![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelAll right. Since everyone else is talking about tea...
I love tea. I've been into it since my senior year of high school or thereabouts, before green tea and white tea became trendy antioxidant additives to everything. I've had literally hundreds of tea varieties pass in and out of my kitchen, and at present I have several dozen tea types on handing, ranging from staples like Yunnan and Assam to rare and delicate things like "White Egret Pearls" and Himalayan Hand-rolled Black.
I know my tea. I can often tell the origin by tasting it. Yes, you can tell Chinese Black from Indian Black, or Chinese Green from Japanese Green, by taste alone. In some cases it's quite easy.
Let's get one thing straight, though-- tea, real tea, is the leaf of the Camellia sinensis plant. That's it. No chamomile, or rooibos, or stevia, or any of that shit. They may have their uses, but it's not tea. Celestial Seasonings? Either not-tea, or minuscule quantities of tea covered by orange peel and hibiscus and licorice root. Again, drink it if you really like that, but it's not really tea. Would you call a drink "coffee" if it consisted of things swept up from Juan Valdez's burro stable mixed with roasted carrot root and Hershey's syrup? Really?
There are four main types of tea:
Black tea, called "hong cha" or "red tea" by the Chinese. The leaves are oxidized and the caffeine levels are higher (but nowhere close to coffee). Use boiling water to steep it. It usually lasts a couple of years on the shelf. Types of black tea range from the beautiful full-leaf Chinese varieties (get Panyong Needles some time) to the various grades of Indian tea, which need a secret decoder ring to comprehend, to the amazing Georgian Guria, which you can steep for about ten minutes without its going bitter. And then there's the CTC tea, which looks like spoiled Grape Nuts and seriously needs milk and sugar to be drinkable. I am not a fan of milk and sugar in my tea unless it's mediocre-to-crappy tea.
Oolong tea, which is partially oxidized. Oolong tea can range from pretty strong, like Ti Kuan Yin, to exceptionally delicate and flowery. Most oolongs are from China orTaiwan Formosa, but there are some nice Indian oolongs out there too. Don't use boiling water, and you can re-brew the same leaves 3-4 times in one session.
Green tea, which is not oxidized. Less caffeine, more antioxidants, blah blah. And it tastes good, though again every tea-growing region has distinctive qualities. Japanese and Chinese green teas taste quite different (compare Gyokuro to Pi Lo Chun sometime, or Matcha to Gunpowder Green), and there are some Indian greens out there on the market. Again, use water that's short of boiling and you can re-brew the leaves a few times in a row. After a year or so, it starts to go brown, so use it quickly.
White tea, the least processed and most delicate of the lot. I'll be blunt-- any sort of heavy flavoring in white tea (anything stronger than jasmine or chrysanthemum, IMO) is a waste. Either you're paying top dollar for tea whose flavor has been ruined by persimmon or pomegranate or bloody acai berry flavor, or you're buying extremely crappy tea with flavor slopped on it. If you like it, that's fine, but you're being ripped off. It's like ordering a glass of Dom Perignon and spiking it with Captain Morgan, OK? Or ordering Two-Buck Chuck flavored with Captain Morgan and being charged Dom Perignon prices. To each his own, I guess.
Your first taste of a genuine white tea will probably be like sipping warm, vaguely floral water. It takes a while to appreciate this stuff. It's subtle. It grows on you. Be nice to it. And keep the goddamned pomegranates away. I love pomegranates, but not in white tea.
Then there's the fifth horseman of the Teapocalypse, pu-erh. This is SRS BZNS tea and one of the more wonderful innovations of mankind, up there with ice wine and distilled spirits. It's dark-- the true "black tea"-- and the taste is a little... well, I guess these are to teas what cave-stored Roqueforts are to cheeses. Seriously wonderful stuff, especially after a heavy meal.
And yes, there are flavored teas and scented teas and blended teas and even some atrocities that combine tea with chocolate, but the basic infusion of Camellia sinensis leaves in hot water is a wonderful thing all on its own. Hold the milk, sugar, honey, and lemon and keep those acai berries and stevia leaves far, FAR away.
I love tea. I've been into it since my senior year of high school or thereabouts, before green tea and white tea became trendy antioxidant additives to everything. I've had literally hundreds of tea varieties pass in and out of my kitchen, and at present I have several dozen tea types on handing, ranging from staples like Yunnan and Assam to rare and delicate things like "White Egret Pearls" and Himalayan Hand-rolled Black.
I know my tea. I can often tell the origin by tasting it. Yes, you can tell Chinese Black from Indian Black, or Chinese Green from Japanese Green, by taste alone. In some cases it's quite easy.
Let's get one thing straight, though-- tea, real tea, is the leaf of the Camellia sinensis plant. That's it. No chamomile, or rooibos, or stevia, or any of that shit. They may have their uses, but it's not tea. Celestial Seasonings? Either not-tea, or minuscule quantities of tea covered by orange peel and hibiscus and licorice root. Again, drink it if you really like that, but it's not really tea. Would you call a drink "coffee" if it consisted of things swept up from Juan Valdez's burro stable mixed with roasted carrot root and Hershey's syrup? Really?
There are four main types of tea:
Black tea, called "hong cha" or "red tea" by the Chinese. The leaves are oxidized and the caffeine levels are higher (but nowhere close to coffee). Use boiling water to steep it. It usually lasts a couple of years on the shelf. Types of black tea range from the beautiful full-leaf Chinese varieties (get Panyong Needles some time) to the various grades of Indian tea, which need a secret decoder ring to comprehend, to the amazing Georgian Guria, which you can steep for about ten minutes without its going bitter. And then there's the CTC tea, which looks like spoiled Grape Nuts and seriously needs milk and sugar to be drinkable. I am not a fan of milk and sugar in my tea unless it's mediocre-to-crappy tea.
Oolong tea, which is partially oxidized. Oolong tea can range from pretty strong, like Ti Kuan Yin, to exceptionally delicate and flowery. Most oolongs are from China or
Green tea, which is not oxidized. Less caffeine, more antioxidants, blah blah. And it tastes good, though again every tea-growing region has distinctive qualities. Japanese and Chinese green teas taste quite different (compare Gyokuro to Pi Lo Chun sometime, or Matcha to Gunpowder Green), and there are some Indian greens out there on the market. Again, use water that's short of boiling and you can re-brew the leaves a few times in a row. After a year or so, it starts to go brown, so use it quickly.
White tea, the least processed and most delicate of the lot. I'll be blunt-- any sort of heavy flavoring in white tea (anything stronger than jasmine or chrysanthemum, IMO) is a waste. Either you're paying top dollar for tea whose flavor has been ruined by persimmon or pomegranate or bloody acai berry flavor, or you're buying extremely crappy tea with flavor slopped on it. If you like it, that's fine, but you're being ripped off. It's like ordering a glass of Dom Perignon and spiking it with Captain Morgan, OK? Or ordering Two-Buck Chuck flavored with Captain Morgan and being charged Dom Perignon prices. To each his own, I guess.
Your first taste of a genuine white tea will probably be like sipping warm, vaguely floral water. It takes a while to appreciate this stuff. It's subtle. It grows on you. Be nice to it. And keep the goddamned pomegranates away. I love pomegranates, but not in white tea.
Then there's the fifth horseman of the Teapocalypse, pu-erh. This is SRS BZNS tea and one of the more wonderful innovations of mankind, up there with ice wine and distilled spirits. It's dark-- the true "black tea"-- and the taste is a little... well, I guess these are to teas what cave-stored Roqueforts are to cheeses. Seriously wonderful stuff, especially after a heavy meal.
And yes, there are flavored teas and scented teas and blended teas and even some atrocities that combine tea with chocolate, but the basic infusion of Camellia sinensis leaves in hot water is a wonderful thing all on its own. Hold the milk, sugar, honey, and lemon and keep those acai berries and stevia leaves far, FAR away.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:37 am (UTC)blatant addictionlove for coffee.no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:36 am (UTC)But um, interesting post! I'm trying to get into a class on tea and coffee for my next semester, so we'll see how that goes. Hopefully I'll come out with a more refined taste... although that might not be so good for my wallet, hahah...
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:43 am (UTC)Though companies like Republic of Tea pretty much exist to rip you off. Their teas are good, the prices are not. You're paying for the canister with RoT on it. :/
I like chamomile tisane just fine. I just kind of twitch when I see all these things being lumped in as tea. It's like calling carob "chocolate."
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:18 am (UTC)I'm meh on Tazo. Awake and Lotus are good, but an outfit like Tazo is SO much about image and marketing.
Recommended online merchants:
http://www.tea-time.com/home.asp (I used to visit their tea house when I was in college)
http://www.theteahouse.com/ (Don't let the website fool you-- wonderful teas, good prices; he's my #1 supplier, even if ordering is a PITA)
http://www.stashtea.com/ (Their Yamamotoyama is one of the best lines of mass-market bagged tea that I've found)
http://www.adagio.com/ (I use this outfit less, but picked up some nice stuff over the years, and the user reviews make for fun reading)
http://www.tenren.com/ (Hardcore; I used to go to their shop in San Francisco, and the people there were very helpful once they realized we actually knew our stuff)
http://zhitea.foodzie.com/ (The hippie aspect is annoying, but it's very good tea; I went to their shop in Austin this year)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:40 am (UTC)ETA: I have a question, actually, as far as boiling the water is concerned--I boil water on the stove at home, but at school I just heat up the water in my coffee maker. Do you know what kind of affect that would have on the resulting tea? It's something I've been wondering about for a while.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:38 am (UTC)If your coffee-pot gets the water superheated, the tea will taste flat, and may even go unexpectedly bitter. Green, White, and Oolong teas definitely don't taste right if the water's too hot. The amount of air in the hot water also matters, so re-boiled water results in flat tasting tea.
Lipton can take it. If you're paying $10.00 for a couple of ounces, wait until you have a stove and a thermometer!
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:47 am (UTC)Also, do you know of any good tea shops in/around Detroit? I don't know of any closer to me.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 04:06 am (UTC)The scientist in me is fascinated by this idea. It's like why you need a bubbler thing in a fish tank, right? Would that be solved by vigorously stirring/whipping the water?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:42 am (UTC)Is there a term that should be used for the herbal tea-less stuff, though? "Hot herbal water drink". . .?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 02:45 am (UTC)Lipton is evil. Pure, unmitigated evil. I'll drink Red Rose, but Lipton just sucks.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:19 am (UTC)Also, I'm trying to learn about tea myself, and I will continue to post about it, so I hope it doesn't offend you if I continue to call the herbal things "tea." Everything in my collection does seem to contain actual tea leaves as the first ingredient (excepting, you know, the chai), so it has to be there SOMEWHERE, even if it's horrible quality and it's been processed over 9,000 times before it gets into my cup.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:27 am (UTC)It's not offensive so much as it just isn't correct. Tea is tea. Other things are not tea, the way that chicory isn't coffee and carob isn't chocolate. It's great that you're so enthusiastic about it (you remind me of myself when I was just getting into tea, to be honest), but as with any passion, the terminology matters. You don't let newbie fencers get away with calling an epee a foil, do you? To the rest of the world, it may be an arcane distinction, but in your world, it matters.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 06:23 am (UTC)WHO NAMES THESE THINGS ANYWAY.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 11:29 am (UTC)I call it rooibos.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:40 am (UTC)Those have their place (I used to be partial to a particular brand of cherry vanilla tea). I like flavored teas; it's when really expensive teas are heavily flavored, or heavily flavored teas are marketed as very expensive teas, that I get annoyed.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 04:04 am (UTC)Anyway, despite hailing from the nation that may have been the motherland of tea (I seriously have no clue and no interest in whether it really was, just an impression), I have no appreciation for tea. But I do know that we have fancy authentic tea brought over from China, and my mother loves giving it away as presents to people who are roundly impressed.
Maybe I could take pictures of it sometime.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 12:20 pm (UTC)As far as I can tell, yes. The tree is native to China and Southeast Asia. I have some "wild-grown" tea from Vietnam, even.
Maybe I could take pictures of it sometime.
Sure! I love the way it's packaged, in the enameled boxes and red tissue.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 05:24 am (UTC)So: which green do you prefer? After exposure to various green teas, I find I still like Japanese Gyokuro best - but it's also the one that I started with, and I have not tried Pi Lo Chun. I think I would like to.
I'm not nearly as experienced with tea as you are. It's a goal to attain, I suppose?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 11:37 am (UTC)Coffee + Chocolate = YES
Coffee + Tea = NO
Chocolate + Tea = NO
So: which green do you prefer?
Out of them all, I probably drink Gunpowder the most. I also like the adulterated greens-- kukicha and genmaicha. I will say that Pi Lo Chun is a pretty amazing tea, though; I've kept mine too long and it's not so good any more. I was very keen on Huang Shan Mao Feng for a while, too.
TEA WILL CONQUER ALL. At least it should once the nasty fruit flavors are banished.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 07:05 am (UTC)I like flavored and unflavored teas, as well as herbal teas/tisanes, all pretty much equally though! My very favorite kind of tea is jasmine pearl, which of course is flavored. I do agree that anything heavier than florals in white tea is kind of gross (I kept trying flavors that sound good in theory for a very long time, only to be disappointed every one). I actually prefer jasmine or lavender white tea to plain though. It's just a bit too delicate for me on its own, I think. But then I tend toward bold flavors in general. I've never really been able to get into pu-erh either. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, or if it's just the varieties I've tried or what, but it always comes off with a weird aftertaste to me. *shrug*
I couldn't help but notice your tea website list too. I looooove Ten Ren. I used to go to their store in Chinatown all the time when I was in grad school. They have some of the best oolongs I've ever had - their green oolong is amaaaaaaazing. Even the second grade - the first grade was always a bit pricy for a grad school budget, even for just a few ounces. :-P I'll have to try some of the ones I don't know well. I also recommend English Tea Store (http://www.englishteastore.com/) (they have wonderful prices and service, and are also awesome in my book because they sell random British stuff) and Serendipitea (http://www.serendipitea.com/Shop.aspx) (I've never ordered from them online, but a local store carries their teas and all but one have been wonderful - I think they have my favorite variety of masala chai, if you're into that).
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 12:18 pm (UTC)Yep. That's the way to do it. My sympathies on the pre-bagged tea, too. "Oh, tea in a... box. In little sachets. You shouldn't have."
It's just a bit too delicate for me on its own, I think
The best white tea I've ever had was scented with chrysanthemums. It had the white tea sweetness with a lovely spicy-smokiness from the flowers. And it was beautiful to watch the flowers unfurl and float upward, too.
One of the worst white teas I ever tasted had honeysuckle in it. It sounded so promising, and it was just gross.
But then I tend toward bold flavors in general.
All my "comfort" teas are big and bold-- genmaicha, Gunpowder, Yunnan, kukicha, and the big daddy of them all, Lapsang Souchong. As for pu-erh... I just love it. My favorite version of that has chrysanthemums pressed into the little "bird's nest," and it brewed up beautifully sweet and mellow. We drank that on special occasions until we ran out.
I can see why it might be off-putting, though-- and bad pu-erh is BAD beyond a doubt.
Thanks for the recs! I love TenRen's pouchong tea, too.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 11:07 pm (UTC)A lot of my favorite teas are the same way. Jasmine pearl is a bit of an exception, I suppose. :-P Lapsang souchong is one of my favorites too. I know it's usually a love it or hate it thing (my ex used to say it tasted like an ashtray, haha), but I really adore it, either alone or with a bit of lemon. So good.
I've actually never been able to have genmaicha because I have a severe rice allergy, but the others are all pretty great too. Yunnan is my favorite of the remaining ones you mentioned. I've been thinking about splurging a bit and trying some golden bud yunnan, in fact. :D
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 07:22 am (UTC)I can barely tell the box teas in our cupboard apart...
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 06:59 pm (UTC)I am actually not really a hot tea kind of person--the only "hot" tea I enjoy is green tea (I've only had Japanese green tea btw). I rather enjoy iced (real iced tea) instead. Iced tea mix is okay, but I prefer the good old "tea bags in ice water with a slice of lemon and no sugar" iced tea. Om nom nom.
But if I had to choose between coffee and tea, I would choose coffee. >.>
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 02:25 pm (UTC)I used to love coffee and went off it in the last ten years; not sure why.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 05:06 pm (UTC)The part I like about actual iced tea is that the lemon adds that nice hint of flavour and it also adds a little bit of natural sugar. Also you can squeeze the lemon or have it steep there or...
I once had unsweetened tea with lime instead of lemon. Was actually really good if you want flavour, but not so much punch like lemon can give off...
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 03:49 am (UTC)I remember growing up, a lot of people in my community considered tea to be a matter of cultural importance. As in, teachers would actually set aside one class session to give a presentation on tea and make sure we second-gen kids at least understood the difference between "red" and green teas and knew where it came from, lol. Most of the terminology didn't stick though (it was relatively advanced vocab, all things considered), and hilariously, I don't think many first gen folks knew much more about tea than that anyway. And then there's barley tea, which is also really popular albeit not real "tea", though it's still called tea in Mandarin at least... needless to say it was all a pretty jumbled boring mess.
(That said, it's probably because I've always known what good tea is "supposed" to taste like that I've never been fond of iced teas and sweetened teas... though I must confess to a weakness for milk tea. And green tea ice cream. :P)
ANYWAY. The older I got, the more I was able to actually appreciate all that and the more I started to take any real interest in it. So.... *takes notes* XD
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 02:27 pm (UTC)Most of the terminology didn't stick though (it was relatively advanced vocab, all things considered), and hilariously, I don't think many first gen folks knew much more about tea than that anyway
This winter I came across a magazine devoted entirely to pu-erh. Seven experts judged some different brands of historic pu-erh. It was funnier than reading wine reviews, as they contradicted one another left, right, and center... and the way they described the teas they all sounded vile.
Maybe I'll write about tea/food pairings next.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 05:11 pm (UTC)/approves