A Tea Addict's Journal

*The following is my translation of a humourous post on the Chinese blog of the magazine Lifeweek. They claim this is taken from issue 660 of the magazine, although I can’t seem to find it in the table of contents of the issue.

1) First – tea leaves. Of course, you must understand the current trends really well, but you cannot simply be following whatever is fashionable. Everyone all know about yancha and zhengshan xiaozhong, so what you need to do is drink things like Oriental Beauty, or puerh that came back (to the Mainland) from Taiwan. If you must drink yancha, then it has to be tea that is from a famous maker. You cannot ever say anything about buying tea, as all the tea you drink must be gifted from friends or famous personages. If you don’t want to explain, you can simply put up pictures of you with said famous makers. If you must spend money to get tea, at least it has to be specially made tea, and not commercial grade stuff. Whether or not you can finish your tea collection in your current lifetime, you must have a lot of tea in your collection. When it comes to puerh, whatever “7542”, “88 Qing”, or “old square brick”, you must have all of them. Have ten different, large yixing jars each labeled with different years and storing puerh of different vintages, and then specially order some rosewood shelves specifically for the storage of puerh cakes. Prepare 30 different Jingdezhen porcelain jars from famous makers and store various kinds of famous dancong, yancha, and the like in them. These must be placed strategically so that when you take pictures they will form the background.

2) You must appear on various occasions where tea is evaluated. When you evaluate teas, you have to immediately and incisively point out the flaws in the tea you’re drinking, especially on the points of roasting techniques and aftertaste. If you accidentally said something as bland as “great fragrance and smooth mouthfeel” then you would have lost all effects from your appearance. If you can figure out which mountain, which hole, or which ditch this tea is from, all the better and you’ll score full points for that. At this juncture, you must go for the kill and not only do you need to point out whether this tea is from a certain ditch or not, but you have to tell us if it is from the edge of the ditch or the bottom of the ditch. This is a little more difficult, and newbies should avoid trying this at home.

3) You must redecorate a room in your house to make it your tea room. Rosewood furniture, supersized tea table are of course a plus. On the tea table you must have at least three different yixing pots, all made by famous artisans. The cups cannot be run of the mill either. Even though Taiwanese makers are now a bit old-fashioned, a few of those might be good, and you can always throw them onto the rack behind you and only explain their origins if someone asks. Small cups from Jingdezhen are always good to intersperse in your tea drinking, but if you can find qinghua or famille rose cups from Kangxi or Qianlong periods, then this is probably best. What you use to boil water cannot be mundane either. You must possess a few antique tetsubins from Japan. If you’re still using induction plates or alcohol burners to boil water for your tetsubin, then this is way too lame. You have to use a stove made with top grade red clay, and paired with olive-pit charcoal. At the same time, you must point out clearly that using olive-pit charcoal to boil water is not the same as using electricity. If you want extra credit, find some friend who’s from another province to provide you with mountain spring water from their region. Of course, such solutions can’t always work for you, but still you can’t just use regular purified water. If you can insist on driving 50km every week to a nearby mountain for water, that’ll add a lot of points.  Also, if you’re drinking tea at this level and you don’t burn incense, then you’re just not doing it right. The incense burner and storage cannot be any run of the mill objects, and the incense itself has to be agarwood. Over the course of a night you have to burn off an entire iPhone4S worth of agarwood incense. Moreover, you gotta learn how to play a guqin song. There needs to be a space in your tea room for a guqin, and when you host top flight tea people in your tea room, you play this song, and that will just be your killer move.

4) You have to have a full-frame SLR with a top flight zoom lens. Since you always have to upload your photos, such a camera setup is essential. All your pictures should be taken at night, the blurrier the better. The chaxi has to be changed constantly, and dead, dried out bamboo can add points to your setup. Unless you’re Chen Daoming or Zhang Jiayi, try not to show your face in the photos. A good way to do this is to only shoot a female hand with a cup, only showing hands and no faces. This way you are simultaneously mysterious while letting everyone know that you’re not some loser drinking tea by yourself at home.

5) Find a friend who’s good with writing, and ask him or her to help you compose 100 short poems and store on your computer. Whenever you need you can pair it with a photo and put it up on your twitter stream.

6) Finally, you have gotta have a title. At least you have to be a high level tea evaluator, or you can team up with a few friends and become some general secretary or trustee of some Chinese tea aficionado association or world tea alliance. Whenever you’re talking you have to mention Zen Buddhism, and have to invite all kinds of religious types to your home to drink tea, not to mention taking pictures with them. If you can get them to write you some calligraphy, all the better. If there are newbies who ask you how to brew tea, just say “I use the ancients as guide and simplicity as my way” and end it there.

One of the great things about being in a place like Hong Kong, rather than being stuck in Maine, is that there are a lot more tea people out here.  Drinking tea alone is quite common in the US, but here you can always find a drinking mate if you need one.  Since I have returned I have yet to visit a teashop of any kind, and haven’t really taken advantage of my situation here.  Today, while I was out and about, I stopped by a shop when there was an hour between engagements, and ran into someone I’ve met before — someone who is nicknamed the King of Pots.

This guy taught me a few things before when I met him at the Best Tea House some years ago while I was hanging out there.  One of the most important things I learned was that when looking at someone else’s pot, put down the lid or the body and only look at the other.  Don’t hold the lid while you’re examining someone’s pot, or the pot while you’re actually just looking at the lid — that’s rude, and may damage the ware by accident.  I’ve met many people who do this sort of thing since then, and have passed on this rule, which I think is very sensible.  I’m sure the King of Pots himself was scolded for doing it, just like he scolded me when I did it to his pot.

Seeing him again this time is quite lucky, really, because otherwise I have no way to contact him, and I would love to learn more from him as he has hundreds, if not thousands, of pots, and has certainly seen more pots than I have had teas.  Not all of his pots are good — I saw one today that was only so so, but as he explained, you don’t need a vintage or famous pot.  If you use your pot often and it’s made of decent clay, that’s better than a Ming dynasty pot that’s been sitting next to a dead body for the last 300 years.  Of course, it’s much easier to say that when you’ve got as many pots as you do.

Now, not all of what he knows or believes in is going to be correct.  He told me today that he also started by drinking tea and learning from Vesper Chan of Best Tea House, but like many others, he has since grown out of it and rarely goes back there.  I count myself in the same category, although a few generations behind him.  What we have both learned in that regard is that people who you revere as teachers early on often turn out to be, at the very least, not all right, and sometimes downright wrong.  Yet, Mr. Chan continues to attract students and adherents who go and buy his stuff, while many older students fall out of the circle.  He’s doing a service to the tea community in that he’s attracting people to come, but very often, people don’t stay as they start wandering around for other sources of things and find out more for themselves.

People like the King of Pots are the tea people I like the most — they drink with an open mind and who are welcoming of newer ideas, who want to try new things, and who’s not afraid to challenge perceived “authority” figures, who, sadly, are often just big sellers with a strong vested interest in teaching you about certain things.  I respect the King of Pots, but I also know that he’s not likely to be correct on all things, and our exchanges often turn into just that – exchanges of information, when both of us can contribute to each other’s knowledge.  Too often, I see people who are attached to one teacher and who just believe in everything the person says about tea.  It’s more understandable if it happens in places like Maine or Minnesota, but seeing people like that in Hong Kong or Taiwan or China really makes me cringe.  Learning from others with more experiences makes your progress in tea go faster, but equally important is the use of a critical mind.  That’s what I teach my students in the classroom, and that’s what I try to practice, and sometimes, like this post, spills over into the blog.

Every cup of tea has two ingredients – the tea leaves and the water.  To fuse these two into a cup of tea, it goes through the process of brewing, and as every tea drinker who’s ever tried an overbrewed cup of tea knows, even the best leaves and water can make a terrible cup if the brewing method is flawed, whether by design or accident.  In fact, among all the major beverages of the world, tea is perhaps the most demanding on the drinker in terms of what it asks for — to make a nice cup of tea, the drinker must be able to brew the tea, and hopefully, brew it well.  It is not an accident that we call the Chinese style of tea making these days “gongfu cha”.  Gongfu roughly translates into skill and ability, and the tea that results is really determined not by the ingredients that went into it, but by the hands of the person brewing it.

What exactly does this skill consist of?  One way of thinking about it is to start with the end goal — a pleasant, presumably fragrant, and enjoyable cup of tea.  This means that the cup should possess as few undesirable traits as possible, such as an overabundance of roughness, bitterness, or odd flavours, and also be flavourful, has depth, and a good body.  An insipid cup does not have any bad traits, but the absence of any distinctive features at all is itself undesirable.

Now, the question is really how to get from leaves and water to an enjoyable cup of tea. If we leave out the issue of the leaves and water (you can read the rest of this blog for my thoughts on those issues) the only variables that we can actively influence as the tea brewer are the teaware, the leaves/water ratio, the temperature, and the time.  Let’s talk about them in turn.

For most of us, teaware is often an automatic choice based on the type of tea in question and the number of people drinking.  The most versatile, of course, is the gaiwan, and it is also perhaps the most neutral. For those of us who, by and large, use yixing or other kinds of teapots for brewing, there are a few things worth thinking about when assigning pots to teas.  For example, is this an aged tea with a strong flavour, or a fragrant one with a delicate aroma? For the former, a more porous pot may be more useful, while the latter might suit a high density pot like a zhuni better.  The shape of the pot may also come into play, as I generally find flatter pots with large openings more suitable for Wuyi yancha, while rounder shapes work better for rolled oolongs.  How the pot pours is of paramount importance — not in terms of whether the flow stops if you stop the air hole (which I believe is of zero relevance) but rather how fast the water drains from the pot.  If it takes too long, you should take that into consideration for the next question, which is the water/leaf ratio.

The question of how much leaves to use in a particular pot/gaiwan is really one of the biggest decision a tea brewer can make, and has implications for all kinds of issues like how fast to pour and what to expect from the cup.  Examining the dry leaves and knowing what type/nature it is will help determine the amount of leaves to use.  Lighter teas generally require less leaves, while heavier ones can take more, even though that may sound odd.  When I say light, I mean lightly processed — greens, whites, qingxiang (little to no roast) oolongs, very young puerhs.  When I say heavy, I have in mind nongxiang (heavily roasted) oolongs, aged teas of all kinds, heavily oxidized teas, etc.  The amount of leaves, in grams, is really not a very useful unit to measure, because what really matters in terms of brewing is how much leaves there are versus how much water there will be in the vessel.  7g of tea is a lot in a 50ml gaiwan, but is not a lot in a 150ml pot.  I always measure the amount of tea I use by how much of the vessel I’m filling up with the dry leaves.  This can range from 1/8 to 3/4 of the vessel, depending on the tea and the nature of the leaves.  Rolled leaves, for example, will expand greatly, so you need to leave room for it to do so, whereas flat leaves, such as certain Wuyis and dancongs, unfurl pretty much in place, and you sometimes need to pack more in to achieve certain tastes.  There are also the special cases of brewing using Chaozhou style techniques (that’s another subject entirely) which needs different types of preparations.

The amount of leaves used determines, again, how fast the infusions should be, and also to a slightly lesser extent, the temperature of the water used.  The teas I drink tend to be on the “heavy” side of the scale, so boiling water is generally required.  When making lighter teas though, starting from qingxiang oolongs, it is often important to pay attention to how hot the water is and adjust accordingly.  Lighter generally means cooler, as most of you already know.  Cooler, however, also means longer steeps, and this is where it gets tricky, often involving active adjustments on the brewer’s part to get it right.  Whereas using boiling hot water often means pouring the tea out quickly, often immediately, using cooler, longer steeps will result in different kinds of tastes.  A heavy tea that is steeped quickly with hot water should be full bodied with the fragrance that is desired, but not the bitterness and roughness that will surely follow if steeped even slightly too long.  With lighter teas, water that’s too hot will scald the leaves and can make the tea less fragrant or even bitter and nasty almost immediately, with no remedy possible once done.  Cooler water with longer steeps will bring out the fragrant and sweet elements of the leaves without the tea suffering from damage.

It is, however, in the adjustment process where I think gongfu tea really gets its name.  How to manage all these moving parts in a satisfactory way is the key to making a good cup of tea, Chinese style, and to be able to do that, it involves a certain amount of practice and experience, which then translates the act of brewing into an intuitive process that flows naturally, rather than something that resembles a science experiment, with measurements and timers and thermometers.  Part of this is very much a practical problem — I’ve observed people who learned tea making a certain way who then follow the directions given to the letter (heck, I’ve done it myself early on — we all have) and it just doesn’t work.  5/10/15/30/30/60/60 is not how you make a good cup of puerh, or oolong, or anything.  Being able to mix and match and adjust on the fly depending on what’s coming out from the pot is.  If the last cup is too weak?  Brew a little longer, or if the water hasn’t been reboiled in a few minutes (depending on the way you handle water in the brewing process) maybe it needs to be heated again.  Or, if you’re not achieving a certain taste, perhaps you can push the tea a little further.  Likewise, don’t be afraid to actually take leaves out of the pot — sometimes there’s just too much leaves in the pot, and as non-intuitive as this is, pull some leaves out.  The resulting cup may actually be better.

Most importantly though, the adjustment process allows the tea to be brewed according to individual taste.  I know that I like the tea certain people make more than others.  They are just better tea brewers, at least in my eyes, regardless of what tea is given to them.  There are those whose tea I had the misfortune of drinking, and by mangling it thoroughly, what should have been a great cup is destroyed.  Sourness that should have been subdued became pronounced, Wuyi that should have that strong rock aftertaste turns into insipid brown tea, and young puerh brewed in such a way as to make me wonder if I should be drinking some white tea instead.  When making tea for ourselves and ourselves alone, the adjustment process is easy — you have perfect feedback from yourself, and can tune the tea making a certain way.  When making for a group of people, asking them how the tea is coming out is equally important.  It is easy to fall into the routine of our own tea habits without thinking about the fact that now someone else has to drink that cup of tea.  Maybe they don’t actually like (or can handle) 10g of Lao Banzhang in a 60ml pot.  Maybe lightening up on the leaves will be a good idea.  Drinking tea by yourself or with others is always a learning experience.  The end goal, I think, is elusive, but every day we think about what we’re drinking, we’re getting closer to a better cup of tea.