Archive for the ‘Pu-erh’ Category

he can’t even review tea, can he?


2011
09.20
I am drinking Green Pu-Erh Tuo Cha and relaxing a bit after a long day.

Recently I responded to an offer to write tea reviews for a site.  It looks like an interesting opportunity, but I don’t want to say any more about it until it’s a done deal.

I was asked what sort of tea I liked…the site was explained to me and like I say, it looks promising.  So I wrote back saying I was interested, and I mentioned this tea blog.  You know.  As in, ‘You want to see how I write?  Go check out the teablog.’  

Despite how informal and slipshod it might appear, I put quite a lot of thought and care into this teablogging lark.

Here’s the thing, though.  I don’t do many tea reviews.  I do some (I used to many more), but for the most part I start reviewing a tea and I go off on a tangent.  It’s not that I can’t simply review a tea.  But one of the ways I like to set this blog apart from others is to make it otherwise entertaining.  It’s certainly a blog about tea, but I like to see how far away from tea I can get without completely losing my readers.

If I’ve done my job well here, you’ll periodically say to yourself, ‘I wonder what ridiculous nonsense that Lahikmajoe  has been writing about lately.’  That non-teadrinkers regularly come here is something that continues to please me to no end.

But I like to try new tea and despite all the evidence to the contrary, I enjoy reviewing tea.  That’s actually why I think it’d be a good thing for me to write tea reviews in a more organised setting.  

A place where I’m not trying to be clever and distracting and boundary pushing.  Because as much as I’d love to tell you about how this Green Pu-Erh Tuo Cha tastes, I’ve already exhausted myself.  I am curious if the folk at the tea reviewing site took one look over here and said to themselves, ‘Who is this guy?  What the hell is he talking about?’

promise of enlightenment


2011
09.01

(The tea Buddha)

One of my pet peeves is people ascribing to tea qualities that it doesn’t have. If I were to believe every claim made by tea advocates/marketers, I’d blindly accept that this plant was able to cure most any disease as well as cure a few geopolitical disturbances. The problem with many of these claims of tea’s powerful properties is that they’re just not quantifiably provable.

These preposterous statements sell tea and (more importantly) magazines, but they’re disingenuous and irritating. To be clear, I’m aware there’ve been scientific studies to support some of these miracle claims. Nevertheless, I still question the validity of many attempts to extoll the health benefits of drinking tea.

A Promise

But there is one thing I can without any reservation promise that tea will do for you. Drinking good tea will ultimately bring you true and sustained enlightenment.

I’m sure you saying to yourself, ‘He can’t prove that.’

Oh, do you really believe I can’t?

I’m sitting here in an ocean of fully-evolved enlightenment-type thoughts, and have come to the simple and lazy conclusion that trying to explain them would only lessen my own personal enlightenment.

To get here today, I chose to brew some Pu-erh fannings, and it’s doing the job quite nicely. I doubt that you drinking the exact same tea is going to bring you anything even resembling enlightenment, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.