Tea Geek Blogs

This may come as a shock to some. Virtually all of the tea produced in Japan is green tea. It’s what they’re known for. Even people who know next to nothing about tea will ask about “Japanese green tea” as if that’s a specific kind or Japan is the only place where “green tea” grows.

Well, I just ran across a reference to a website that sells black tea (koucha) manufactured in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. (Shizuoka is famous for its green teas.) I haven’t tried any of it, but I’m tempted to order just to see what it’s like. First, though, I wanted to share the discovery with my readers who might also like to try some. (Apologies for using their image without express written permission–but I think it still falls under fair use since I’m giving credit and linking to them, and I’ve altered it a bit.)

Curiously, the website appears to be of the Assam Tea Company. Their teas all seem to be from India except this one. Even their greens and whites come from Assam (which might be just as shocking as a black tea from Japan to some people).

Very interesting stuff. I can’t vouch for this particular source, but it does seem like more and more experimentation is being done in the tea world, and those experiments are actually reaching the American tea-drinking public. And that’s pretty cool.

“Drink your tea. Tea’s a good drink. Keep you going.”

–Agnis Hamm (played by Judi Dench) in The Shipping News

Things have been busy for me recently, so here are just a few things that I’ve wanted to mention on the blog. It’s a bit more higgelty-piggelty than other posts, but there’s tea involved with it all so that will have to do for a theme.

First, happy Lunar New Year (aka “Chinese New Year”–China being homeland of tea). My partner and I went down to Seattle’s International District for the celebration last weekend and I took a photo of the new traditional Chinese gate that was ceremonially revealed for the new lunar year. (What was actually revealed was the plaque in the center that basically says “China Gate”.) We were given hong bao or red envelopes with chocolate coins inside, and since it was crowded we went home to have tea after picking up a few goodies at the local Asian markets. May Cai Shen (aka Bi Gan, or the God of Wealth) be kind to us all this year–as well as Shen Nong, the emperor who supposedly discovered tea!

Okay, next–tea in the media! On his most recent appearance on Oprah, Dr. Mehmet Oz revealed his Ultimate Anti-Aging Checklist which included the recommendation to drink 4 cups of white or green tea daily for the antioxidants. While there are a couple of things that he said which fall under several listings on my own Common Tea Myths article, such as the supposed levels of caffeine, I certainly can’t argue with drinking 4 cups of tea daily for increasing antioxidant intake. Based on what I’ve seen about tea, varying types would probably be better because green and white teas are high in some antioxidants and low in others…black, wulong, and puer all have different mixes of which antioxidants in which amounts.

Also in the media, during a recent television interview, U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed that she kept up with the grueling demands of the campaign trail by drinking lots of water and drinking tea instead of coffee. Go Hillary! (For her tea drinking habit, of course…Tea Geek hasn’t found any candidates with a sufficient pro-tea platform to be comfortable offering an endorsement.)

Having now worked in two different tea shops (one mainly English style, the other mainly Taiwanese), one of the most common things that gets brought up is caffeine. Sometimes people ask direct questions about caffeine, sometimes they just want a tea with a lot (or none), and sometimes it’s a vague thing like, “I want something that will help me sleep.”

There are a couple of interesting things about this. First off, the assumption seems to be that the only “active ingredient” in tea is caffeine…besides the antioxidants. Most people seem to think that if they don’t sleep, it’s because of caffeine. They also seem to assume that the stronger the flavor and darker the color of the tea, the more caffeine it has: a lightly floral, almost clear cup of tea can’t possibly have more caffeine than a nearly-black cup that’s so strong a mouse could trot across the surface.

Others bring out the oft-repeated myths either that different styles have a predictable level of tea relative to the other styles (i.e., black tea has more caffeine than green tea), or that you can decaffeinate tea with a quick wash of hot water. Dump out the first 30- to 45-second steep, then brew the full time, and you’ve got easy decaf tea. (I did mention that these were myths, right?)

The truth, as it often is, is far more complex. Basic caffeine levels depend on a huge number of factors, including your tea-to-water ratio, brewing temperature, and brewing time. So making a prediction of caffeine content based on what leaves you’re buying is already problematic.

Then add other factors: plant varietal (Camellia sinensis var. assamica naturally produces more caffeine than Camellia sinensis var. sinensis), weather conditions, soil type, fertilizer used (or not), shade level, which leaves were picked (younger leaves produce more caffeine than older leaves), amount of stem included, whether the plants were propagated by seed or cutting, and so on.

In addition, most people don’t drink single-origin teas. Most teas are at least blends of tea from different farms, but even more common are blends of tea from different growing regions or different continents. All of the above variables are then mixed up with that based on exactly how much came from Sri Lankan farms, and what percentage of the mix is Kenyan, and did they add a pinch from Argentina?

Hopefully you now think it’s hopeless trying to predict caffeine levels in tea. Good. Now, you know how I said it’s more complex than that? Well, that’s still true. Along with the caffeine is a little amino acid called theanine. Actually, theanine comes in two mirror-image molecules, called L-theanine and D-theanine. D-theanine doesn’t seem to do much for humans, but L-theanine appears to enter the brain and help you to reduce stress and relax. In brain-wave terms, it encourages alpha-wave production–think meditation, not sleepiness. The tea plant only produces L-theanine, as far as I can tell.

What’s even more wacky is that it appears that this relaxing effect of L-theanine is enhanced by the presence of caffeine. That’s right, you get more relaxed when you’ve got a stimulant involved. I think this combination is why people sometimes say that “coffee caffeine is different than tea caffeine”. That’s not true–caffeine is caffeine. However, there is a relationship between caffeine and the other compounds that get consumed along with it. That is what’s different.

Oh, but wait…there’s more. Just like there was all of that variation in caffeine, there’s also a ton of variation in theanine levels. Now less is known about theanine than caffeine, but according to tea scientist Nigel Melican (interviewed earlier by Tea Geek), the Tea Research Foundation of Central Africa published some Japanese tests from a few years back on the subject. These findings lumped tested teas into regions. The 15 Japanese teas averaged the lowest concentration, while the highest were the 12 teas from Argentina, the 4 South Indian teas, and the 12 Malawi teas.

Finally, just like the “different caffeine” thing, your body has different compounds floating around. Your body chemistry is different from my body chemistry. What you consume is going to affect you differently than if I have some of the same pot of tea. The amount you drink each day may differ from the amount I drink. And when we drink them may differ as well. Tolerances for caffeine (and perhaps for L-theanine) differ. It’s crazy.

So the upshot to all this is that you simply cannot predict ahead of time the amount of caffeine in your cup, or how it will affect you. My advice? Buy some tea. Drink it in the morning in case its caffeine turns you into some kind of hyped up monster. If you like its flavor, experiment with when you can drink it and how strong you can make it. Experiment with multiple brews versus just one. If you don’t need to get up the next morning, try a cup at night to see if you really can’t sleep.

Oh, and the 30-second decaf steeping thing? Doing that will very likely get rid of most of the beneficial antioxidants and a good portion of the flavor, according to the small amount of tea science I’ve read. But if it makes you feel better, you can go ahead and do it. Much of our experience with the world is psychological anyway. But more on that in another post.

Edit:  Original post mentioned “R-theanine.”  This has been corrected to “D-theanine.” 

I had an interesting experience a couple of weeks ago that I’m only now getting a chance to write about. I should start out by saying that what I like about tea is strongly weighted in favor of factual information. That’s not to say I don’t like drinking it or whatever, but I don’t have a super-fantastic palate and I read other tea blogs that are of the “tasting journal” variety more to glean data than to try to figure out what particular nuances their authors are finding in a particular tea. I should also say that I’m more of a wulong kinda guy than a puer lover. Puer is very interesting and I enjoy drinking it, but it doesn’t make me light up like a new kind of wulong that I’ve never heard of before.

That said, I’d often heard (and occasionally repeated) that if you taste a cooked (or “shu”) puer next to a naturally aged green (or “sheng”) puer, the natural aging process would win out over the “forced” aging process of the shu puer. Well, I finally buckled down and did the experiment. On two different occasions, I tasted an old green against a young cooked puer. The green was a Yinhao sheng puer tuocha (or for those puer beginners, a bunch of naturally aged and fermented tea leaves pressed into the shape of a bowl or bird’s nest) from the 1980s. It was also my first sheng puer of that age…most of my puer experience is of ones made in the last 10 years or so.

The first cooked was a Menghai Tea Factory bing from December 2005, and the other bing was one that I don’t have any information on but was a similar kind of decent-quality cooked puer.

And my experience was that the cooked puers had a “bigger” flavor, and that the flavor seemed somehow “damp.” Puer is going to be earthy no matter how you cut it, but the shu/cooked ones tend towards the fall leaves / fresh soil / basement kinds of flavors.

The Yinhao, though, was certainly of a different breed. My first and strongest image was that of being several floors above the basement, in some kind of old manor-house library or historical archive. It was a dry-earthy flavor…delicate, like old books, but also with little hints of things to discover by flipping through the (if you’ll forgive me for mixing metaphors with a single word) leaves.

The side-by-side comparison with the unknown cooked puer happened to be at an introductory puer class. The general consensus amongst the puer beginners was that they liked the cooked one better than the aged green. My guess is that it was that the stronger, more basic flavor of the cooked tea was easier to “get” whereas the aged green was something you’d not pick up on unless you had some more puer experience under your belt.

Or, it could just be that cooked puer tastes better to most folks and it’s that us tea geeks think the aged greens are supposed to be better so our minds play tricks with our experience. Who knows…but if you get a chance to repeat my experience, I encourage you to take it, and to let me know about what you noticed.

P.S. — I got 14 or 15 brews out of the Yinhao, whereas I didn’t get nearly as many of the other two. So the aged green had more staying power than the two particular samples of cooked that I used. The picture to the right shows steepings #1 at 30 seconds, #3 at 50 seconds, and #6 at a minute and a half. And yes, it really did get darker and then lighter again.

For the last four years, I’ve been teaching a tea class at a unique and cutting-edge school called the Puget Sound Community School. The class meets once per week and I cover some aspect of tea–sensory testing, culture, history, processing, geography, chemistry, biology, or (as we did a couple of weeks ago) just sitting around in the library drinking tea and watching Wallace and Gromit with crackers and Wensleydale.

Students have come and gone over the years, but they’ve developed quite a bit of tea skill and knowledge, if I do say so myself. When I challenged them with a blind taste test of several wulongs and had them guess (by taste only) the general level of oxidation and general level of roast of each tea, the basic consensus amongst the students was pretty accurate.

I brought in three Keemun teas (a congou, a mao feng, and a hao ya) and brewed them according to the ISO sensory test for black tea guidelines–without milk–their average scores for each tea clearly ranked them in order of quality. This tasting is what’s shown in the photo.

And I’ve already written about the comparison I did in my Dragonwell tasting post and the followup I did at PSCS in my Dragonwell at PSCS post. If you’ve been following along, you’ll recall they nailed that one as well. Who knew junior high and high school students would be able to so accurately determine price and quality of tea just by taste?

They do me proud.

It’s been a bit since I wrote last, in part because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but more because of the Seattle food & Wine Show. If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you’ll know that I did a bunch of work helping set up a booth at this show for the Puget Sound Tea Education Association (PSTEA). That’s what’s taken up much of my time over the last couple of weeks, but I can say that it was a success. Our goal was to let people know that we’re working on the first Northwest Tea Festival, and to start building our mailing list.

We had almost 30 tea businesses involved in the discussion and planning, and a dozen or so who contributed to the supplies, advertising, booth staffing, tea samples, and everything else we needed to get the booth up and running. We answered questions, showed off a real live tea plant from Russia, handed out sample cups of tea, and gave out punch cards for samples from local tea shops to those who joined our mailing list.

Now that we’ve started the buzz, though, it’s time to work on the NW Tea Festival itself. It will be Fall of 2008 (hopefully not conflicting with my tea trip to Taiwan!) and if you’re interested in attending, please sign up for the NWTF announcement list. If you happen to own a tea business and would like to be informed when we get the booth registration and/or sponsorship details finalized, you can send an email to teageek’at’teageek.net.

At some point over the last couple of months, I received a sample of tea. Unfortunately, between then and now, the label got sticky or damp or something and stuck to my counter. When I picked it up to brew it, all I could manage to make out was “near Guangzhou.” I know it’s a red (black) tea, and that it’s from a place near Guangzhou, but that’s it.

Anyway, since I haven’t had a black tea made in Guangdong province (a.k.a. Canton) to the best of my knowledge, I thought I’d give this one a try. By the way, Guangzhou is the capitol city of Guangdong province. I’m trying to stay away from tea-tasting reviews on this blog since that’s the focus of most other tea blogs, but I’m making an exception for this tea for the simple reason that it’s a new province/tea-family combo for me.

The dry leaf had lots of long, thin leaf twists that appeared to be whole leaves. It reminded me of a larger size of, say, Keemun Mao Feng or a Ruby #18 from Taiwan. Balancing that were a number of smaller-sized pieces (which could have happened anywhere from the processing to me yanking the bag off the counter).

I brewed 2.5g in a 150ml ISO-standard tasting pot, using a 3-minute steep in freshly boiled water. The source of the water was Seattle tap water, filtered through a Brita pitcher. (Not that it matters, but I boiled the water in a stainless steel electric kettle.) When the brewing was complete, I presented it as if I were doing a flight of tea samples and took a picture. They don’t call me a tea geek for nothing.

As you can see from the picture, the liquor color was an amber-caramel color, which could either mean that it was under-brewed, or that this particular tea simply has more theaflavins than thearubigins (the colorful antioxidants that are in red/black tea but not so much in green tea.)

The scent of the liquor was a little nondescript. I got the impression of black tea, of course, but not much character beyond that. Nothing bad, just nothing fantastic either.

Remember how I said the leaves reminded me of the Taiwan black tea Ruby #18? Well, the flavor was like that also–on the lighter end of black tea flavor. Only trouble was that where Ruby #18 has a sweet smoothness, Near Guangzhou had a little bite to it instead. Again, not unpleasant but not very complex or interesting. I imagine this tea to be a reasonable everyday tea–one you’d have with something, not as the center of attention. Maybe a better description of the flavor would be if you took Ruby #18 and cut it with a low-grade Keemun.

The infusion shows longish (1-2″) twisted leaves. Untwisting pieces revealed generally between 50% and 75% of a whole leaf. My guess is that whole leaf was the goal of processing, but many were broken in processing or while dry. They had a pleasant-yet-plain chocolate brown color.

My overall take, then, was that it was fun to try out, but I’m not going to kill myself tracking down where this sample came from so I can get some more.

I recently got my first International Standard tea tasting set. I’d used them before, of course, but I didn’t have any of my own. I did a little more research and found that they are specified in ISO 3103:1980 which also includes the standard method for brewing tea in them.

You can’t really see it in this picture, but the “pot” behind is kind of like a mug (the handle’s in back) with a lid.  There are several serrations along the edge opposite the handle which allows the tea to pour out with the lid on, straining the leaves.  The infused leaves are then dumped into the inside of the lid and presented behind the tea liquor in the bowl.

If you’re curious, the “right” way to brew, or prepare tea liquor for use in sensory tests (according to the International Organization for Standardization), follow the procedure below. I’ve done some conversions for 8-ounce cups, to make it easier to brew correctly at home:

• Use 2 grams of dry leaf per 100 ml of water, weighed to an accuracy of +/- 2%. Since a measuring cup is 8 ounces, or 236.6 ml, that comes out to 4.64 to 4.82 grams per cup. No more, no less. Or else. I’m serious.
• If the tea is to be tasted without milk, the leaf is added to the ISO standard pot, and “freshly boiling water” is added, filling the pot to within 4-6 millimeters of the brim. Be sure to measure. Steep for exactly 6 (!!) minutes.
• If the tea is to be tasted WITH milk, the milk goes into the bowl first,* using 4.1 to 4.2 ml (or .83 to .85 teaspoons) of raw or unboiled pasteurized milk per 8-ounce cup. The tea is brewed the same way as without milk.
• If possible, use water as similar to the drinking water where the tea will be consumed for maximum similarity between the sensory test and actual drinking conditions.
• A test report should be written, including any variation from the above procedures (like, <your favorite deity> forbid, putting milk in after you’ve poured the tea in the bowl). Be sure to include: mass of the tea used, volume of water, duration of brewing (if not 6 minutes), source of the water, whether or not milk was used and if used the volume and type of milk, when the milk was added, and all details of the experience necessary for complete identification of that exact sample of tea.

…and people think I’m a geek because I know a Keemun from a Yunnan.

* Note: on the rare occasions that I add milk to tea, I do it WRONG! I add the milk after and I don’t write it down. Take that, International Organization for Standardization! Ha!

It’s been longer than I’d like since I last wrote a post, but I’ve been developing a relationship with my digital camera. I don’t have a whole lot of photography experience, mind you, so I’ve been feeling the learning curve. Meanwhile, I’ve also been tasting new teas for upcoming classes (listed here plus a new one at Teahouse Kuan Yin on November 5th), and working on some research for the Tea Geek Wiki.

While I do all of this, I’ve been taking pictures of tea, tea, tea. You can check out my pictures that I’ve got on the wiki’s articles on Bai Hao, Tie Guan Yin, and Keemun, and I’ve included some pictures of my samples here. Sometimes it seemed as if my tea (or a gaiwan in this case) were a wild animal, leaping out of the frame at the last moment.

Next time, look for some history on tea in America…I’ve been working on an entry about that one in the background.