually enjoy spending a whole day in a tea market. It’s harder for people who don’t know much about tea, and who are only visiting a certain place for a short period of time. It’s not a good way for them to spend their time, unless they go often and know the place well, so spare them and let them enjoy their vacation.

I dabble in drinking some whisky now and then. It has, interestingly, some similarities with tea drinking. In particular, I find the experience of drinking and analyzing whiskies to be quite similar to the process that you do with tea, except, very crucially, whisky has alcohol (and also can be consumed straight out of the bottle – and a relatively consistent experience, at that). So, I don’t drink much of it, but I like it.

I also think there are things we can learn, or not learn, from those who drink whiskies. Long time readers probably know that I’m not a big fan of tasting notes, and especially, I’m very skeptical of tasting notes that are full of flavour descriptors – hay, tobacco, straw, etc etc, abound in notes for puerh from many people. I’ve never had hay, or straw, or tobacco, so none of those things really mean all that much to me, and I’m not even sure it means all that much to many people (not to mention that I have a hard time believing tobacco is all the same – it’s like some tobacco smoker describing a flavour as “tea”). So, I generally try to avoid those things. Sweet and sour I use, and sometimes fruity or coolness or smoke, but that’s because I think it is a more elemental, basic sense – I try to avoid things that are quite specific. My vanilla is not really your vanilla.

So it is a rather pleasant surprise to see someone in the whisky review community who is talking about this very issue, and he does so in a very clear, straightforward manner. For those interested:

It’s slightly long, at 15 minutes, but he’s addressing the same issues – don’t just drink with your nose and your tongue. Pay attention to the body, the way the whisky (or in our case, tea) behaves in your mouth, the way it interacts with your body, the finish – how long it lasts and how deep it penetrates down your throat. So on, so forth. Most Taiwanese oolongs, for example, share some similar flavours, but what separates the good from the great are these bodily reactions/responses to the tea that cannot be captured by flavour descriptors. As I’ve said before, drink with your body.

According to the folks at Steepster, you should love the website for six reasons.

1) It’s an online tea journal – this is the only point I agree with. It’s probably a pretty good and stress free way to keep a journal of the teas you’ve tried, which I personally think is a good way to help you learn and develop your tea palette. Trying new teas and writing down what you think about it is an important process that helps you think about what you just drank. So far, so good.

2) It’s a different way to discover new teas – ok, hard to argue with that, it’s new anyway, but at the end of the day, you have to buy and drink it. The problem is not so much that it helps people find new teas – yes, it does that to a degree, by showing you things that may be similar, at least according to their algorithm. But their reviews don’t seem to allow pictures, and usually there’s only one relatively useless picture of the tea, so to get anywhere, you still need to head to the vendor’s page to find out more about the tea. Unhelpfully, Steepster doesn’t link you to the vendor’s page for the tea, but only to the vendor, so you have to go through the trouble to find the tea anyway. While for some vendors this is easy to do, for others it’s a non-trivial task, especially if the vendor has weird categories, such as puerhshop.

3) It’s the largest – well, that’s both good and bad. The size of Steepster would make it seem like a good thing, and on some level, I suppose it is – it has more reviews of more teas than anywhere else on the web, and it benefits from its critical mass so that, right now at least, it seems like the only player in town. Other rating sites, of which I only know of one, are basically dead, which means nobody will bother to go visit.

The size, however, is also a problem. First of all, the rather endless stream of reviews on the site is more than overwhelming, and if you happen to be following a few dozen people, chances are you have no way of sorting out one review from the next. Also, for the most part, the network is pretty much anonymous – you have no idea who’s posting. The person posting a poor review of a black tea could be a lifetime green tea drinker who hates anything black. The person reviewing a wonderful Yiwu might be drinking raw puerh for the first time without telling you so, and thus describes it as tasting like a drain cleaner. You have the option to “like” a certain review, but like is more ambiguous than Amazon’s “did you find this review helpful?”. Like might mean you agree, or you liked what the person said for other reasons, or because you’re their friend… there’s no way to tell. The volume of information on teas, in written form, is completely overwhelming on this site.

It also is very unfriendly for people who reinfuse their teas multiple times, which most readers of this blog probably do. So, there’s no way to indicate what you do with your tea, other than in written form. Unless you’re the only reviewer, nobody will ever read it.

Moreover, because of the sheer volume of written information on the teas, the only thing that people actually will pay attention to is the ratings, in numerical form. That’s easy, simple to look at, and quick to comprehend. So far, so good, but there’s a problem – almost everything on the site rates somewhere between 70 and 85, which means that, as a mechanism for picking out teas to try, the score is almost entirely useless – how different is something that rates 78 really from something that rates 82, especially when each of them only have, say, 5 ratings each, three of which have no number attached?

Let’s take puerh for example, one of the genre of teas that I think are least reviewed there. Sorted by rating, it takes 36 pages for you to reach the first tea rated in the 60s. That’s 36 x 28 on each page, totaling slightly over 1000 teas, many of which, I’m sure, are no long available. If you look under Menghai Tea Factory, almost everything is within the narrow band of 71-81. As a selection guide, this is more or less utterly useless.

As someone pointed out on Teachat, the name of the vendor is fungible, so that someone might enter Menghai Tea Factory, while another person might attribute the same tea to Yunnan Sourcing. Likewise, referring to what I talked about earlier about teas being anonymous, it is quite possible that two or three or four tieguanyin being reviewed (with different impressions!) are actually from the same wholesaler, rendering the ratings rather moot.

Curiously, among the top ten rated puerh are a number of teas from Verdant Tea, which as Hster has uncovered, has some issues as a puerh vendor. Is that shop really that great, or is something else going on? I can’t say for sure. It might, however, have something to do with the fact that he seemed to have distributed samples to folks on Steepster. Verdant Tea in general seems extremely active on Steepster, which might explain something. Seems like that’s a good way to goose your ratings.

4) You’ll broaden your horizons and try new teas – same as 2, really, but here they’re talking about their revenue stream, aka vendor sponsored sampling, which at the moment seems dead. Also, referring to the above point about Verdant Teas, I wonder if the key to high ratings is to send non-offensive teas to a bunch of people who’ve only had teas from Teavana.

5) It’s a place to hang out and talk about all things tea – yes, but the discussion on Steepster is exceedingly shallow, mostly because it is not designed for anything more in depth. Each review can have comments, and once in a while, you might have good comments on one thread – if you can ever find such things, that is, buried deep within each thread for each tea. The discussion board is largely useless, because it is only categorized in the most general way possible, which means that it is nearly impossible to follow specific topics for very long. If you search for a term, the search engine will completely overload you with information again, in the most useless way imaginable – by highlighting every instance in every thread where the search term has been mentioned, ordered in the number of times that term has been mentioned in each thread (at least that seems to be the way they’re doing it). This means that the longest threads will tend to be read, whereas shorter threads will drop off the radar. That’s great if you’re looking for something exceedingly specific, but if you just want to find some discussion on, say, sencha… good luck.

6) It’s free. Well, it better be.

I’m not trying to rain on someone else’s parade, but Steepster, while it is a great tool for someone to keep a personal log of teas to drink, fails on the sharing and discovery part of the equation. Is there a better way? Perhaps, but I think to start it might be more useful to introduce/tweak features that will result in more depth in the comments, notes, and discussions. Right now, reading reviews on the site is like reading a stream of consciousness writing, much of which is completely useless to anyone other than the drinker. The scores, likewise, is not very useful as it is. It doesn’t even really help you weed out teas, unless perhaps the ones that are universally hated, but those seem to be few and far between. Lastly, it might help to, for example, be able to toggle whether or not a tea is still available – listing a bunch of teas that are no longer available high on a list when you click “teas” really isn’t a good way to introduce more people to good tea either.

I’m not sure if there’s the right balance of information and quality, but right now, Steepster is high on information, but low on quality – you get a lot of stuff, most of which is noise, and it’s set up in a way that makes it difficult to filter out the noise. I think something like TeaChat, flawed as it is and hampered by an ancient discussion board engine, is nevertheless in some ways a superior forum for talking about teas than the more newfangled, social-media craze inspired Steepster.

Addendum: Some, fans of Steepster, for example, may see this as an out-and-out attack on the site. I have zero financial or personal reason to hate the site – I signed up a while ago hoping that it will be a good forum for more discussion, but came away pretty disappointed. I think there is no progress if there’s no criticism. I’m not saying I’m the one qualified to do it, but on this blog, I tend to say what I think without dressing it up too much. As I’ve mentioned, I think Steepster is a great tool for one purpose – keeping the journal of teas you’ve drunk. I hope the site’s creators can improve on the other aspects of it so that the users there can engage in tea more deeply, maybe even without knowing it. That can come from all kinds of angles – changing their algorithm in what it recommends, improving the way comments/notes are displayed and scored, organizing the discussion page using tags, instead of just what looks like an unfiltered stream of threads on unrelated topics, etc. There is a lot of space to improve upon the site now that they’ve gotten people to use it – and don’t do what Digg did and screw everything up with a drastic revision that everyone ends up hating.

Vendors, read this.

Languages in East Asia are tough, at least for foreigners. They are some of the most difficult languages to learn in the world, and for tea drinkers who don’t speak or read such languages, they can be a bit of a pain to navigate. Since names for teas are already such issues, with vendors naming their own teas and also the confusion and lack of oversight of tea nomenclature. It doesn’t help, however, when romanization is itself an issue. This is more of an issue for Chinese and less so for Japanese, since there the romanization is pretty standard. Korean romanization can be a little weird too, with different competing systems (Jeolla in Revised Romanization vs Cholla in McCune–Reischauer, for example), but since Korean teas are, let’s face it, a relatively small universe with better sourcing information generally, I’ll ignore its issues for now.

For those of you who know Chinese, you probably know that there are two main romanization systems, Wade-Giles and Pinyin. Up until the early 90s, pretty much everyone used Wade-Giles except those in Mainland China, who used Pinyin. Then things flipped, and everyone started using Pinyin, and Wade-Giles is increasingly dropped with the exception of Taiwan, which finally adopted Pinyin two years ago. These are partly for political reasons, and partly because, well, a billion people can’t be wrong, I suppose. I personally reserve a special hatred of simplified characters, because in the simplification process much of the meaning of the proper characters are lost, but I realize that many people now simply cannot read proper characters, unfortunately.

Anyway, with two romanization system and the relatively recent date of conversion, you can imagine there are issues with their usage. The problem is further complicated by two things: 1) conventions from the past, and 2) the fact that many Chinese people, especially those from Taiwan and Hong Kong, never actually learned any romanization system at all. Chinese, as you probably know, consists of characters that do not have phonetic indicators – meaning that by looking at the characters, you can’t tell how to pronounce them. It’s awful for people trying to learn the language, but it’s great for the purpose of keeping lots of people who don’t use the same dialect sharing the same written language. For all these romanizations that we’re talking about, we’re only concerning ourselves with the use of standard Mandarin.

So we’ve got two main romanization systems, but a fair number of people who don’t really know either, and a lot of vendors who probably don’t know much or any Chinese, as well as the use of older customary romanizations that persist. One of the most obvious and common old conventional spelling that still exists today, as related to tea, is the use of puerh instead of the Wade-Giles p’u-erh and Pinyin pu’er. I use puerh, instead of the Wade-Giles or the Pinyin version. Another common one is tikwanyin, which in Wade-Giles should be t’ieh-kuan-yin and in Pinyin tieguanyin. One reason people have dropped Wade-Giles in favour of Pinyin is because Wade-Giles has finicky rules regarding the use of apostrophes, which are essential for accuracy, and also hyphens. Without those, or getting those wrong, renders Wade-Giles rather useless. Pinyin only has issues with apostrophes, which is easier to deal with and errors are often not fatal (although still frequently wrong).

Pinyin also includes strict rules with regards to how to separate words. Since Chinese is character-based, it is very tempting to put everything into separate characters and just be done with it. Using the cake from the last post as an example:

The two big words are “yesheng” or “wild”. Then, above the 2005 is “xianliangban” or “limited edition”. After the 2005 are “Menghai laoshu yesheng tedingcha” or “Menghai (region) old wild tree special ordered tea”. At the bottom is “Chenguanghe tang chaye yanjiu zhongxin rongyu dingzhi” or “Proudly ordered by the Chenguanghe Tang Tea Research Centre”. Note, of course, the nonsensical “Chen kang ho tang Pu-erh Tea”.

Now, imagine if the bottom row is all separated (and capitalized, as is often done for reasons unknown) “Chen Guang He Tang Cha Ye Yan Jiu Zhong Xin Rong Yu Ding Zhi”. What’s going on is that by separating everything, it becomes very difficult to tell where one word ends and the next begins. When romanizing, one of the things the person doing the romanization is splicing the words into sensible units, following the rules I linked to above. If I see a row of romanized characters all separated into individual syllable, I often need to see the Chinese original to know what I’m looking at. Properly romanized, however, it is usually quite easy to figure out what we’re dealing with.

One of the worst offenders of romanization confusion is Hou De. For example, the puerh brand Xizihao is routinely romanized as Xi-zhi Hao (finally fixed in some 2011 new listings, but persist for the older ones). There are no hyphens in Pinyin, and no X in Wade-Giles, so this is really neither. Hou De routinely does this sort of mixing, but Guang’s certainly not the only one. In his defense, he probably never learned Pinyin, having grown up instead on zhuyin fuhao. Other vendors mix in capital letters when there should be none, separate words randomly, mix in Wade-Giles from time to time, or simply spell things wrong. Babelcarp has a truckload of such misspellings, helpfully linked to the most widely used one.

Another issue is more simple – some vendors choose to give you the name of the tea in translation, while others give you the name in transliteration. Biluochun and green snail spring are the same thing, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’ve learned that somehow. Likewise, you can see Keemun, the old conventional name for Qimen, often on websites and teas and what not. Qihong is Keemun black, but again, you wouldn’t know it unless you somehow already knew.

While most people can figure out that puerh and pu’er are the same thing, it’s harder when the difference is between tikwanyin and tieguanyin, or even oolong vs wulong. Ideally, we’ll all use the same thing, so there are no problems, but I choose, for example, to use oolong instead of the proper wulong romanization because of accessibility – the same reason why puerh is used instead of pu’er on this blog. Very often people will find oolong being the word on vendor pages, not wulong, and might wonder what wulong is when in fact it’s the same thing they’ve always had. I also thought about switching wholesale to use Pinyin exclusively, but the thought of somehow having to go back and fix past listings stops me. I suppose the only way for a consumer to wade through all this is to arm him/herself with some knowledge of Chinese, so that one’s not too reliant on vendors’ proclivities. Vendors can also help by using more Chinese in the websites – it never hurts, and in this day and age, easy to do. Unless, of course, if they decide to rename their low grade Yunnan black tea Golden Peanuts, or something.

Addendum: Sometimes I forget the original impetus for writing these things. Jakub, helpfully, reminded me with his comment. For things like proper names, one should string them together. So, Yunnan province is Yunnan Sheng. Menghai county should be Menghai Xian. Yiwu mountain should be Yiwu Shan, not Yi Wu shan or Yi Wu Shan. Gaoshan Zhai, or Guafeng Zhai, or any other village, are a little more ambiguous. Zhai, in this case, is really “village”, “hamlet”, or literally, “stockade”. So it should be treated the same way as sheng (province) and shan (mountain) and separated from the name.