Tea Adventures

[forestofglory]

So one result of my recent enjoyment of Chinese dramas is that I've been learning about and tasting more tea.

It started when I was working on my Guardian Food and Drink Project. Someone commented on one of my posts about it with a link to this the Tea House Ghost Youtube Chanel and I enjoyed those videos very much! But for a while that was all. Fancy tea is intimidating, its expensive and it seemed like you need a lot of special equipment.

However earlier this year I decided that rather than being sensible and finding some good surveys of Chinese history I was going to dive into the deep end with some very focused academic history books. And the first thing I read was Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn. Which I really adored.

So that got me to take a few more steps. I order a tea filter and a few samples of different Chinese style teas. The tea filter is just a mess basket that sits in my tea mug, and you put the leaves in there while the tea is brewing. I also started actually timing how long my tea brews for, which isn't as complicated as I thought. I can use the clock on my phone.

So the tea samples where very enjoyable, and I wrote a fic featuring a lot of tea, and read another book about the history of tea in China (The Rise of Tea Culture in China by Bret Hinsch) so I decided to order more tea. After asking around I ordered form TeaVivre I still wasn't sure what I liked so I ordered a bunch of sample packs and also some things that where on sale. It's been great to have lots of try.

So far I've learned that I really like pu-erh, and don't like oolong. (I sent the extra oolong to a good home). Not only is the pu-erh delicious but its relatively low fuss. I got a bunch of mini tuochas or tiny cakes of pressed tea so its all pre-measured. Unlike some of the other teas I have it brews with boiling water so I don't have to fussy with trying to cool the water down. Also it can be brewed many, many times!

With green teas I'm still figuring out what I like. I've enjoyed the dragon well tea I have now and the sample of Bi Luo Chun was very tasty too. The fact that I don't have precise control of the water temperature is making trying the green teas a bit more difficult. I have fancy kettle that does variable temperatures on my wish list, I'm hoping some one will give it to me for my birthday if not I will buy it for myself.

Tea is great! It has been lovely to learn more about the history of tea and also taste a lot of different teas. It is a bit complicated to do loose leaf tea, but its simpler than I thought. Do you have favorite teas? I'd love to hear about them!

Comments

[brigdh]

(Sorry for the late reply!)

Tea! I have so many thoughts on tea. :D I also love pu'erhs – they're so forgivable, as you say! Forget about them until they're way oversteeped, water too hot or too cold, resteep them a hundred times – they'll still be great no matter what you do to them. Have you come across the pu'erh stored in a tangerine peel, like this? TBH, I never notice much of a taste difference, but the mini citrus is so adorable to me that I can never help buying these when I come across them in stores.

I appreciate your dislike for oolongs, but I would still recommend that you give milk oolong a try, if you happen to come across any. It's got such a wonderful creamy flavor, you'd never know it doesn't actually contain milk! And if you've never tried lapsang souchong, it's worth doing at least once, though it's the sort of tea that divides people into love-it-or-hate-it camps. It's smoked, and has a strong smoky flavor (my girlfriend calls it 'bacon tea', since the whole house smells like bacon whenever I brew it). A high-quality Darjeeling is also really worth giving a try, though it can be hard to be sure you're actually getting what is advertised (4x as much fake "Darjeeling" is sold than authentic Darjeeling worldwide; a good tip to probably get the real stuff is that it should be labeled with what specific garden and flush it came from).

Green tea was my first love! I only recently started branching out into blacks and oolongs and pu'erhs. I adore matcha, even if you don't have all the proper equipment, and genmaicha is a fun easier tea (it's plain sencha plus roasted rice; my continually helpful girlfriend calls it 'popcorn tea' for the scent).

I love your book recs, too! I read The Rise of Tea Culture in China myself recently and found it amazing. Do you mind if I give you a few more recs? The Opium Wars are as much about tea as opium, and are incredibly fascinating/horrifying. A History of Tea: The Life and Times of the World’s Favorite Beverage by Laura C Martin (the same book has also been published under the name Tea: The Drink that Changed the World, idk why two titles) is a really good global overview that has great coverage of the Opium Wars. Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire by Roy Moxham is another good book about them, and also has a lot about the British labor system on tea plantations in Sri Lanka, which led almost directly to the recent civil war there. Tea: A Global History by Helen Saberi is a good, short book that covers approximately a million topics; it's not specifically relevant to Guardian, but I found it very interesting. And my favorite rec is For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose, a very readable pop history about how the East India Company sent a spy into China to steal the knowledge of how to grow tea.

[forestofglory]

Everyone has been telling me to try oolongs again so I'm planning to do so!

Thanks for all the book recs!