A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘musings’

Teapot mysteries again

April 1, 2008 · 9 Comments

First of all, thanks for those comments, as I try to plug the holes in the article and make it a little better.

Here’s some more of that “is that really true?” business with teapots.

I remember one of the very first things I learned with pots is that they need to be well made. Ok, but what’s well made? Well, it means that they should

1) be well made
2) pour well
3) good to handle

Now, I don’t think anybody will have any sort of problem with any of these issues, and neither do I. However, I do have some issues with the way things have been portrayed or interpreted.

For example, I have been told before that to test whether or not whether a lid is well made, one puts water into the pot, put the lid on, and then pour water out. First of all, the stream of water should be smooth and doesn’t break for a long time. Second, when you put your finger on the air hole, the stream of water should stop completely — this is, supposedly, evidence of a well fitted lid and a well made pot. Good for purchase.

That’s the part that I’m questioning these days. My black pot, which makes good tea, leaks when you pour. It does not stop flowing when you put your finger on the air hole. In fact, it hardly slows when you do that. The lid is fitted, but not well fitted, obviously. The pouring is good, but not fantastic. But… it makes good tea.

Since when did it matter whether or not a pot stops pouring entirely when you push on the air hole? How does it affect tea making? In the days before machine made pots, could one truly expect such things from a teapot?

I’m not so sure. I don’t see how that has anything to do with the making of tea. That’s an action that nobody would ever perform when pouring tea out of a pot. Obviously, a lid that is so loose as to leak water profusely out of the lid is no good, but that’s an obvious case of poor make. A pot that doesn’t stop entirely when you plug the air hole, or a pot that has a stream that starts breaking earlier than others, is not a pot that will kill you.

The lid leaking a bit when you’re pouring is a bit of an annoyance, but it’s not a deal killer either, as long as you learn how to use a pot and control it properly. The only thing I can think of when that can be a problem is when you try to do it Chaozhou style, and the lid leaks tea everywhere. But that’s something that can be managed.

If anything, I think a well made pot needs to be made of 1) good clay, 2) good pour (including a fast pour…. not too slow, as some pots are prone to do) and 3) good handling. But ultimately… it needs to make good tea. A pot that doesn’t make good tea, in my opinion, is a useless pot. I don’t know how a tight fitted lid has anything to do with it.

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Water water everywhere

March 31, 2008 · 17 Comments

My friend from Beijing, L, recently took on a job to be an editor for a tea magazine that Zhongcha puts out, and he asked me to try to write a column for him. It’s going to be in English and Chinese (the column, not the rest of the magazine) and I thought I should give it a shot in English first before writing the Chinese equivalent. The below is my first attempt — please give any thoughts or comments you might have so that it may get a little better. Thanks 🙂

There are only two ingredients in a cup of tea – the leaves, and the water. The leaves we talk about very often. In fact, I would say the leaves are almost the only thing we tea lovers normally talk about. Water, however, is a much neglected subject, and for water, the preparation is usually the least discussed. Yet, over the years, I have found that the preparation of water and the water used for the tea is extremely important to a cup of tea. This is obvious among those of us who already drink tea often, but it is difficult to say something conclusive about water. While I certainly do not pretend to know anything more than my readers here, I do feel that it might be useful to engage in a discussion of the sort of variables involved in water that seem to affect the making of tea.

The first question about a type of water that we can easily know about is the source. Where is the water from? There are a number of old texts that deal with this question. Lu Yu from the Tang dynasty said that the best water is spring water, then river water, and the worst are well water. Other, later texts generally find that to be true, although there are smaller variations in their beliefs. I don’t think it is necessary to discuss which spring is the best, because that is partly subjective, and it is also rather difficult to pinpoint such things when most of these springs are not reachable by us. However, we do now have the ability to gather water from a source and ship it many, many miles away. So in some ways, we do have such access.

I think the primary differentiator between the different waters that we can usually access is the amount of minerals in each of them. Every water has a unique mineral profile, and in many cases, we can compare them easily as the bottlers who make the water provide these information to us. Without getting too technical into the chemistry, generally speaking I find the ppm of a water a reasonable indicator of what kind of tea it brews, but most of the time water contains mostly Calcium Carbonate (plus whatever other minerals there are). On the low end, I’ve seen water with as low as 10 ppm. This was, I believe, a water from a small island on the south side of Japan that supposedly had pristine conditions. On the hard side, you have famous waters like Evian, or even the new water from Tibet, that have hundreds of ppm of minerals in the water.

So what does it do for your tea when you brew teas with different hardness? I have done a test before using two different types of water and brewed them in an exact same way, using the same equipment. The tea used was a Yunnan black tea. This picture is the result

The water I used for the tea on the left is the new 5100 water from Tibet, with anywhere from 482 to 725ppm of dissolved solids in the water. On the right hand is the Nestle water from Shanghai, which I believe is a public source water that is treated. They don’t provide a specific amount of dissolved solids, but I believe it is quite low.

If you’re not convinced of the fact that this was a product of the water, and not of other variables, such as the amount of leaves used or the time the water spent in the tea, I brewed the next infusion by switching the waters around.

I think this shows that the effect of the color of the tea is mostly a product of the water difference, and not anything else.

The taste of the teas were also different with the two waters. The cup of tea made with 5100 is softer, rounder, fuller, with a heavier taste and seems to have some more depth. The tea made with the Nestle water, on the other hand, is a cleaner tasting cup, with higher notes and less of the body and depth. Yet one might say the tea taste crisper, and some may prefer this type of taste. I do, however, think that with more minerals there does seem to be an ability by the water to pull out more flavor from the tea.

When I was in Beijing for a year doing research, one of the things that always was a problem was the water used at the tea shops. Some shops use very good water that make the tea taste good, but some use very bad water that are basically filtered or even distilled water. That can make a tea taste very flat or boring sometimes, and so when I buy tea, I often will first buy a little bit to take home with me to first taste it at home, using water that I am familiar with, before I buy more. Unfortunately, for teas that seem bad at the shop, sometimes it is possible to miss a very good tea because the water they used was bad.

There was one instance when I remember such a thing happening, although in that case, it was a tea I brought to somebody’s shop, this time in Hong Kong. I had a tea with me, a Yiwu, that I thought was very good. I took it with me to the shop and we made it, and instead, the tea came out very flat. There was a very low level of aroma, and the body of the tea was also thin. It was not active in the mouth, and was barely showing any sign of strength. I was mystified, because the tea was certainly much better than what I was tasting in that cup.

Then I realized that they use a very advanced filter system for their water. The water filtration system is so good, in fact, that probably very little minerals were left in the water at all. If my theory that higher mineral content tend to “pull” more flavinoids out of the tea, then a very low content would mean a flavorless tea, which was true in this case. I walked outside to the closest convenience store, and bought myself a bottle of Volvic, a French mineral water. I took it back with me to the shop and we continued brewing this tea with the Volvic, and instantly, the taste improved dramatically. The tea now had a throatiness and a depth that was lacking before, and it tasted much more like the tea that I know. The shop girl, who is a good friend of mine, was surprised to find it so different.

What the above story illustrates is that water can sometimes be “too good”. Just because it is filtered for a million different things does not mean that it will make good tea. I believe that a good water requires a certain minimal level of minerals in it. There are some ways of fixing this problem. One is to use stones that can be placed in a kettle or a water container and which helps put some minerals back into the water. Another is to buy some mineral salts and add them to your water.

So what water is good with what tea? I can’t say for sure, for, again, it is a matter of taste, but I do feel that there are some general rules that might apply a little more universally. I think for teas that are delicate and light, which includes most green teas and white teas, as well as some lightly fermented oolongs, the water used should probably not be too heavy in mineral content. Using a crisp water would accentuate the freshness of the taste of the tea, and often will even make the tea feel cool to the mouth, which is sort of what you want anyway from a green. Using water that is too heavy for such a style would create a tea that seems unbalanced.

On the other hand, I think heavier teas, including blacks, darker oolongs, and puerh (and I put even young raw puerh in this category) water that has a bit more minerals in it would be beneficial.
In these cases, there is usually a depth of flavor and a complexity that is being sought after, as well as potentially a good solid body in the liquor itself, and even down to a deep, rich color for the eyes. Both of the teas that I tested for this purpose that I mentioned above benefitted from the heavier water.

The key here is that I believe there is no single water that works for all kinds of tea. Water that is good for green tea is probably not going to be good for black tea, and vice versa. Again, what “good” means really depends on the individual, and some people may just like the lightness that comes with a black tea brewed with a crisp water. But I think as a general rule of thumb, we need to adjust our water as we change the tea being made.

How to pick water that is available is obviously a matter of great concern. One is simply through trial and error. Try widely, and eventually you will find one that works for the tea in question. Everybody has their favourite teas, and in those cases, maybe a little more experimentation would be useful. Since each person’s favourite tea is probably also the one that he or she knows the best, it also makes experimentation more fruitful, as any change in taste due to the water tasting different would be more obvious.

More importantly though, I think tasting water on its own, without the tea, also helps develop a sensitivity in understanding the water’s characteristics. Whenever I am traveling I will always go to the local convenience store and buy bottled water that I have never tried before. Tasting them, sometimes side by side or one after another, can tell me a lot about the way different waters taste and the range of possibilities that exist. Doing a blind taste test at home, with maybe three, four, or five different kinds of water in identical glasses for taste, is also one good (and I should add, fun) way of getting a better sense of how different waters taste. When doing this, it might be useful to include the normal water that one uses for brewing tea, which in our case is most likely filtered tap water. Doing so will help locate exactly where on the spectrum the tap water is.

I have yet to do this yet, but I think at some point it might even be useful to try water cocktails – mixing different waters together to get something else out of them. I don’t know if it is something worth trying, but it’s definitely a thought. After all, teas are regularly mixed to maintain consistency from batch to batch. I don’t see why water can’t be mixed that way.

This is just the water itself. We haven’t even mentioned the preparation of water for brewing, but that is another topic entirely, and should probably be discussed on its own.

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The beginning of an addiction

March 26, 2008 · Leave a Comment

After college I started working, and that proved a horrible, horrible thing for my tea habit, because, well, it became rather difficult to sustain when you’re in office most of the time. I remember I would normally only drink tea properly on the weekends, with weekdays being reserved for bad oolongs in the office brewed in a mug or something. I would keep that cup going all day, grandpa style, and squeeze it until there’s nothing left to squeeze.

Back in those days I mostly bought tea from Hong Kong or when I made the odd trip to New York’s Chinatown. There really wasn’t much online, if I remembered correctly, but then again, I wasn’t really looking at that point. It was also around then when I discovered the Best Tea House in Hong Kong. I had already started paying attention to tea shops in Hong Kong, but I didn’t look at them very seriously, preferring only to pick up random stuff here and there. When I went to Best Tea House though, I realized that I had been only trying a small spectrum of stuff. After all, at that time I was only still a novice, mostly self taught, and didn’t have anybody to talk to about tea. Here was my chance.

For a summer I basically went there every other day or something to chat. This was at a branch which has since closed (a shame, because it was close to my home). I remember a bunch of us would gather in the afternoon and talk tea. I learned a lot from various people there, notably YP, but also other more expeirenced drinkers who have been doing this for years. I bought some things, random things that I got just because I’ve never tried it, or because I liked the ones but this was better. Sunsing’s big Causeway Bay store wasn’t even open at that point yet. They were still stuck in their small store in Tsim Sha Tsui.

It was after I got into grad school when I became more serious about tea again. Grad school, as you can imagine, allows one ample time to do things, and tea became a daily ritual, something that I haven’t dropped since. I bought my first tea tray, my first fairness cup, etc, although I kept my thermos set up for quite a while until my third year. I remember back then I would still drink green oolongs, white tea, and I would delight in their aroma. I somehow don’t think I’ll feel the same way.

One of the most important developments in my tea making since I started this blog was, I think, the use of a water warming alcohol burner. That I acquired in Beijing, along with an electric kettle that I used to pre-heat the water. I remember the water would always be warm this way, instead of cooling down (and requiring reheating) every so often. I gradually got used to it, I think, because at first I probably oversteeped some of my teas. I have also gradually used more leaves and lowered the steeping time, but that trend has sort of reversed a little recently. The glass kettle that came with the alcohol burner broke, but the tetsubin has replaced it.

Ten Tea was ditched by the end of college. A few years later, Best Tea House would be ditched too (I still go, but I don’t really buy much from them anymore). It’s a funny thing, because while I spent more time on tea, the cost of my teas actually has gone down. I’m now buying much closer to the source than I used to. Instead of paying for rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world, I’m paying people who want to unload their old inventory. On the other hand, the cost for teaware never goes down. I wonder if I will ever get so lucky as to find somebody who wants to unload their stash of old teapots on me.

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Humbler days

March 25, 2008 · 3 Comments

I remember when I first started drinking tea on a regular basis out of my own volition (tea drinking in Hong Kong is more or less a part of life and isn’t an option). It was in my college dorm room, freshman year, and I just bought myself an ugly Republic of Tea teapot that had a mesh strainer that I now loathe, because the synthetic material on that thing absorbs any and all smells and taste. I would make green tea in that thing, or jasmine pearls, or earl grey, using a percolator for coffee to heat the water. I can’t remember where I got that percolator, but I do remember the water tasting like plastic after boiling.

I quickly learned that jasmine pearl, when oversteeped, would be nasty and bitter. Longjing was much better in that regard, but even then, the longjing I was drinking was pretty substandard in retrospect, low grade stuff that probably doesn’t even qualify for Hangzhou Longjing status. In many ways, earl grey was far more reliable, if for no other reason than bergamot oil tasting more or less the same everywhere.

My first tea revelation didn’t come until about two years later, when I went to Great Wall in New York’s Chinatown and bought myself a small bag of Mingqian (pre-Qingming) Longjing out of curiosity. I remember it was expensive, something like $120 a pound or some such. I thought it was a ridiculous price for a tea, but I also wondered why it cost so much more than the other grades of longjing they sold there. Great Wall, I’ve been informed, has since died. I will, however, already remember it fondly as the place where I bought the first tea that got me hooked. Mingqian longjing, for a few years, became my favourite thing. I still drink that stuff maybe once or twice a year, but nowadays my body doesn’t really like too much green tea.

I didn’t brew the longjing I bought until I got back home to college (I believe it was fall break when I went, or maybe spring). By this time, I had graduated from using the percolator, since I was living in a house with three other people and we had a functional stove. I used it occasionally for food, or what passed as food in college, but I used it often for hot water, boiled in my enamel lined kettle I bought from Wal-mart for something like $12. The enamel lining didn’t last very long, and by the end of the year I had to ditch the kettle for a better one, this time stainless steel with no silly lining that broke down after a year’s use.

Since I moved back into a dorm in my senior year though, access to hot water became a problem again. A solution had to be found, and I decided that I would boil the water in my kettle in the communal kitchen, and then transfer it to a thermos to be used in my room until it ran out. Since I was mostly drinking greens and some lighter oolongs at that point, that really wasn’t much of a problem, temperature wise. If anything, I tried lowering the temperature of the water by stretching out the pouring from the kettle into the thermos in order to cool down the water, and also to let the thermos sit with the lid open so that the water wouldn’t kill the tea. By this time, I had also acquired my very first gaiwan, a $50 affair from Ten Tea in New York. It was a nice gaiwan, with a rhomboid saucer, ruby red glaze, with black accents, but it didn’t last the year, as the lid tragically broke on the handle of a couch in my room. I was very angry for maybe a week.

I can’t remember what I used as a cup in those days. I think I was using the same mug I did when I entered college, and which I still possess, although no longer used much. After the gaiwan broke, I had to look for another one, and an opportunity arose when I had to go for a job interview in Chicago and I had about a half day’s worth of free time. I figured I could try my luck in the Chinatown there. Chicago’s Chinatown turned out to be not much, but it also had a Ten Tea, and I bought a set of a gaiwan plus a cup. Too expensive, obviously, but that was a nice gaiwan and a decent cup. I still have them, although the gaiwan is now too big — probably 200ml.

For more than a year, that was my entire tea set up. No tray, no chahe, no fairness cup. I didn’t need one. The cup that came with the gaiwan was big enough for all its contents, and I rarely had the chance to brew for others. Most people in college were not that interested in tea. The few who did would take a few sips. I think nowadays the college-aged crowd are more interested in this sort of thing, but back then, perhaps partly because information did not flow as quickly as it does today, even though we were already in the dotcom boom, students were more engaged in other things. My school’s students were all too busy protesting, anyway. I still remember that one time when a friend of mine simply refused tea. I asked her why she wouldn’t try it, and she just said she doesn’t like it (without, of course, having tried it at all). To this day, I don’t understand, and I think I am still a little insulted.

College ended almost as quickly as it began. I don’t know if I learned anything in those four years. I did, however, started drinking tea more seriously, and started learning about tea and brewing tea consistently. The habit, you can say, was formed. I learned that it is easy to screw up an oolong by overstuffing the gaiwan, or that brewing tieguanyin too long can yield a really nasty brew. My taste back then was mostly greenish teas, which, ironically, I no longer drink at all, basically. This is not atypical, from what I gather, for many people I’ve met in Taiwan and China share a similar trajectory in their tea-life. Greens and greener oolongs tend to be where everybody got started, and aged teas tend to be where you end up. I don’t know if that’s a function of income, a function of age, a function of constitution, or what, but I know in this respect, I’m not alone.

To be continued…

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Yixing mysteries

March 23, 2008 · 10 Comments

One of the very first thing I learned about yixing pots is that you shouldn’t use more than one type of tea in it. They say it mixes tastes as you season the pot, and will eventually lead to a pot that brews tea with weird combinations of flavours. This is something that I’ve heard repeated many, many times, and which I myself have told others before. However, I am increasingly skeptical as to the truthfulness of this claim, and whether or not such division is truly necessary.

I should first point out that I am not saying that all pots are equally suited for all types of tea. I do notice, for example, differences in my aged oolongs when I brew it with my black pot versus my zhuni pot. However, I am no longer sure that it is truly necessary to confine each pot to one type of tea, especially in some of the rather fine distinctions between, say, Taiwanese high mountain oolong and low roasted baozhong, to name a pair that can be distinguished from each other, but whose tastes are not too dissimilar.

I own a pot that is around 300-400ml in size which I occasionally use for lazy brewing of loose puerh of one kind or another, usually some wet stored stuff or the very rare cooked puerh. I haven’t used it for anything else thus far, but last night I felt an urge to drink some darjeeling all of a sudden, and pulled out some of the black darjeeling generously given to me by Mr. Lochan of Doke tea. It’s a fine darjeeling, sweet and mellow (and I think aged slightly since last year, when I got it). I brewed it in my pot, the same one that I’ve used all along for puerh. Did I notice anything funny that I could attribute to puerh? No, not at all.

Sure, one could say that it is probably because I haven’t used the pot enough for puerh yet, therefore it didn’t impart anything to my darjeeling that I could detect. It does make me wonder though, how often do you need to use the pot before it will start affecting the taste of the tea being brewed, and how much of that effect is dependent on the previous teas you’ve brewed in the pot?

My guess is we generally overestimate the amount of work that seasoning a pot does to the taste of the tea in the pot. Seasoning the clay certainly makes it look nicer, but I’m not too sure if it really makes the tea taste nicer in any meaningful way — or at least, a meaningful way that is detectable by most drinkers. If it takes, say, prolonged use over years with one type of tea for a pot to gain any sort of meaningful “seasoning” that will affect the taste of the tea (more than the pot itself would otherwise) then is it really useful to advice newcomers to tea to buy more than one pot? I have heard before that all of this is just a ploy by pot makers/sellers to sell more pots. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there’s no proof that it’s not true… or is there?

Mind you, all of the above is purely speculative. Yet sometimes I do feel that when somebody is led to believe that they must buy half a dozen pots for all the teas they plan to drink…. is that a bit much?

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That sinking feeling

March 19, 2008 · 8 Comments

Those of you who pay attention to things like the market and the economy have probably been treated to a roller coaster ride in the past few weeks of good and bad news, mostly bad. Those of you who don’t have probably still heard a lot about the credit crisis, mortgage problem, and that bit about a coming recession. Those of us who drink tea in the US, unfortunately, will also be victims of this mess, and not just because you worked for Bear Stearns and are about to lose your job.

The thing is, the US dollar has been sinking like a rock. This is most acute in the case of the USD/Yen exchange rate, which has the USD falling by about 15% in the last three months. If the USD keeps at current level for any amount of time, I’d imagine that those of you who love sencha, hojicha, matcha, bancha, or God forbid, genmaicha might start noticing that all your teas, especially the spring 2008 crop or beyond, are going to be a bit more expensive. You might not see the full effect immediately, since somebody in the supply chain might absorb some of the exchange rate cost in order to keep their customers, but at some point or another, this is going to show.

The Taiwan dollar is a lot weaker than the Yen, but even that has risen against the USD by close to 10% since when I left Taiwan. There’s this batch of aged oolong that I want to buy more of from here by wiring money to the Taiwanese tea shop, but now I have to factor in an extra cushion because, well, prices went up. Or I just have to bargain hard to try to get it down, but I don’t feel too lucky.

Then there’s the Chinese yuan, which is not a free floating currency. However, in its controlled floatation, the yuan has steadily risen against the dollar throughout the last year and half (basically since the current regime of limited floatation started). It went from about 7.75 yuan/USD to the current 7.07 yuan/USD, which, again, means that everything will cost you 10% more compared to a year ago. I still remember when the Hong Kong dollar was higher than the Chinese yuan. That was when I first got to Beijing. Since the HKD is pegged to the USD, now HKD is worth about 10% less than the Chinese yuan. Sigh, how times change. The bad thing about this one is that there’s almost an expectation of the yuan rising — there are fundamental economic reasons for this. So, it is easy for those selling Chinese tea to work this cost into their price in advance. Woe to us.

While I don’t claim to be a financial wizard, it doesn’t seem as though there’s going to be any substantive change in the works for a higher dollar. So it seems we’re stuck with more expensive tea in our future, if things stay the way they are. At least those of you in the Euro zone or in the UK need not worry about all this mess. Lucky you.

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The comforts of home

March 10, 2008 · 4 Comments

On this recent trip to Boston I made tea twice at somebody else’s place, and at both places I am reminded of how tied I am to my own tea setup, how my habits of tea making are determined by the teaware I use. It’s not the yixing pots or the cups or even the tea that really determined my tea making. It’s one specific thing of my kettle — the spout.

This might sound a little silly, but the spout of a kettle really determines how it pours, and that in turn greatly affects how I make tea. At the first tea meeting, I kept overshooting my pot (easily portable) when I tried to pour water into it. The spout on the water kettle there makes sure the water comes out at an angle that is not the same as the kettles I use, and thus I kept misjudging the first few times I poured. At the second place there was no such problem, although I am still reminded of how much I miss my kettle and my whole setup at home.

Kettle spouts come in all shapes and sizes. These are the ones I have at home

The one on my current tetsubin is the second, and not surprisingly, it gives me the most control in the speed of pouring. The last one is my electric kettle. It looks a little too wide, although it doesn’t drip at all, even though it seems like it might. It actually can pour a very fine pour, but it takes quite a bit of practice. The first is a spout on a simple stainless steel kettle. It does the job, but very hard to pour a fine pour of just a little water. The third is the flat tetsubin that I now have as a spare. It pours fine, except that it does drip a little (shorter spout and less tapering) and also is quirky because of the level of water vis-a-vis the level of the spout. Over time, I tihnk I am used to the higher levels of control that my kettles’ spout affords me, and also the perculiar ways they are shaped. The comforts of home, in this case, includes a familiarity with my teaware when I make my tea, and coming back to it makes me very happy.

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Travel day again

March 2, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Long day driving…. only high point was drinking my aged baozhong in a paper cup with hot water from a coffee joint.

But boy, the tea made me feel good.

This blog’s called A Tea Addict’s Journal for a reason 🙂

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Brewing parameters

February 23, 2008 · 6 Comments

This question comes up again and again in the course of talking tea over the internet…. what’s your brewing parameters?

The same question, I find, is much less common in the Chinese online scene for tea. Either people all know it and don’t need to ask, or people don’t care.

I think the reason people keep asking this question is because of the belief that there’s an optimal brewing parameter for a particular tea, where the extraction of soluable things from the tea will be optimal (just right, not too bitter, etc). It might be 5/5/10/20/30/60, or it might be 5/5/5/5/5/5/5/10. I don’t know. Whatever it is, there’s a certain sense that there’s a “right” answer.

As my readers generally know, I am against timing infusions. I think if we start timing infusions, then one must also time the number of elapsed seconds between infusions — whether that is 10 seconds, a minute, or five. Leaves that have been infused three or four times will continue to cook in your pot/gaiwan until the next time you pour water in. As Dogma said to me, the water that you pour in does basically two things — bring the temperature up a little (it’s likely still very hot in the pot/gaiwan without the water) and it carries all the dissolved stuff out with it when you pour. The actual amount of time it spends in the pot/gaiwan isn’t that important.

For example, today when I made a rather commonplace wet stored loose puerh, I think my infusion parameters, as judged by time spent with water in the pot, runs something like 3/3/5/5/5/5/10/10/20. I guess I should tell you how big (in ml) my pot is, but I have no clue. Nor do I use a scale. I can tell you that my pot was about 1/3 full of dry leaves when I poured the wash in.

But that’s not the whole story. I spent considerably more time (proportionately) drinking the tea earlier than later. There was probably a minute or two of rest time in between infusions 4 and 5 (or was it 5 and 6?). Some infusions come out weaker than others. How do I account for all of these things?

I don’t, however, think I brewed this the “optimal” way, nor do I think there is an optimal way. I like my teas this way, because …. I find they come out just fine. I use similar parameters for almost all teas, unless they happen to be green or white, which I almost never drink these days anyway. So, the short answer is…. that’s how I brew my tea, and it applies to almost everything I post about here, which, oddly enough, seems to work remarkably well.

Scary thought, isn’t it?

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Aesthetics and tea

February 18, 2008 · 5 Comments

I think the first thing one should make clear when talking about Chinese tea is that there is no real ceremony involved. I don’t think of gongfu drinking as a ceremony. It’s more like a particular way of preparing the tea, much like, say, drinking espresso is not a ceremony, it’s a kind of coffee. It bothers me to no end when people say yixing pots are part of the Chinese tea ceremony, because I don’t know what that is.

What about those tea brewing performances? Yes, well, those are, of course, some sort of “ceremony”, but I find those things generally very stale and boring, and entirely contrary to the whole purpose of Chinese tea making, which is very singularly focused on the extraction of the best drink possible out of the leaves. Of all the stuff that were written in the past (in Chinese) about tea, I have seen very, very little that has anything really to do with the form of tea making. Rather, it all has to do with the purpose and the result of tea making — how do you get a better cup out of the leaves you’ve got (and in many cases, how do you get better leaves in the first place).

This, I think, is in quite a sharp contrast with the Japanese Chado, which is quite concerned with the aesthetics as well as the actual tea itself. In some ways, I sometimes even feel like Chado has things backwards — sometimes the form and the aesthetics pleasures of performing/participating in the ceremony is much more important than the actual cup that you’re drinking. A lot of attention is paid to the space, the setting, the equipment… all sort of things.

Now, I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying that’s different. I do think that if one is too concerned about form, the actual tea being made suffers a little. It’s most obvious when I see those tea “performers” making tea with that twist of the elbow or the little “presentation” they do with the pot…. all the while I’m just thinking “if I want to look, I’ll go to a chashitsu and get a lot more out of it”. I just can’t handle the overly stylized Chinese “ceremony”.

That’s not to say, of course, that we should ditch all sorts of aesthetic concerns either. There’s I think a fine balance between form and function, and in the case of Chinese tea, form should follow function (call me Modernist). I believe that one should make one’s tea making space as comfortable and beautiful as one would allow, but the beauty or decorations or whatever should not get in the way (not too much anyway) of the tea making.

I’m currently debating whether or not to ditch the tea tray I use to collect waste water, and switch instead to a wooden tray with a bowl to hold any runoff for the pot. The downside is, I need to have another place to dump the water, eventually — basically after every infusion, but it does also mean that there will be water sitting under the pot while I’m brewing, which might not be a bad thing. The upside, of course, is that it’ll be prettier, and I’ll also have more room to do things, instead of feeling constrained by the tray right now. Which leads me to an entirely opposite position — the environment we make our tea in greatly affects us, as the Japanese have obviously figured out. If the place is right, the tea will feel better, even if, objectively, it’s not. I still think form should follow function, but maybe if something is too function, it loses its magic.

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