Tea Writings

My obsession with soy milk green tea lattes started early this summer. On Sundays when my S.O. was off at jujitsu and errands and such, if I didn’t have to go somewhere else myself, I would often go to our local, independently owned coffee shop to get some writing done.

The shop is called Simon’s, and as I understand it has become one of the respected coffee shrines in the area for those who worship the trade of the barista. (The baristas have been in competitions and such.) They also have a light menu of soups and muffins, and of course they offer tea of various excellent kinds, served in the pot.

Of course, when it’s hot outside, a hot pot of tea might not be what I’m looking for. But I still want my hit of tea. And all too often iced tea, if not done right, is a waste of good tea anyway. So one afternoon I was staring at their chalkboard menu and it dawned on me, oh, green tea latte. That sounds kind of good.

But with summer come my seasonal allergies, and milk or dairy products pumps up my mucous production. So I asked. Can the green tea latte be made… with soy milk? Of course! replied the cheerful barista. And… can it be iced! Surely!

And a new obsession was born.
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I’ve written a lot about things like rose tea (with more to come), and I’m about to write about chocolate tea soon (still tasting), but today I thought I would turn my attention to the recent teas I’ve been brewing that “taste like tea.”

In the American sense, tea is black “orange pekoe”, usually Lipton. I had a horrifying (or perhaps edifying) experience last month. I was helping to run a conference at a fancy hotel, and in our staff room we had continuous catered coffee and tea service. The tea service was not terrific. This hotel, which used to serve a very fancy brand of tea (I can’t remember the name but the tea “bags” came as stand alone pyramids with little leaves at the top), had switched to Tazo for all their flavored teas and, yes, Lipton for their regular black tea & decaf. Yes, it’s the economy.
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In my seeming never-ending search for a tea I liked as much as the lychee green they brew and sell at the famous tea house in the lake in Shanghai, which I visited in April 2007, when I was in San Francisco last summer I picked up some “lychee blossom” at the Imperial Tea Court (Ferry Bldg. location).

Here’s Imperial Tea Court’s description: A new addition to our flower tea collection, this beauty features a red lychee flower waiting to blossom inside a surrounding flower of green tea. Subtly scented with jasmine and flavored with lychee fruit, this stunning tea will display beautifully in a glass teapot.

It took me a while to get around to brewing this tea because I didn’t have a glass pot and kept not getting around to buying one, and beautiful flowering teas are maximally enjoyed when one can see them. But then I received one for Christmas! The other thing is I usually like to brew a flowering tea when I have a friend over for tea so we can both enjoy the sight, but I’ve been so busy lately I finally decided to just try it for myself.

I’ve had flowering teas before of various kinds and so I decided this time to photograph the process. What follows are the photos of the tea opening:

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The time has come for me to either restock the Ten Ren black rose tea I’ve just run out of, or to replace it with something else.

Being an adventurous sort (not to mention a tea blogger…) I’m open to trying some other brands, flavors, and formulations of rose, but a quick look over just my favorite sites, much less the plethora of rose teas reviewed at Steepster (up to 532 from just 519 teas yesterday!!), reveals more choice than my currently overtaxed brain can handle.

So I solicit your suggestions, here, on Steepster, on Twitter, Facebook, and wherever else you may cross my path.

Ten Ren Black Rose Tea: So, the tea I am now out of is sold from huge canisters at the Ten Ren shops all around the world. I bought this batch at the shop in Chinatown NYC and had no idea it was going to become one of my “staple” teas — i.e. a tea I brew at least once a week. (I typically brew 2-3 varieties per day, every day.) As I mention in my tasting note on this tea on Steepster, “This is a reliably delicious tea that holds up to at least 4 steepings, still giving beautiful color and excellent flavor, though milder by the 3rd and 4th time through. It doesn’t hit you over the head with the rose too much, doesn’t muck it up with any other flavors.”

The first thing, of course, is that the black tea itself must be of good quality. Crummy tea hidden by a shot of rose oil is not what I’m looking for, obviously, but I am a big believer in the fact that the most expensive tea isn’t necessarily the best. (more…)

All of a sudden strawberry black tea has leapt into my life. They say things come in threes, and three different black teas with strawberry have all come along at once.

The first was on Christmas day, at the house of some friends, where we do the annual gift-exchanging and stocking unstuffing. One member of the household there has a truly prodigious variety of teas, probably 100-200 if I had to guess just from looking at the shelves that are visible. (There may well be more stashed away out of sight.) I picked a tea more or less at random and ended up with a black tea from South America that had strawberry in it. I had never had a tea from South America, so was curious about that, but most of what I tasted was the strawberry. Given that we were eating Christmas candy and the like, a sweet-tasting tea blended with it perfectly well. I didn’t write down the name or the seller of the tea, unfortunately. Little did I know that two more strawberry teas were about to land in my lap within the next few days.

Then I traveled on the 26th to Florida to see my parents for the holidays. This meant a layover of a few hours at the new JetBlue terminal at JFK airport in New York, which has espresso bars in the gate waiting areas. At one point I was feeling chilly and inquired whether they served tea. The young barista showed me their selection, which was of a brand name I didn’t recognize (Dammann) but which I gathered was the tea brand carried by Illy coffee affiliates. There were a few of the usual suspects (earl grey, chai, etc…) but she urged me to try the “strawberry tea (more…)

Our next stop on our San Francisco tea excursion was the Aroma Tea Shop, a place I’ve ordered from many times on the web but never visited.

If you have seen their web site you will have seen a posed photo of Haymen Da Luz and his wife Ying Wi, described there as “the young and sexy owners of Aroma Tea Shop.” In the photo they are both wearing traditional garb, Haymen is holding a bamboo bird cage, Ying Wi a teapot that matches her chongsam. Midori, who had met them before at their Richmond area store, however, described them to me as “like two characters straight out of anime.” (more…)

Tazo Tea has been stalking me.

Okay, not really, but it seems like everywhere I have been in San Francisco OTHER THAN the fancy tea shop tour I took yesterday with a friend (posts on that still to come), it has been TAZO TAZO TAZO.

It started when I suddenly realized the day after I arrived that I had not, in fact, remembered to pack my travel stash of tea. So I began my re-caffeination the day of the convention with a stop into a ubiquitous Starbucks where I availed myself of the “China Green Tips” tea. At SBs they put two tea bags in the large cup (whatever the **** they call it). I let them steep for maybe a minute, maybe 90 seconds before I pulled them out, and the resulting brew was pleasingly grassy and sweet.

I went back to Starbucks for this same tea several times over during the convention, although “back” is perhaps a relative term, since I never found that exact Starbucks again, but kept ending up at other ones that I thought were it, but weren’t. (All were within 2-3 blocks of the hotel.) Interestingly, none were as good as that very first cup, making me wonder if I had found that same location if they would have been, or if it was some other factor.

Meanwhile, the hotel itself also stocked Tazo, and at the various buffet meals we took part in I helped myself to more. I’ve had Tazo in these kinds of hospitality situations before. Earl Grey, Wild Orange, etc. It’s often the hotel brand one gets with room service, too. But I had never seen the “Green Tips” before and still think it’s the best.

Now I am in the Oakland Airport. My flight is delayed, but at least there is free wireless and a Starbucks with plentiful power outlets. I’m drinking Green Ginger right now and I’m wishing I had gotten the Green Tips instead. It’s not bad, but it’s not a tea drinker’s tea, really. I had to sugar it to make it really palatable, and now it’s pleasing, but a bit like drinking candied ginger. Yummy, but not tea.

Or maybe anything would just seem blah compared to the tea I drank yesterday. Next post I’ll start trying to go through the teas and the tea tour I went on yesterday. A friend from the Bay Area and I hit four different tea shops (and dim sum) in the course of the day, tasting and smelling lots and lots of very fine, wonderful teas. More on that when I get back home!

Today I visited the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, especially to see the”Lords of the Samurai” exhibit.

It should shock no one reading this that the Japanese ruling class of 1100-1868 were very into tea. They were strongly influenced by China, and many noble families collected tea implements (bowls, scoops, etc…) from Viet Nam, Korea, and other “exotic” places, and kept them as prized family heirlooms. One bowl in the exhibit had been cracked and fixed up with gold. Many of the individual implements were given poetic names like “Queen of the West.”

You may be familiar with the term “raku” to refer to a kind of pottery. The name originates from a family of ceramicists, and one person in particular, Raku Chojiro, who popularized a style of rustic individual pieces, each being completely unique and more naturalistic than the prim, painted ceramics from China. They have a bowl in the exhibit which Raku Chojiro made himself! (Pictures and more details here. They also have the original scrolls of the Book of Five Rings as copied by Miyamoto Musashi’s apprentice. For a martial artist like me, that’s a bit like seeing the Gospel actually written in some Disciple’s hand.)

Some of these prized tea things were so highly valued that the high ranking families had paintings made of them.

I ended up buying some sencha in the museum store after looking at the exhibits. I bought “Sa” brand sencha, which has various “award winning” claims on the box and a fru-fru marketing blurb, like most fancy teas seem to have these days.

The sencha is good. I’m on the second steeping on this chill and foggy San Francisco evening. The tea has that grassy flavor, a hint of that rubbery side coming out that is so common in sencha and dragonwell, but not in a detrimental way. I don’t think I dare go for a third steep, though. It will likely turn bitter before reaching a reasonable level of flavor.

Speaking of bitter, throughout the convention I was attending all weekend, I made a trip pretty much every day to Starbucks, where I purchased the Tazo “China Green Tips” every day. The first day it tasted quite sweet to me, but each successive day it seemed to be getting more and more bitter, even when I definitely did not oversteep it. I finally figured out today that everything tastes a bit bitter to me right now, even chocolate malted milk balls. Weird, no? I’m not sure if it’s my allergies acting weird, or my brain being out of whack, or what. The first day, I found I quite liked the China Green Tips and I will definitely try that one again sometime when my taste buds and/or brain have gotten over this bitter phase.

I am still working my way through all the samples I got from Holy Mountain, and this one I have had to brew five or six times before I was ready to write about it. They call it “Honey Lemon Sunburst Green Tea” and describe it as: “A traditional favorite combination of flavors brightened with a burst of sunflower petals.”

This skimpy description does not really prepare you for the unique sweetness of this tea. “Bee pollen?” is what a friend of mine quizzically asked when I served it to her.

“Maybe?” I replied. What gives it the honey flavor when there doesn’t appear to be any actual honey in or on the tea leaves? Where does the lemon flavor come from, for that matter?

Holy Mountain lists is among the “scented green teas” and clearly it’s more to do with the scent than an actual flavor, but it’s a mystery to me how it’s done.

Interestingly, I’ve been wanting this tea a lot on the days when my pollen allergies are the worst. Is that backwards? Something that tastes infused with bee pollen? Or maybe I’ve just been trained to think of the combination of honey and lemon as good for sore throats and congestion? But this tastes nothing like a Luden’s Honey Lemon cough drop–it doesn’t even taste like a traditional cup of Lipton with honey and lemon. It tastes spring-like and fresh, and every sip is invigorating. Who knows, maybe it actual helps my allergies somehow, though perhaps just the result of drinking something hot on my clogged sinuses and swollen eyes.

This tea is a mystery, a sweet mystery, and will apparently have to stay that way.

Ahhh, this is Da Stuff.

I’ve been drinking a lot of enjoyable teas lately. Despite the fact that it’s mid-June and the longest day of the year is nigh, it’s been downright chilly in New England. With the temps in the low 60s every day and in the 50s (or even 40s again like it was last night) at night, it’s perfect tea-drinking weather. A warm pot sits on my desk throughout the day and evening hours while I work.

Having just ordered a slew of sample teas from various places, I’ve been brewing lots of things that are quite tasty, but I’ve been refraining from writing about them until I’ve tried them each four or five times. I used to review music back in another life, and I learned that I didn’t really know what I thought of an album until I’d heard it through five times. I figure tea might be the same.

Except today I brewed a pot of “Oolong Choice.” (more…)