Now if only I had a setup like this. This is a sitting area for guests who are coming in to soak at the onsen and resting up before they leave. The water is kept warm all day long with a slow charcoal fire going under it. It’s nice and warming to just sit there.
Entries tagged as ‘travel’
This is how you use a tetsubin
November 3, 2013 · 14 Comments
Hong Kong milk tea
October 18, 2013 · 6 Comments
While we’re on the subject of what regular people drink, it’s hard not to talk about the traditional Hong Kong milk tea.
Normally, milk tea of any sort usually consist of some milk or cream and a regularly brewed black tea of some type, maybe lipton or something along those lines. Hong Kong milk tea doesn’t follow that. It’s a very heavy blend of evaporated milk and tea. Witness the colour
These things are usually served without any sugar. You can add your own, if you want, as sugar is usually on the table in large quantities. The way this stuff is brewed is what some people call the “stocking milk tea” – it actually is a cotton bag that looks like a long sock, with tea inside. They use two pitchers with no lids. The brewer repeatedly pour boiling water (after the first infusion, tea) back and forth between the two, while having it on the heat source so it’s kept at a very high temperature. They do this until it reaches the desired strength, which is somewhere between super strong and incredibly strong. Then, to serve, they add a few big spoonfuls of evaporated milk and then pour the tea into it with force – the “clash” between the two elements is important, and the resulting drink is a very smooth tea/milk concoction. Without the milk, the tea itself is a very bitter, sour, and strong drink that isn’t very good.
The tea they use is pretty low grade stuff, and is usually a blend of various kinds of teas. The base is this
The right hand bag is the tea (left side is coffee). If you really want, you can buy a bag of this stuff over Taobao at the paltry price of 168 RMB for 5lbs (incidentally the Taobao page also has a couple pictures of people making this tea). They claim this is Ceylon black tea, with different grades mixed in. Oftentimes various restaurants will use these as a base and may or may not add things to the mix to create their own flavour – cooked puerh for example is sometimes used to give the tea more body.
Evaporated milk (right) is the preferred fat source in Hong Kong.
I think in Singapore you see condensed milk instead (left), which is already sweet. The results are very different. There are also different kinds of evaporated milk. Something you run into sometimes is a particularly nasty one – basically imitation evaporated milk made using mostly vegetable fat and milk powder. It looks like the real deal, but the taste is off, and the body is thin and gross.
There are other variations on a theme, most notably the yuenyeung (pinyin: yuanyang) which is a perculiar mixture of half coffee, half tea, plus milk. I’m not a fan, but it has its devotees.
You’d think something like this should be pretty simple, but I’ve been to restaurants where the result is so horrible I’ve never gone back again. It’s really one of those drinks that can define your shop, and if your ability to make this singularly Hong Kong drink is not there, your business will suffer.
Tea and sugar
October 12, 2013 · 5 Comments
These two things do go together, sort of. Like this HK style french toast (two slices of deep fried white bread with peanut butter in the middle) and lemon tea.
I normally don’t drink my tea with any sort of sugar, as you can probably imagine. But sometimes I’m reminded why so many people do – it really softens the tannins in the tea, and tannins in tea, when it’s strong, can be pretty nasty.
The point was driven home while I was in Turkey, which, to my surprise, is mostly a tea drinking country, despite the fame of its coffee tradition. Tea was cheaper, and drunk far more often, than coffee. The preferred tea is samovar style – super concentrated concoction watered down. This process makes sense especially in settings where you need to make a lot of tea quickly – you make as strong a brew as possible, without regard for how it tastes, and then you water it down so that it’s more palatable. That’s how tea is made in Hong Kong too in most places – the tea is made super strong, with repeated boilings of leaves with water, and then you finally water it down to the desired strength.
The watering down, however, is also where things go wrong – usually when it’s still too strong when watered down. While in Turkey I sometimes would add a cube of sugar (two always comes with your cup) because they made the tea too strong. While that can be nice, sometimes, when it’s overly strong, it can be pretty unpalatable, since the tea itself isn’t much to write home about. Adding that sugar, however, magically transforms it into a much softer, gentler drink – the tannins are gone. What was a pretty strong and pretty harsh drink is now quite nice, and with one cube, you still only barely taste the sweetness. This is especially true if you then wash it down with some baklavas – or maybe it’s the other way around.
Cream, of course, has a similar effect, but cream influences the way tea tastes far more than sugar does. A small amount of sugar has a fairly neutral effect on the taste, but a small amount of cream is just nasty, making your tea look like sewage, while a large amount will of course change everything. I’m not about to dunk two cubes of sugar in all my tea every day, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of why most of the rest of the tea drinking public love their sugar with tea.
Turkish delight
October 1, 2013 · 6 Comments
These cups are everywhere in Turkey, and usually accompanied either by a big bowl of sugar, or two cubes of it on the side. It’s really quite a nice way to get a little tea in the middle of the day – that caffeine hit you need for those of us who don’t imbibe that other drink.
This particular place was in the middle of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. It’s a tiny corner rented out to these tea purveyors
Interestingly enough, there is something vaguely similar between this and the way they make tea in Hong Kong. The pots you see up top are full of concentrated tea – tea brewed very, very strong. Then, when it’s time to serve, they dilute it with water from the spigots. Three old men take care of the station and do some short deliveries, and some younger men are there for the somewhat further shops. I suspect each of these stalls have their own “region” in the bazaar – since it’s quite large – and serve their local area. The tea never comes with any milk or cream, just sugar. One cup costs a lira each (about 50 cents USD) and it’s drunk fairly quickly – the cup is small.
The best part of this is, it’s on demand.
Throughout the bazaar are these men carrying the dishes – delivering tea (and other drinks, but tea mostly) to the various shopkeepers. There’s also food that gets sent too, and interestingly, I didn’t see much coffee sent around. Maybe coffee isn’t drunk in this sort of setting? None of the deliveries involve any sort of throwaway boxes or cups – they are all reusable, glasses or dishes. It’s quite environmental. I wish Hong Kong still does that. There’s an old world charm about this, and it’s on full display here in this historic city.
Water temperature
March 26, 2013 · 9 Comments
I was just in the US for a few days for a quick conference trip, and had to endure a few days of subpar tea. I did bring my own – some tuo that I found recently that’s rather decent. These days, nice hotels generally have better coffee makers than they did of old. Whereas the old drip coffee machines mean that your water will have to pass through not only the area where the coffee goes, but also into the glass pot where anything going in will start tasting/smelling like coffee, the new ones tend to be done with a construction such that, if you were to remove the coffee element, water will directly pour into your cup. This means, among other things, that there’s no more need to really try to eliminate the coffee smell before you can use them for tea. So thankfully, tea in my room was mercifully ok.
The same, surprisingly, cannot be said for the airport lounge. The coffee machine they have is a fully automatic thing that has a hot water dispensing tap that spits out water with the push of a button. This tap, however, is problematic – the water is too cool. I suspect it comes out at something like 80-85 degrees, and the tea simply doesn’t brew properly in those temperatures. Whereas my tea at the hotel was decent tasting – more or less like the real thing when I brew it at home – the same tea brewed at the lounge in a pre-warmed coffee mug tastes like coloured water. Worse, the tea never really expanded/broke apart. The two chunks of tea stayed quite chunky for a very long time. It was only after maybe the 5th or 6th time I added water to the cup when it finally started to come apart, and it was only then when the tea started tasting a bit stronger. In other words, the water was not hot enough.
This is why when you have a vendor telling you to brew younger puerh at anything under 100 degrees, especially if they tell you to use water much cooler, what you’re getting is a very different experience from what you would get if you go at it with hot water. The effect of cooler water is a lower extraction rate from the tea, and it also opens up the leaves slower. It means that for teas like puerh, you’re not getting everything out of it at once. This does decrease the amount of bitterness and roughness that you might get from the leaves, but it also means you’re not really tasting everything you can.
For teas that you’re trying to evaluate whether or not is age-worthy, this approach can be problematic. If you brew your tea purely for currently enjoyment, then by all means, do whatever you like. If you want it with olive oil and cinnamon, do that. However, I do find that if the roughness or the bitterness is too much, a better way of avoiding/managing them is shorten the infusion time or lower the amount of tea leaves used. Lowering temperatures often diminishes the overall experience – most importantly in the mouthfeel of the tea, making it thinner and lighter. The tea at the airport was definitely a sub-par experience – one that I think makes the tuo come off as weak and boring. I rarely use warm, rather than hot, water to brew tea, so it is good, sometimes, to be reminded of what is possible, and what others may do to a tea. This can also explain the range of experiences that you often see when talking about the same tea – the variables are too many and so comparisons are, oftentimes, at best suggestive.
Categories: Teas
Tagged: musings, travel, water, young puerh
Notes from Kyoto
December 27, 2012 · 2 Comments
I’ve been to Japan quite a few times by now, but there are always things that you notice on trips that you didn’t before.
1) Restaurants, at least here in Kyoto, almost all seem to serve hojicha or genmaicha as the tea of choice. Of the ones that I’ve gone to so far, that has always been the case. Some of these places are not exactly crap restaurants either, and the hojicha, as far as I can tell, are pretty decent. In one case, it was the most interesting hojicha I’ve ever had. I think sencha perhaps doesn’t go as well in many ways with a lot of cuisine, and I can sort of see why. Hojicha is a bit more neutral, and probably does a better job of making food go down easier than sencha could.
2) There really are a lot of teaware stores here. Last time I was here I ran into a teaware store near Daitoku-ji that sold me a few coasters that I think are really quite nice. This time, walking around the main shopping districts here in Kyoto, there are many more teaware shops that sell quality stuff. The prices range from reasonable to very expensive, and it all depends on what you’re going for. If you want a run of the mill kyusu, a few thousand yen will do. If you want a nice chawan from someone who’s probably a bit more than unknown, you’re going to have to shell out a few hundred thousand yen. Chawan styles that are most commonly sold here seem to be kyo-yaki that are very colourful and full of makie decorations with vibrant colours. There are your rakuyaki, of course, and there’s even a whole store devoted to just selling rakuyaki in Gion, and other styles are also sold here, but kyo-yaki is definitely the most common one. To just give you an idea:
This is just another teaware store. For those who like browsing, if not buying for stuff, there’s no better place than Kyoto. You don’t find the same concentration of such stores elsewhere in Japan – you have to have a better idea of where to look.
3) I don’t drink much of Japanese tea at all, especially the green stuff, so I don’t usually shop for them. Prices, however, are expensive, and I think most of the high end stuff you’ll never see in the US. Prices on the high end seem to be somewhere in the 3000yen/100g range. Granted, this is retail in a touristy city in Kyoto, but like teas in Taiwan, China, and elsewhere, I think the outcome is the same – the best stuff stays at home.
Categories: Information
Tagged: Japanese tea, travel
Kitano Tenmangu and ShÅkÅken
December 25, 2012 · 3 Comments
We are spending a quick few days in Kyoto, and one of the nice things about Kyoto is that there’s tea pretty much literally everywhere you go. Today we spent a little time at Kitano Tenmangu, an important Shinto shrine for the god Tenjin, the deification of the person Shigawara no Michizane, but more importantly, the shrine was also the site of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s famous Grand Tea Ceremony, held in 1587 and was supposed to run for 10 days, even though it ended up only being about two days. It was, for the most part, a grand show of power and patronage by Hideyoshi, but there was some tea involved as well.
Among the collections of Kitano Tenmangu are a number of artifacts related to the tea ceremony, as well as some good looking raku ware chawans. More interestingly, there’s a painting of the scene of the Grand Tea Ceremony, which also lists the famous teaware of the time that was used during this ceremony and who was present at which particular seating. Alas, no pictures allowed in the museum.
There’s also a nice teahouse that wasn’t very obvious given the hubbub surrounding the shrine, as it was the flea market/fair day. The teahouse is called ShÅkÅken.
The sign suggests that this is the original building used by Hosokawa Tadaoki, a daimyo and a student of Sen no Rikyu, during the Great Tea Ceremony. But looking around, at least on the web, it seems as though the original building was moved to Kotoin in Daitoku-ji, and the one here might then be a re-creation. Either way though, the well is the original one they used.
The house is quite big for a teahouse – and has a nice garden.
As with a lot of other interesting sites, however, this teahouse is not open for viewing, so all you can do is to climb over the wall – at least climb high enough to see inside. It’s bitterly cold right now, so I don’t imagine it being a very pleasant experience to drink tea in such an environment, but in warmer days, I’m sure a tea session here would be exceedingly enjoyable.
Categories: Information
Tagged: history, Japanese tea, travel
Anonymous teas
August 3, 2012 · 7 Comments
In the Western hemisphere people who reads blogs like this one and drink mostly Asian teas in loose-leaf form are a distinct minority, and shops that serve our kind of needs are, by and large, niche players who get relatively little business from those who are not so serious about tea. I suspect that the largest source of loose leaf tea consumption in retail format comes from places that serve loose leaf tea as part of a cafe style operation – with cakes, scones, snacks, and the like.
There are different ways in which such teas are served. On a national scale, the large chains almost all serve teabags, and for good reason – teabags are easy, they’re cheap, the margins are high, and they’re consistent. Anybody can stick a Tazo teabag in a cup and throw hot water in it, and out comes a breakfast style tasting tea that is going to be the same everywhere you go. Smaller shops, on the other hand, especially higher end shops, tend to serve loose leaf teas these days to distinguish themselves from the big chains. If the teas are taken in store, they’ll come in big pots and cups. If you order to go, you’re going to get a paper cup with a t-sac of tea. That’s much harder to do for the average shop – you have to make sure your employees have some idea of what they’re doing, otherwise the teas can be quite nasty. When done well, the teas can be quite decent, and for a traveling tea addict like myself, it can be a welcomed caffeine fix, and it can also be a good introduction to loose leaf tea, or a great place to experiment with teas that one’s unfamiliar with, for people who are otherwise not so tea inclined. Two days ago, I found myself going to a tea and macaron place called Soirette in Vancouver while I was visiting the city for a quick trip before heading to Portland OR. I had a “Wuyi Rock Oolong” which turned out to be quite ok, even though it was made a bit too weak for my taste. But then, any tea in a paper cup is going to be too weak if it were a yancha, so I’m not complaining.
The thing though is that teas are anonymous. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the difficult things are tea purchasing is that two shops can sell the same tea under different names, and you could be none-the-wiser even if you tried them one after another. Unless you do a strict comparison tasting side by side, it’s not always obvious that they’re from the same source. Places like Soirette must source their teas from somewhere – I have a hard time imagining them purchasing teas in bulk from a number of different sources, for that would require a level of work beyond what is necessary (unless, of course, the owner is a tea addict). So, the question is, where?
I tried looking through the web to see if it is possible to find out who they source their teas from, and it turns out to be quite difficult. There are really two possibilities – some big, national stores, or local shops that supply teas for them. Alas, after searching, there’s no real way of knowing with any certainty. I think the only time when you can tell for sure is if some more or less branded teas are used wholesale, without any type of name change. On Soirette’s tea menu, for example, there’s a “Harbour Morning”, which is some type of breakfast tea and named in reference of Coal Harbour, where they’re located. Pretty obviously they named it for their store’s location, and very likely it used to be called “English breakfast” or some other generic name. Then there are things like Jade Oolong, Organic Iron Goddess of Mercy, Marsala Chai, etc etc…. at first I thought it might be Mightyleaf, which has a lot of similarly named organic teas, but then, they also didn’t offer a lot of what Soirette had either. Some look suspiciously similar, but…. the point is, barring some amazing discovery of identical names, etc, and a tea I recognize by taste, there’s just no way to tell.
Perhaps in some ways, that doesn’t matter. However, I do think it speaks volumes about the kind of difficulty faced by newcomers to the hobby – having to deal with the byzantine naming conventions of the trade, and the idiosyncracies of individual shops. If you really love that Harbour Morning blend, you could certainly ask the shop where they get their teas from. In this case, they might tell you, since I don’t believe Soirette sells tea in bulk (although I could be wrong). Try asking a retail tea store, however, and they’ll probably spin some story about sourcing the best teas from the best places, etc. You can go on a quest trying dozens of breakfast blends and not finding the same tea, and even if you end up with the same tea, you might miss it because you feel it’s somehow different. It’s tough when you try to hunt specific teas down, and it all comes down to the problem of teas not bearing names when they’re in loose form. Which is why it’s probably always a good idea to not get too hung up on “the XXX tea I tried at Y shop” too much, because chances are you won’t find it anywhere else.
Tea in Korea
July 19, 2012 · 14 Comments
Generally speaking, I don’t drink much green teas because I find them to be relatively one dimensional. Although it was the type of tea that got me started drinking seriously, I now consume less than 100g of green tea every year. That’s one big reason why I rarely drink Korean teas – they are, by and large, green teas. While the ones I’ve had are generally pretty decent, I just don’t have the room or the inclination to drink them with any regularity, so much so that a can of tea I bought two years ago from a Korean farmer still sits in my tea cupboard, unopened. It’s a shame, really, but I have too much tea to drink, so my experience with Korean teas is limited.
Since I was going to Korea though, there was no reason not to drink some local tea. My previous experiences in Korea is that, for the most part, there’s no tea in the country. Even at restaurants, the most you’re ever going to see are some bad teabags. This time I was pleasantly surprised that the quality of teabags in the country has improved – they are no longer the scum of the earth type of tea that I experienced ten years ago. It also helped that I brought my own tea, so I wasn’t very desperate for caffeine. It is rather telling though that at a place like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, they only had three types of non-flavoured, non-tisane teas, versus maybe a dozen or more that you’d expect when you’re in California. The local taste is really for coffee, and flavoured teas.
Since this was a family oriented trip, I didn’t have much time to spend trolling teashops. I did find enough time to go visit Insadong, which is a touristy area that sells a lot of cultural goods – paper, ceramics, arts and craft things, and among them, some teashops. The last time I was in this area was over 10 years ago, but not much has changed – I still recognize a lot of the shops that I went by last time, which, in and of itself, is pretty incredible. Some, such as one that sold puerh back in the day, is still selling puerh now. The prices, however, are extravagant.
In fact, tea in general seems pretty expensive in Korea, for reasons I don’t understand. Perhaps it is the tariffs that kills it (if I’m reading correct, tariff for green tea is 500%). Either way, we’re talking about some pretty expensive teas here, with a relatively limited selection of greens that are differentiated primarily, for the untrained eyes anyway, by the youthfulness of the buds. I didn’t hold out much hope for anything too fascinating.
While walking around Insadong, however, MadameN and I ran into a rather large shop that I don’t remember from my last visit. The store is called O’sulloc, which, upon googling it after returning, seems like a big tea producer in Korea. Mattcha, who has been writing about Korean teas for years now, says they used to sell to the Western market, but no more. We went to the third story of the teahouse, avoiding the large crowds at the second floor who were voraciously devouring shaved ice. It was rather quiet up there, and dark, with prices to match the surroundings. Looking at the menu in the dimly lit environment, I tried to pick out what looked the most interesting – we had two teas in the end, the Unhyang and the SamdayÅn.
After a “cleaning” cup of green tea, we each got served our own tray of tea.
Lighting is bad in there, so bear with the bad pictures. This is a picture of the SamdayÅn, although I couldn’t quite tell the true colour of the tea itself, because the interior of both the pot and the cup are reddish in nature, which obscures the colour. The taste of the tea though is very interesting – it is a taste that I don’t think I’ve ever had before. The “post-fermentation”, whatever it is, did something to the tea, and there is also a scent that is probably from the cedar that they stored the tea in. The leaves used for this tea is some kind of sejak base – very small, fine buds. The colour of the leaves is a reddish one – looks a little like a good Oriental Beauty. This is an odd one.
In comparison, the Unhyang is less exciting, tasting more or less like a highly oxidized roasted oolong. The problem common to both teas, really, was the relatively low amounts of tea they used in the pot. I think we each got maybe 3g of tea in the pot, which really was nothing, and was not sufficient to get a good sense of the tea itself. The water used was also lower in temperature to start off with. I think both of these teas, because of their processing, can stand higher temperature and probably would be much more interesting brewed stronger, but alas, that wasn’t the case. At the prices they want for a mere 30g of tea, I find it hard to fork out that much for something that was only decent. A nice curiosity tea, perhaps, but not one I’d go for with any regularity.
There were some other shops that looked promising, at least, but we neither had the time, nor the energy to go through them. I didn’t really get a chance to shop again either, so this trip’s tea activities were relatively limited This is inherently the problem of trying to tea shop in a place you’re not too familiar. The shops that you end up at tend to be in the more touristy areas. You have very little time, and very little information on which shop is good and which one isn’t. You have a limited amount of energy and stomach to try a lot of teas. You are, sometimes, constrained by language barriers. If I had a few months in Seoul, I’m sure I could do better and find more local shops that might have interesting things for less money, but I don’t. At least I’ve spent a fair amount of time shopping for tea in other places, but even then I had trouble getting good tea within half a day.
Now imagine if you ask a friend of yours, going to China for the very first time, to buy you some nice tea while you’re there, preferably some yancha or puerh…. you can imagine what will happen then. Which is why I always tell people don’t ask your friend to buy tea for you unless they know the area really well and they also know tea really well. Otherwise, you’re quite likely to end up with duds that disappoint.
Loot from Kyoto
April 8, 2012 · 6 Comments
Kyoto is really a lovely town, and is one of my favourite places on the planet. They are filled with tourists, yes, and they live, more or less, off the tourists, but it is because of their charm that cities like Kyoto or Venice really are able to preserve at least some of their flavour that most other places have thoroughly lost – even the old districts of Beijing are slowly dying, because of the lack of preservation and the encroachment of new economic developments, which have spawned massive, unlivable blocks of monumental buildings instead of the very human-scaled neighbourhoods that used to characterize the city. Kyoto, thankfully, has mostly maintained that.
As you can probably guess, I just made a trip to Japan for the past few days, and tried, at least a little bit, to work some tea related activities in there among all the sightseeing. It started, in a certain sense, right after I got off the plane and onto the train from the Chubu airport – Tokoname (yes, that Tokoname) is, unbeknownst to me, right across the water from the airport and was the first stop of the train.
I must admit to having neither interest nor time in getting off the train to see the kilns, but next time, I guess I’ll know where to go.
It was cherry blossom season, although after an unusually cold winter and a freak windstorm the day before I arrived, most of the trees weren’t blooming yet, although some were. There are actually more cherry blossom trees in places like Vancouver, where they pretty much line every street and the city turns into a sea of pink during spring, but it doesn’t have temples like these.
I did stop by a few tea places, one of which is Ippodo, which I understand lots of folks like to buy tea from online.
They have a shop, and a cafe on the side of the shop (enter through main door). Here’s the menu:
I was traveling with companions, and so I got to try more than one thing. There was a spring special (not seen here) menu as well. I had the Nodoka matcha from that menu, and someone else had the organic sencha. They seem to have an A and B version, but since A is sold out, I presume I tried the B. The organic sencha is very good, with a deep, robust taste and solid mouthfeel. Anyone who’s read this blog with any regularity knows I’m not exactly a sencha fan, so for me to like a sencha is indeed a pretty rare thing. I didn’t buy any though, since I know if I bought any I wouldn’t finish most of it in time for them to be fresh – stale sencha is really not my cup of tea.
Kyoto also has a lot of antique shops scattered around, and Teramachi, where Ippodo is located, has a number of them. I ended up taking home a Republican era pot for a reasonable sum of money. Later in the day, I also found the perfect coaster for pots, made of rattan, in a random teaware shop that has been around since 1870 that I ran into near Daitokuji, which itself is, in my opinion anyway, a must-see site of Kyoto, although one could say that about many of the sites in the city.
The rattan coaster, in particular, is something I’ve been seeking for a while now. Those things are hard to find. It’s probably only in places like Kyoto where you can run into a 140 years old shop selling high quality teaware while randomly strolling along an otherwise nondescript street. There was, alas, no time for more extensive tea or teaware shopping this trip, as I was on a pretty tight schedule. It would’ve been nice, for example, to see Uji again, but that will have to wait till another day.
I also stopped by Osaka, which offers no such luck in finding items. Metropolis though it is, the antique shops located in the Oimatsu area are extremely disappointing – only two offers any kind of collection of teaware. One was mostly junk, the other being extremely overpriced. Kyoto, it seems, is hard to beat, and I’ll have to go back there for some more sooner rather than later.
Categories: Objects
Tagged: green tea, Japanese tea, shopping, teaware, travel, yixing
Unrelated: Thanks for still being around.