Tea Geek Blogs

I think the pictures say it all.

Perhaps it’s a good day to drink tea, but not to be tea.

When we talk about a particular tea–Darjeeling, for example, or Bai Hao Wulong–it’s something of an error to think of it as “a” tea.  Really, all of these names, from Dragonwell to Silver Needles to Puer to Assam, are all categories of tea.  To be truly speaking of a single pure (i.e. non-blended) tea, you need to talk about a particular batch, picked on the same day, and following it straight through processing at a single facility without getting mixed in with any other batch.  Even from the same farm and the same plants, and the same processing style, each picking (even if two pickings happen from the same patch of plants on the same day) will be different.  A tea picked early in the morning will often produce a lower-quality tea than leaves picked just before noon, so a tea farmer sometimes produces two different teas in a single day.

But with each farm potentially making potentially two different teas each day the weather’s good, how do you differentiate?  How do you refer to one versus another?  Well, that’s where it gets even more confusing.  As with all things in the tea world, the right answer appears to be “it depends.”

Generally, a tea can be referred to by a number of different features of its production history.  It can be referred to by geography, whether a city (Darjeeling, Puer) or a state/province/region (Assam, Yunnan, Keemun/Qimen), or a local feature (Dragon Well, Alishan [Mt. A-Li]).  Other teas are referred to primarily by what varietal of the tea plant they are made from:  Tie Guan Yin (Iron GuanYin), Jin Xuan (Golden Lily), Si Ji Chun (Four Season Spring).  Still others are named based on their appearance:  Bi Luo Chun (Green Spiral Spring), Yin Zhen (Silver Needle).  Some just have fanciful names like Oriental Beauty or Old Work Tea.  And to make matters worse, some are named after a combination, as in “Wuyi” which is both a mountain range and the name of a varietal, and often implies a certain style of processing.  And “Oolong” or “Wulong” (same Chinese characters, different method of rendering into English letters) can refer either to the entire category of semi-oxidized teas or to a specific cultivar of Camellia sinensis var. sinensis or even to the specific semi-oxidized teas made from that cultivar.

Then there are the modifications to this basic name.  Some teas are classified by the British system, dividing teas into grade based on how big the leaf pieces are.  The bigger the pieces, the higher the grade.  These grade divisions are encoded in a string of letters such as BOPF (Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings, otherwise known as “very small pieces”) and FTGFOP (Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, or sometimes jokingly translated as “Far Too Good For Ordinary People”).  Other teas are graded by how much effort and care has gone into them.  Keemun Congou–or “Qimen Gongfu” if you de-Anglicise it–is the basic quick and dirty version, while Keemun Mao Feng has more care taken but still uses somewhat older leaves, and Keemun Hao Ya takes the most effort and uses the most young and delicate leaves.  Hao Ya is divided further into “A” and “B” with the former being the cream of the crop.  Keemun Hao Ya “A” goes through an extra hand-sorting process that is skipped with “B”.

Then, going from the frying pan into the fire as they say, some teas are named incorrectly.  That is to say, there are many teas called “Dong Ding” that are not made actually on Dong Ding mountain.  They’re called that because they’re made in the style of teas from that area.  Another is Chinese Sencha.  Sencha is a distinctly Japanese tea, but for economic and business reasons, some Japanese tea companies are having the tea grown in China but processed like they would have been had it been grown in Japan.  Is this really Sencha, or a Chinese green tea made in the Sencha tradition to Japanese specifications?

All of this boils down to an impossibly complicated and confusing mess when it comes to referring to a particular tea.  To be really accurate, one could refer to all of the specifics, like “Makaibari Estate, Darjeeling, India, FTGFOP, Black Tea, Pick Date May 2nd, 2008, 10:45am” or “Su family farm, Dong Ding Shan, Nantou County, Taiwan, oxidized for 12 hours at an average of 20 degrees Celsius, rolled mechanically, and roasted three times for 2 hours each at 80, 100, and 110 degrees.  Only picking of November 12th 2008, from the lower of the two patches of Wulong varietal.”

But who wants to ask for a cup of that?

However, what might help is if everyone starts asking about these aspects of nomenclature.  Ask at your local tea shop if they know whether this wulong was hand picked and processed or machine harvested.  Ask your waiter at the restaurant if the Darjeeling is a blend or single estate.  Check your online tea sources for varietal of tea plant used.

While the tea industry is nowhere near agreeing on a universal nomenclature to describe each tea one from another, at least by asking the questions to clarify these finer points we can all encourage tea industry professionals to know their stuff.  And even if it’s called “Li Shan Wulong” on the jar or package, you may be able to discover information that differentiates this one from the “Li Shan Wulong” from the shop down the street.  At least then we as a tea community can start talking about teas with real information and not just the short label of two or three words given to the true complexities of geography, climate, botany, biochemistry, and human artistry that make each and every batch of tea unique.

One of the experiences I had in Taiwan was to visit Pinglin, where a famous tea competition is held at least twice each year–for the Spring and Winter tea seasons. Pinglin is a township in Taipei County, a little more east than south of the city of Taipei in northern Taiwan. On the one hand, it was disappointing because we got there when the weather was awful for tea picking and processing. On the other, we got there on the first day that farmers were bringing in their entries for the Winter competition.

It was an interesting process to see, with lots of people working very fast. First, the farmer would arrive at the school gymnasium with a large sack of tea weighing about 28 pounds (or just over 12.6 kilos). The sack would be weighed, and a number would be assigned. Forty-two metalic bags and a small plastic zip-close bag would be put into the farmer’s sack. All 43 inserted bags would have already been labeled in advance with the assigned number by the industrious people at the first table. A person further down the table would take some of the tea and put it in the zip-close bag and set it aside.

Next, the big sack was taken to one of five tables scattered around one side of the gym. Each table was covered in plastic and was attended by six or seven people, mostly women with generally a man supervising or auditing. The 42 metallic bags are taken out and the tea is dumped on the plastic-covered table. Each of the metallic bags holds half a jin of tea.  (A jin in Taiwan is 600 grams, which is slightly more than either 21 ounces, or 1.3 pounds.  To be confusing, in mainland China, a jin is 500 grams, or about 1.1 pounds.)  Most of the people at the table scoop up roughly a half-jin of tea and put it in one of the bags.  They are then given to a person with a scale who fine-tunes the weight to exactly 300 grams per bag.  The bags then go to yet another person who heat-seals each bag and packs them into two boxes labeled with the appropriate lot number.  Ten jin (20 bags) fit in each box, for a total of 20 jin.  The other two bags don’t fit into the boxes.

Ah, but there’s a method to this madness.  The two boxes are then stacked in the half of the gym where nobody is working.  (Over the course of the 5 days when entries can be delivered, that half of the gym will be more or less filled with tea.  Next time you’re in a gym, think of half of it filled with tea leaves and consider how much space the ounce or two you typically buy at your local tea shop takes up.  It’s a staggering amount of tea.)   The two forlorn bags that didn’t fit into the neatly stacked boxes are eventually taken to the building where the judging happens.  This last “extra” jin is what gets brewed for the judges.  Any tea left from the original farmer’s sack is put back in and given back to him.  Even though it’s from the same batch, it cannot legally be called competition tea because it’s not in the special numbered bags.

Meanwhile, that little zip-close baggie of tea that was separated at the beginning of this process is taken to the ground floor of the building where, upstairs, the judging will occur.  Below, however, are a couple of people hard at work brewing samples of tea.  They, however, don’t get to drink it.  Instead, they put the tea in fancy scientific equipment to test the samples for pesticides and agricultural chemicals (which was something that took a while for me to figure out–I didn’t know the Chinese term for “pesticides and agricultural chemicals” and the closest our friend Mr. Tsai knew in English was “medicine.”  Thank goodness for Pleco!)

Since we were there on the 12th of November and the actual judging didn’t start until, I think, the 20th.  If my understanding of the explanation wasn’t too far off and my memory holds, the three days of judging were November 20th through the 22nd, and the winners were announced on the 24th.  But Mr. Tsai and Mr. Chen did treat us to a tasting of three submissions (but I don’t know their numbers so I can’t tell if any of them won or not).

My friend and tea teacher, Shiuwen Tai, now has available the First Place, Second Place, an Honorable Mention, and one of her supplying farmer’s personal favorites (“Farmer’s Choice” she calls it).  I have some tea made by the Second Place farmer, but it wasn’t the same batch that won.  Check out mine at the Tea Geek Store, and Shiuwen’s at FloatingLeaves.com.  Get a little of each and taste them side-by-side!

I was just going over some of the materials I picked up on my trip to Taiwan to glean a little something to put on the Tea Geek wiki and I was struck by how important language fluency is to getting good information about tea.  I already know that the English-speaking world gets some basic information wrong because of the translation of Chinese word 發酵 (pronounced “fa jiao” according to four dictionaries, but everyone I’ve heard actually say it would be “fa xiao” in pinyin)–in Chinese it can mean either “ferment” or “oxidize” and is often translated one way when the other is more accurate.  Thus, we get black tea being called “fully fermented” when it isn’t fermented at all.

But then there are translations that just are bewildering.  This is the description, in English, that I found about how Baozhong tea is made:  “The tea-making process requires the undertaking of tea soot picking collection, shrinkage and fall by sunlight, indoor shrinkage and stir mix, tea cream stir-fry, kneading, and dessication in order to complete the strip-shaped Paochung Tea characteristic of Pinglin.”

Now, I’ve seen wulong production and I generally understand what steps they’re talking about but I’m confused why some of those English words show up in that description.  For example, “tea cream stir-fry”?  That sounds like a weird entree or something.  Imagine that your local tea shop sees that description of the process of making this tea and doesn’t have any recourse to either (a) someone who has seen the process, or (b) knows a Chinese speaker or knows a little Chinese themselves.   What stories do you suppose they’d tell their customers and/or other folks in the tea industry to show off what they know about tea?

(By the way, the “tea cream stir-fry” process is, I think, the “kill green” process where heat is applied for a few minutes to stop oxidation in the leaf; this pamphlet didn’t include the Chinese characters to double-check.  Some teas like Longjing/Dragonwell have “kill green” done by hand in an actual wok much like stir-fry.  Other teas are made using what looks like a very deep industrial clothes drier.  As to the “tea soot picking collection,” I think they mean “tea shoot picking collection” rather than some process where ashes are spread over the fields or something… although there does seem to be a craze where bamboo-charcoal is being added to all kinds of things as a cure-all.  Not sure how much science there is behind it, though some of the claims I saw were at least possible.)

I’m back from my trip to Taiwan! Actually, I got back a few days ago but jet lag and catching up at work and home took center stage. We went all over, met some great farmers, drank fantastic tea (and some that wasn’t so fantastic–there’s bad tea even in countries of origin, unfortunately) and learned a lot! I’ll be writing bits here and on the Tea Geek Wiki for many weeks to come. Quickly though, here’s a run-down of the places we visited (some aren’t tea-related, I know, but I figure I’ll give a brief overview here and later posts can be more tea-specific).

30 October: Taipei (National Palace Museum, Taipei City Hall, Taipei 101)

31 Oct: Jiufen (shopping, eating, and a really great teahouse, the Jiufen Chafang, and the Shilin Night Market–one of my favorite days)

1 Nov: Yingge (Yingge Ceramics Museum, teaware shopping, and Free Ceramics with your purchase of Beef Noodles!) and Sanxia (Zushi Temple–another favorite–and the town’s Old Street)

2 Nov: Taipei (Camera Street, The American Club, and failing to get up to see the Grand Hotel because it was heavily guarded for the visiting dignitary from the mainland)

3 Nov: Taipei (Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall, rain, Chinese Handicraft Promotion Center, more rain, Longshan Temple, Snake Alley <shudder>, and Ximending Night Market)

4 Nov: Taipei (National Museum of History), Huayuan Xincheng (tea oil noodles for lunch), Wulai (brief drive-through tour), and Maokong (teapot museum, dinner, and a temple complex overlooking Taipei)

5 Nov: Tainan via high speed rail (walking tour of temples and other historical sites)

6 Nov: Tainan (more temples, including Koxinga and Lady Linshui) then to Jiayi (the temple of the City God, and the city’s famous turkey rice for dinner)

7 Nov: Alishan (picking, watching the processing, comparing different days’ products from the same farmer–LOTS of learning experiences and another favorite of the trip)

8 Nov: Alishan (hiking the mountain trails, then back down through the tea fields, returning to Taipei via Jiayi)

9 Nov: Taipei (engagement banquet where we were drafted to represent family members of the groom-to-be who were unable to get to Taiwan) and Bitan (teahouse with yummy snacks and a great view, and dessert at Chocoholic)

10 Nov: Lugang (visiting a tea club, two temples, and more food), and visiting a friend’s family’s ancestral home nearby.

11 Nov: Taizhong, Nantou (studying plant varietals and more at Dong Ding, visiting an ancestral home, visiting a 200-year-old tea plant–shown above–and eating dinner on the edge of a bamboo forest near the base of the mountain)

12 Nov: Pinglin (Pinglin Baozhong Tea Competition entries, tasting tea with another farmer, and the Tea Leaf Museum only because the weather was too bad to pick and see the process in real life)

13 Nov: Northern Taiwan (Yangming Shan, Jin Shan’s Old Street, one of the more famous beaches, Danshui, Ba-Li, and more)

14 Nov: Nangang (Tea Processing Demonstration Facility), Taipei (re-visit of Longshan Temple, and dinner at a friend’s home), and then the airplane home.

The weather has turned cold and so my tea plant, the one that had been overrun with hornets and then miraculously liberated earlier this summer, is now pregnant. And I’ve got pictures. If you’ve got small children, you may want to have them leave the room because I’m going to show off the sex parts of my tea plant.

A little more seriously, though, this gives those who don’t have their own tea plant to get an idea of its flowers, leaves, and seeds.  I’ve read that the flowers are often quite fragrant.  I didn’t find that to be the case with my plante–they smell kind of herbaceous and ever so slightly spicy, but not particularly fragrant.

I’ve included my hand and a ruler to give a sense of size.

Also, there will be a bit of a break in my blog because I’ll be in Taiwan through the middle of November.  Cross your fingers for great tea being available while I’m there!

It’s been longer than I’d like since I wrote a blog post. The main reason is that I was the president of the Puget Sound Tea Education Association (PSTEA) and we just finished the first ever Northwest Tea Festival. Attendees of the festival appeared to enjoy themselves, lots of tea was had by all, and virtually everyone involved said it exceeded their expectations.

A few photos from the event:

Not long after my last post, I was looking at my site statistics and looked at the list of search terms that brought people to my site.  In the month leading up to that date, more that a quarter of the people coming to my site arrived because their search included the word “caffeine.”  Some wanted to maximize caffeine (“how to get the most caffeine from your tea”) while others wanted to minimize it (“how to get rid of caffeine from tea”).  Still others just wanted to know about it (“caffeine tea second brew” or “amount of caffeine in a cup of tea”).  Some didn’t specifically mention caffeine…but I could tell that was the intent (“tea can’t sleep”).

Why this obsession with caffeine?  Is that really why Americans drink tea?  Some to get more caffeine and some because it has lower levels that soda or coffee?  I’m not so sure.

To my mind, there are three basic reasons to drink tea.  Perhaps the most pedestrian and simple reason is because you want a beverage.  Thirst-quenching is something tea can do, and so people drink tea.  Leaves, hot water, and a cup/bowl/mug/trough/etc. is all you need.  Guzzle it down like a water buffalo or sip daintily with your pinky extended, it’s all “beverage.”

The second basic reason to drink tea is for a “reason.”  You can drink tea “because it’s good for you.”  Or “because I need a pick-me-up in the morning.”  Or “because I feel sophisticated having tea with my friends.”  This is a deeper category of tea drinking.  It requires that you’ve thought about tea a little bit and have decided that because of some criteria, tea is the best choice.  I think the caffeine-obsessed among us fall into this category:  “because tea has lower caffeine” or “because tea doesn’t make me jittery like coffee.”  However, it can still be somewhat one-dimensional.  Isn’t tea more than that one criterion, really?

Finally, the third basic reason is as an experience.  This is the spirit from which tea ceremonies come from.  It’s where people get their intellectual or spiritual kicks from.  When people speak of the “spirit of tea” or the “way of tea” it’s in this category of drinking.  Here, subtleties and variation are paid attention to.  Environment and teaware are important.  The chosen company and chosen leaves have great weight.  It’s perhaps the most sophisticated of the three basic reasons.  At the very least, the tea drinker needs to be somewhat self-aware and centered in the present moment to enjoy tea in this third way.  Additional study and experience only enhance tea-as-experience, because it allows for the experience of “I didn’t expect such-and-such flavor from this particular tea!” or “Oh, I’m excited to try that–I didn’t know they made so-and-so in that country!”  The more you know, the more you can detect, express, and enjoy.

Are any of these reasons for drinking tea wrong?  Absolutely not.  However, I think lots of conflict about tea comes from not understanding that other people drink tea for other reasons.  “Beverage” people see “Experience” people as tea snobs.  “Reason” people see “Beverage” people as doing it wrong.  To someone who want so experience the subtle flavors of a particular award-winning batch of wulong, adding milk and sugar may seem like sacriledge –an outrageous violation of teaness.  To a person who wants a comforting drink, milk and sugar in grocery store teabag tea may be the perfect thing.

It’s very easy to get caught up in your own reasons and assume other people should drink tea for the same reasons. But for different tea-drinking reasons there are different “better” and “worse” ways of going about it.  If you’re a Beverage person, Chinese gongfu cha probably isn’t a very good choice.  Lots of fiddling with utensils and very tiny cups of tea at the end.  On the other hand, if you’re an Experience person, the fiddling becomes a way to play with a particular tea and see how many different flavors you can get out of it–perfect for getting a full experience of a particular batch of leaves.

So next time you’re thinking someone’s doing it wrong, or is snobby, or can’t pick tea, take a moment to think of whether you’re imposing your own reasons for drinking tea on them.  And remember that drinking tea is good, no matter what your reason.

Recently, I heard another iteration of something I find fascinating. A person complains that they can’t drink tea in the evening because the caffeine keeps them awake, but they don’t like the taste of decaf teas and herbals don’t suit them. What are they to do?

Then a tea shop eager to sell them some tea tells them that all they have to do is do a quick 30-second steep, which removes most of the caffeine, pour that out, and re-steep the recommended length for a great low-caffeine cuppa for the evening. The customer follows this procedure and voila! Evening cups of tea AND sleep ensue. Victory!

I’ve heard this story on a number of occasions and it always makes me laugh a little, as well as getting curious. Because as I’ve mentioned on other posts and in the TeaGeek wiki, the 30-second decaf thing is a common tea myth. A majority of the antioxidants come out in the first 30 seconds, but perhaps less than 10% of the caffeine. This is based on the results of a couple of tea studies (which, if you’re interested, you can find references to via the links earlier in this paragraph).

Why do I laugh and become curious? Because if you put the customer story and the tea science together, you have to ask a question: Given that the customer slept well after a process that as been shown NOT to remove much caffeine, what’s the explanation for this phenomenon?

Personally, I think it’s psychology. First off, I think that most people first blame any sleeping problems on any caffeine they might have had. Tea and coffee come first as perceived sources of caffeine, even though some chocolate desserts can have more caffeine than a cup of tea, and are regularly enjoyed in the evening.

Next, I think that the 30-second decaffeination ritual invokes a kind of placebo effect. The customer believes there is no caffeine in the tea. Maybe it actually helps decrease the effect of the caffeine that is present, in a similar way that college students get impaired reactions when drinking alcohol-free beer that they believe to be normal beer. Or perhaps it just helps the customer choose other reasons for troubled sleep–that chocolate cake, or stress, or noisy neighbors. After all, it couldn’t be caffeine because it had all been removed in the 30-second rinse.

Either way, it becomes easier to think that the caffeine-disrupted sleep problem has been solved. And this could happen even if nothing had changed at all.

Another thing to look at is whether something besides caffeine has changed. For example, I have had evening tea and slept like a baby (last night for example). Other times, I’ve had evening tea and slept poorly. It’s easy to remember the times when you sleep poorly after having tea, but there’s no reason to pay attention to whether you had tea late in cases where you sleep well. So the poor-sleep nights stick out in the memory, seeming to get a prominence not warranted by their actual frequency.

(There’s a term for this particular flavor of cognitive bias, but I can’t recall it at the moment. I do know it’s mentioned in Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert. It’s a fascinating read even if you’re not a tea geek. This same bias is why it seems that your line at the grocery store always goes slowest–when the line goes quickly, you don’t pay attention to it, but when it goes slow it sticks in your memory.)

Now, I’m not a psychologist and I don’t have the facilities to carry out the research that would be necessary to verify my hypotheses (sleep studies, testing caffeine extraction rates, etc.) but it seems likely that psychology plays a big role in how we perceive caffeine and its effects in ourselves.  Of course, I’m open to other ideas about why so many people’s perceptions and experiences are at odds with the scientific evidence in this area.  Leave a comment if you’ve got one!

Well, it’s official.  Tickets have been purchased.  I’ll be in Taiwan for the first two weeks of November.  If you’ve got a hankering for something Taiwanese, especially tea or teaware, let me know.   Itinerary isn’t set yet, but I’m hoping to make at least one or two major growing regions (probably Pinglin, Wenshan and then perhaps something in Nantou county).  I’m hoping also to get some experience picking and/or processing, so stay tuned.

Of course, if you’ve been there and have suggestions on places I need to see or things I need to experience, I’d love to hear them as I set up the trip.