Archive for the ‘to the leaf-side’ Category

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teascapades of a tea newbie


2012
01.27

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Posted in guest teablogger, to the leaf-side | 9 Comments »

a note from your regularly scheduled teablogger: this post is written by Jim. You will immediately be able to tell that Jim is not a tea drinker. Why on earth would I turn the reigns of a teablog over to the likes of this guy? Why indeed. 


Well, I write this blog partially with the tea newcomer in mind, and he’s curious about tea. He writes some very funny non-tea-related blogs, and I knew he’d do something entertaining with it. And that he certainly did. 


One important thing to remember: this is just the beginning with Jim and tea. He’s already agreed to be a recurring character on the teablog. Without further ado, I bring you our guest teablogger:

I like to try new things, and while tea isn’t “new” to me, having access to someone who might know a bit about tea is. In the past, I tried tea as a substitute for coffee, specifically Lipton tea. Everyone knows that Lipton is the name in mass produced tea. Right? Right?
So I tried it, and honestly it made me sick to my stomach.Not initially, but after a couple cups. I found it was a little harsh on an empty stomach (much like coffee can be) and eventually I gave it up as a bad job.
Nearly a decade later, enter Twitter, toss in a mildly humorous and nearly contentious miscommunication spawned from incorrectly linking to people’s blogs. . . and I found Ken. And in finding Ken, found someone to ask all my annoying questions about the mysterious world of tea.
I tapped that resource for the first time in the middle of a grocery trip this past weekend. Without copy and pasting the exchange, essentially it amounted to this: Assuming Ken was more or less waiting by his phone/pc for my tweet, I said, “quick, I’m at the store, what tea should a newbie try?” and he, apparently actually sitting by his phone/pc waiting for my tweet began to guide me to the best of his abilities to my best choice.
Yeah. . . so there are a lot of options. And I tried tweeting this picture to Ken, but I was in a wifi-less store, and it kept timing out. So after Ken had asked a couple of questions about what sorts of tastes I preferred, he offered me four or five options. And believe it or not, the store only had one of them. I mean, are you looking at that shelf? That’s just the Stash choices I could fit in the picture. . . Anyway, we settled on Stash English Breakfast.
Ken wanted me to get filters, but I couldn’t find teafilters to save my life, so that apparently put loose-leaf tea out of the equation. But fear not, regardless, of whether this tastes like ass, I will totally try loose-leaf tea because it’s different, and I like trying different things. Not ass. That was probably misleading how I wrote that in there. But different things.
So I had the tea. Now, I drink coffee in the mornings ordinarily, and I won’t lie, sometimes when I finish my gigantic travel mug full o’ joe, I feel a little bit like I’m going to throw up. That doesn’t stop me from doing the same thing the following day, mind you, cause my mama didn’t raise no quitters, but I knew I wouldn’t try tea on a day that I was already queasy from caffeine overdose. Today was that day!!
The very first thing I did was find my finest heirloom porcelain tea cup. Because tea evokes all sorts of images in my head of cultured snobby people drinking tea out of fine china with their pinkies in the air.
Mission accomplished. I filled it with the finest tap water moneycan buy and prepared my tea kettle microwave.
Ken had told me to heat the cup, and essentially what I did was.. . heated the cup and water in the microwave until it boiled. Once it boiled,I removed it from the microwave and plopped the tea bag in it.
Ken (and the packaging) said to steep it for three minutes. I set my duck timer (the duck timer is win/win/win. 1) “When Timer Ends Duck.” That’sfunny. I can see people actually ducking when the timer goes off (as instructed),2) ducks are funny, 3) when I use it with my kids I can blame the duck for why they have to finish doing whatever it is they’re doing, “sorry kids, the duck quacked.”)
So I steeped. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t trust Brownian motion to disperse my tea evenly throughout my hot water, so I. . . in the absence of Ken’s learned guidance. . . bobbed the tea bag up and down in the water a couple times. I didn’t continually do it, because Ken’s instructions hadn’t explicitly spelled out how I was to steep, but he hadn’t mentioned bobbing, so I felt certain I was going outside the framework of accepted tealore, but I fucking did it anyway, because sometimes, in the absence of instructionsto the contrary, you just go with your gut. Plus I’m American, and if history has taught me one thing, it’s that when Americans get a hold of tea, they do unexpected things with it.
Further to my discussion of Brownian motion…when the timer was done, and the duck quacked and I had ‘ducked’ and then chuckled at how funny I think I am. . . I threw the bag away and I stirred the tea. Because it seemed to me at the time that if I didn’t trust Brownian motion to disperse my tea evenly through the water, I may as well help the process of mixing and get a good uniform dispersion. Ken had told me not to squeeze the bag out, so I didn’t.
Finally, I was ready to drink my tea. But, as I was about totake my first sip two things occurred to me. 1) It was so hot I was going to burn the shit out of myself, and 2) pinkies up, yo!
Something they don’t teach you at tea academy is that if you’re using a big giant Bugs Bunny coffee mug as your fine china, it’s really heavy and you should be careful not to be too cavalier with your pinky erection lest you spill hot tea all over yourself when the mug slips from your grasp.
pinkies up, yo!
pinkies in the air…like you just don’t care
Okay, I don’t know what the tea pros say, but when tea is so scalding hot you can barely tolerate it in your mouth? It’s also too hot to taste. So I waited a while longer. Because to quote Ralph Wiggums, “It tasteslike burning.”
It, okay and don’t hate on me here, tasted like Lipton.
Now Ken suggested that if I drank coffee with cream and sugar, I might enjoy tea the same way. I suspect so, and for whatever reason it never even occurred to me to add cream to tea. But my next attempt will be to add alittle and see if I like it better. The short answer to the question of ”isEnglish Breakfast a better choice than crappy ol’ Lipton?” may, unfortunately, have to be “no”. At least at this early tea age, I’m not really tasting any difference.
Jim pretending to enjoy his tea goodness
11 comments

add tea preparation to her feminine wiles


2012
01.02

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Posted in femininity, function, masculinity, tea ceremony, to the leaf-side | 11 Comments »

she can make me tea anytime she likes



Xavier showed up the other day with a book in tow. He asked, ‘How good is your French?’ and in retrospect, I suppose it’s not as good as the impression I gave him it was. Although I understood most of what I was reading, my translation is questionable enough that I had to double check it with him.


The book is Le thé dans l’encrier, which is nicely displayed here: Grillon du foyer. And immediately I was drawn to an essay about Honoré de Balzac and the seduction of tea. It talks specifically about one of his later books La Cousine Bette and what sort of tea drinker Balzac was in reality. 


The essay starts with a Chinese proverb which has been translated from the original Chinese to French to German and finally to English, but here it is:

‘You can forgive a murder, but never a mistake while preparing tea.’



And the author (Gilles Brochard) discusses two sorts of people when it comes to tea drinking. Again with my pigeon translation: 

‘I want to give them the opportunity to express themselves. We shouldn’t confuse those who can or will be entirely seduced by tea for the entirety of their life and then those who alternate between both coffee and tea. I believe that Balzac was in the second category.’



This is a curious topic on which I find tea drinkers go back and forth. Some of us are even a bit hesitant admit that they even drink coffee. Some tea drinkers have never had coffee or when they have they simply didn’t enjoy it.


Why is this even a topic, right? If you like drinking both coffee and tea, why should you have to somehow hide it? Not with me you don’t. There’s been some enjoyable joking in my circle of acquaintances about how drinkers of the bean and the those drinking of the leaf can live in some sort of harmony. From my perspective, I certainly cannot see why we can’t.


Even more interesting was the Cousine Bette translation that I found online. I’ve gone on at length about how men shouldn’t feel ashamed drinking tea in masculine tea drinking. This masculinity of drinking tea continues to attract not only the most readers but also the most comments on this and other teablogs. Even with the assumptions and stereotypes of women and tea drinking, I was intrigued by how Balzac handled the topic.


‘Just then, Valérie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a mark of attention; it was a special favour. There is a whole language in the way a woman performs that office, and women are well aware of this. And so it is interesting to study their movements, their gestures, their looks, and the pitch and intonation of their voices, when they perform this apparently simple act of courtesy.      

From the question, ‘Do you drink tea?’ ‘Would you like some tea?’ ‘A cup of tea?’ asked coldly, and the order to the nymph presiding over the tea-urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, and offering it submissively to her heart’s pasha, in a caressing voice and with a look full of voluptuous promise…’

(source & more about Cousine Bette at Google Livres)


Not only that she asks ‘Do you drink tea?’, but it’s the manner in which she asks it. She may add tea preparation to her list of feminine wiles. I looked up the definition of wiles to make certain that it doesn’t always have a negative/sinister connotation. It doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to.


Is the entire question of the femininity of tea drinking or tea serving completely outdated? Am I going to get a lot of feminist blowback for even asking if a discussion can be made of this?


If we were talking about the book itself, the theme of tea drinking would hardly come up in discussing Cousine Bette. It’s a bit of a stretch for me to even write an entire blogpost about it. This text is a blend of a morality tale full of vice and salaciousness and a study of mid-19th century Paris society and culture.


Having already excused myself for stretching this into a theme, is there such a thing as feminine tea drinking? Is it even worth mentioning?

 

4 comments

1st annual Tea Trade gathering


2011
08.07

Posted in Alishan Zhu Lu Oolong, Assam Mangalam, Darjeeling Singell, Flugtee, Gu Zhang Mao Jian, Jackie, Nilgiri, Nilgiri Thiashola 'Carrington', Peter, Robert Godden, Snowview Darjeeling, to the leaf-side, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Although we’d met separately over the weekend, the whole gang finally got together on Sunday afternoon and we went through a nice selection of tea. There was a wonderful surprise organised by Robert, and he wrote about it over at It’s a mad, mad world…

The other not necessarily tea-related surprise was that I invited my bass player friend Jarrod, about whom I’ve written here periodically, and we started the afternoon out by playing some of my tunes and some lesser-known covers. It hadn’t been announced, and the music was well received.

Jarrod was interrogated at the beginning of the festivities about whether he even drank tea, but I quickly assured everyone that he was one of the people I’d lured partially over to the leaf-side. Many of my tea-related experiments have first been tried on Jarrod before I’ve launched them on the general public. He seems no worse for wear.

Before anyone arrived, I’d brewed the Gu Zhang Mao Jian that I wrote about in yesterday’s post, as well as some Nilgiri Thiashola ‘Carrington’. Both got nice comments, but the Nilgiri especially seemed to impress. I wrote about it in tea choices for marauding teenagers or Zombie Apocalypse, but you have to read through to near the end of the blogpost to get to the part about the Nilgiri.

In addition to the strong black and earthy green, I wanted to have a decent Darjeeling to offer people as they arrived, so I chose a first flush from the Snowview Estate. Although it’s a tea from 2010, it’s still remarkably crisp and fresh.

But because the darker tea got such a good reception, I decided to make a strong but not too malty/bitter Assam. I’d written quite a bit about Assam Mangalam, so I decided now was my change to showcase it. If you look in the comments to my blogpost Waking up in Mangalam, you can see what interesting things Jackie found out about this estate and their distinctive clonal Assam. Here’s the best part:

From Steepster:
“The Mangalam tea estate is named after Kumar Mangalam Birla, once the son of the estate’s owners and now one of its managers. The estate is owned by Jayshree Tea & Industries, a large company that incorporated in 1945. Jayshree is heralded in the Orthodox world for its special clones that produce a big golden leaf tip, which no one is able to replicate, making Jayshree Assams easily identifiable.”

I couldn’t miss an oppurtunity to serve some Flugtee, so I brewed a pot of this year’s Singell Darjeeling first flush. From my perspective, this was probably the best tea served today and it certainly got the praise it deserved. One person who nearly always drinks any black tea with milk said that this was the first tea she’d had that was just fine all on its own. That alone made my day.


As good as the tea was to be, the quality of the cake was of extreme importance. Jackie made it clear that good cake was absolutely essential. From what I could tell, she was anything but disappointed.

As people started getting ready to leave I quickly started brewing multiple infusions of my nicest high mountain Oolong from Taiwan. It’s called Alishan Zhu Lu Oolong and it really was the perfect tea to wrap up an enjoyable afternoon. Even after six infusions, the taste was vibrant and blooming. No wonder many serious teabloggers spend so much time talking about high mountain Oolongs.

The weekend has been fantastic, and I can only hope we actually do another annual gathering. Maybe Adelaide next year? Or everyone make a pilgrimage to the Chicago Tea Gardens? I’m sure we can find a place centrally located.

Here’s yours truly, Jackie, Peter, Sheila, Sabine and Xavier. We were too busy drinking tea and listening to music to take a lot of photos, but there were a few.

1 Comment

guest blogposts


2011
07.26

Posted in guest blogposts, teablogs, to the leaf-side, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Over the next several weeks I’m going to have a few guest blogposts. I tried this last year with someone I successfully lured over to the leaf-side, and we’ll hear from her and how her tea tastes have changed over time.

That should be interesting. I think you’ll agree.

There’re also a few other people in the tea world I’d like to talk to and possibly interview here. There are German tea experts whose sites/teablogs I’m reading that have some ideas worth discussing. Maybe a different perspective than what you might get in your corner of the tea community.

So, you’ve been warned. If you come here and there’s a voice/author you didn’t expect to find here, it’s an attempt to spice things up a bit. Enjoy.