A Tea Addict's Journal

If I had bought a whole bunch of puerh at that time, around 2000-2001, I would’ve been a rich man by now. Instead, I didn’t, and kept drinking my tieguanyin mostly. I also had some greens, some whites, and some puerh. The puerh I drank was, for the most part, loose stuff (or broken bits of cakes) bought from teastores of various kinds. I remember going to Sunsing as well, and this was in their very early days. I tried some of their teas, but didn’t really like anything there. I was still, at the time, getting to know all the teas and was in the curious phase. I tried everything and anything that came my way, and was rather undiscerning when it comes to buying.

Work kept my interest in tea from developing any further. I was drinking tea more regularly by now, and chugging down some sort of oolong at work brewed in a sort of a mug, in the “throw leaves into cup, add water” style. At home, I would make other stuff, things that are more interesting — highly roasted oolongs, greens, puerh… but at this point I was still only using my oversized gaiwan (too big, but I still have it). I think by the end of the year though, I was starting to get bored.

Between my job and grad school, I obviously had more free time and I think my interest in tea took a leap. By the time I entered grad school, I had my first yixing teapot. I was drinking even more varied kinds of tea, falling in love with Wuyi teas as well as exploring my way through puerh. I also bought my first tea for aging… a brick of tea that is still sitting in the same box, scarcely drunk, and waiting to be aged. In retrospect, it wasn’t a good buy, but what can you do. It’s tuition.

I remember I would come home for lunch everyday, and if I had classes at 2pm, I would drink tea until then after lunch. Otherwise, I would be sitting there in a more leisurely manner and drink my teas. I went through lots of boxes of loose puerhs of different varieties, but raw, young puerh was not to my taste. I thought they were not very nice to drink (and I still largely hold that view). I usually only drank younger puerhs at teahouses whenever I was in Hong Kong, but it was usually because somebody else was trying stuff, not because I wanted to. I simply did not find them attractive. Of course, I should’ve probably bought more teas for aging, but again…. oh well

It was around this time when I think I cut my habit of drinking green teas. I would have a box of green at home, but I rarely touched it, instead opting for the very nice BTH dancongs or some roasted oolongs or the like. My taste was changing.

It was not too long before I started this blog when my transformation from being a mere tea drinker to a tea addict was complete. That summer I went to Taiwan and Beijing, and I think when I was in Taiwan I was exposed to more kinds of tea and a different kind of teashop culture. I didn’t really teashop in the mainland, so it wasn’t very formative (I had yet to discover Maliandao). When I visited Kung Fung Yung of Taipei, however, I had the first young puerh that I actually liked. I bought a cake of it, and now that I look at the pictures again, I think it might have been a Jingmai cake. The shop didn’t tell me where it was from, but I thought it was a good tea and would probably age into something even better. This was the beginning of a trend.

The rest of my tea experiences are well documented by my blog, and I think the very existence of the blog and the act of blogging has helped me along greatly in not only the appreciation but also the understanding of teas. Memories of teas I’ve had after I started my blog are much better ingrained in my brain than memories of teas before I started blogging. The pictures help, but the act of writing about them also helps. I think I would be confused for a lot longer with regards to younger puerh, given the dizzying array of teas at Maliandao, if it weren’t for my blogging. I also think that I would never have done some of the things I’ve done, such as tasting two teas using the same parameters with two gaiwans simultaneously, if it weren’t for my blog. Of course, I would never have met a lot of the people I’ve met over the course of this year if it weren’t for my blog either.

I suppose the next step for me is to figure out how teas are actually made, not only puerh, but other kinds as well. I may very well be making a trip to Yunnan in the spring, and if time allows me, I will try to visit a tea farm when I go back to my hometown in May or June. When I am in Taiwan in the second half of this year, I want to go see a farm there as well. If nothing else, I think it will add an important dimension to my understanding of teas. If people reading this blog get something out of it as well, so much the better.

I basically did the same thing for two years, until one time in my junior year in college…

I was visiting New York City. I remember distinctly I went to Great Wall, a Chinese market in the Chinatown there. I was really just browsing around, but then… I saw a small display of the teas they sold. They put them in glass jars, and one of them stood out. First, it had a non-standard sticker on the jar, saying “Lion Peak Longjing — fresh from Hangzhou”. The other was its sticker price…. which was something in the area of $160 USD per pound. Not all THAT much in retrospect, but at that time, I thought it was a lot.

Despite that, I thought I’d try it out, to see why the sticker price is so high. As those of you who’ve been reading this blog knows, I still do that these days. It’s a bad habit.

Anyway… I went home and tried the tea…. and….. obviously, the tea bug bit me. The tea was GOOD. Very good. Much better than the “longjing” I was drinking a lot at the time. I started demanding better tea. Since Ohio wasn’t exactly the greatest place for tea, I only got better teas once in a long while when I visited a real city. I was still using my Republic of Tea teapot. I also remember buying some crap tea from the local Chinese market. They even gave me a tuocha for free. I obviously didn’t know what to do with the tuocha at that point (from what I can remember now, it was a raw tuocha). I should’ve kept it. Instead, I think it got thrown out in one of my many moves since then. Sigh.

I got my first gaiwan in my senior year. It was bought from the TenRen (gasp!) in New York, of all places. It wasn’t cheap, but I really, really liked it. It was one of those red gaiwans that has a sort of metallic glaze. It was broken within a year. I was mad, very mad, for quite a while.

I also started drinking oolongs and tieguanyins more at that point. I remember distinctly trying out different kinds of tieguanyin, and I thought I was getting a little more knowledgable in drinking tea. I still drank a lot of longjing, but I was starting to get bored of it, not to mention the astronomical prices of good longjing. Tieguanyin, in comparison, seems much cheaper….

Sometime around then, I discovered the Best Tea House in Hong Kong. They had a branch in Causeway Bay back then, not too far from Times Square in Hong Kong, and that’s also where I met Tiffany. I remember one summer when I was on my vacation, I went there a lot drinking tea. I also took my first and only tea classes there, learning the basics of gongfu brewing. I also got my first dip in good, non-restaurant style puerh at that time….

My first active memory of tea was sometime when I was still a little kid, and I remember a house guest coming and we served them tea in some ugly looking glasses, leaves floating in the water. It was some sort of green tea. My guess is it was some sort of longjing.

My grandfather always drank tea, and he still does today, everyday. Tea, as I’ve noted before, surrounds you in Hong Kong. Everywhere you go, there is tea. Kids, however, rarely drink them. I remember a schoolmate in primary school (I was probably about 8) saying with a sour face that “tea is really bitter!”. I concurred — I didn’t find it very fun to drink it.

It really wasn’t until college when I started taking an interest in the drink. All through high school I drank no tea, basically. I would drink them when it was available in a restaurant, as in going to dim sum and what not, but I would never brew myself a cup.

Then when I went to college, I remember buying myself a teapot from the school’s co-op. It was a Republic of Tea teapot, with a plastic mesh filter. I thought that was convenient. I probably bought some earl grey or some other tea also, but then, I asked my sister to ship me a little bit of tea from Hong Kong. I think she bought me two kinds, a longjing and a jasmine pearl. I liked the jasmine pearl, although I do remember overbrewing them (adding too much leaves, in retrospect) and having to contend with this extremely bitter brew. I also remember having my first ever caffeine overdose — after a long night of essay writing (back in the day when I was very inept at the job of BSing my way through any essay topic) and having been pumped up by caffeine, I went to bed, only to wake up an hour or two later…. and with my legs shaking uncontrollably. It was rather frightening, and I never got to that point again drinking tea.

Maybe it just means my tolerance got higher.

Even then, I didn’t drink tea everyday. I drank once in a while… maybe once every few days? Once a week? Something like that. I noticed that the plastic infuser started taking on the smells of jasmine, and basically whatever else I brewed in it before. It also started to get stained… brown stains from the blacks I was drinking, no doubt. I drank it all out of a white mug.

Making hot water was a bit of a chore, as there was obviously no kitchen in my open-double dorm room with green carpet. I remember I brought along with me a percolator from home, and I used that to heat up water to make. Aside from nasty tasting water in Ohio, even after Brita (I distinctly remember my first sip of water there, unfiltered, tasted like swimming pool water), the percolator gave the water a lovely plastic smell. It was great for making tea.