Tea Writings

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 Read the rest of this entry →

When I was eleven years old, my family took a month-long trip to the Philippines to visit our many relatives there on my father’s side of the family. One of the revelations of that trip was how incredibly good the fruit was there. At the Silahis Hotel in Manila my father ordered a half of a papaya for breakfast one day, and it was easily the size of a large watermelon, longer than his forearm! (For my part, I discovered the hot rice, ginger, and chicken porridge known as arroz caldo, traditionally served for breakfast, and insisted on having it every day.)

Better even than the papaya was the mango. After spending some time in Manila, we traveled to Cebu City (on the island of Cebu) and in ‘the provinces’ could buy perfectly ripe, huge yellow mangoes every day in the market. We ate them every day for breakfast or for ’siesta’–the light afternoon meal or snack that came right before naptime. My mother loved them so much that after we came home, one day we were walking down the street in midtown Manhattan when we were stopped by a TV news crew polling people about what they thought the sexiest food was. Nearly everyone else said pizza, but my mother immediately said the mango. They aired her comment and we were all thrilled to see her on TV!

By now you are wondering what this has to do with tea, since this is a tea blog. I’m getting to that. Let it steep. I promise I’ll eventually make some point about food and drink being a cultural connection between people and their families and society at large. Or something. Read the rest of this entry →

You meet all sorts of people on the Internet. Having a tea blog is a little like running an online tea shop. People stop by from all over, and sometimes you get into interesting conversations with them.

One recent visitor to TeaWritings was Jason Witt, the author of the recently published book Spirituality of Tea. Right now the Kindle edition of the book is only a dollar, so I bought it. Jason is something of a tea monk. He eats a low-calorie diet, doesn’t drink or do drugs, doesn’t own a car or house and tries not to clutter up his life with possessions, and finds his ecstatic pleasure in tea and communing with God daily through tea. He doesn’t live on a mountaintop in Tibet, though, but in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jason’s book reminded me in some ways of the books of Earl Grollman, who although he is a rabbi, focuses his books on a wider audience through the belief that all human beings, not just those of a particular religious sect, could benefit from his message. Grollman’s subject is grief and bereavement, and he writes in a very direct and almost simplified manner, soothingly repeating the messages distraught survivors need to hear. Jason’s subject is overcoming the stresses of modern life and the get-ahead mentality that distances us from our true needs, both physical and spiritual. Like Grollman, he invokes God and Heaven without specifying a specific church or doctrine and sends a powerful, direct message about the peace and happiness one can find.

Despite rampant commercialism and battles over its meaning, the holiday season still means something spiritual to me, making now a good time to talk with Jason about God, tea, religion, and other such subjects. I chatted with Jason, of course, through the Internet.

CT: The basic message of your book is that people can find God within themselves through drinking tea. Can I ask which one you came to first, God or tea? Read the rest of this entry →

My favorite tea pot broke the other day. It was a white china pot, with a blue fish on the side. I was attempting to scrub it out by hand after it had gone through the top rack of the dishwasher. It slipped out of my wet hands and smashed in the sink. When I say smashed I mean the spout broke into about 12 pieces plus many slivers of smashage as small as grains of sand. In other words, it shattered a lot like glass, and the slivers were even sharp enough to cut, as my thumb discovered shortly thereafter. It’s not reparable. (The teapot, that is–my thumb turned out fine.)

This pot was bought in Chinatown for four dollars about 12-13 years ago, and over the past five years or so has been used pretty much every day. One impressive thing about the inside of the spout where it couldn’t be scrubbed–which I can see now that it’s smashed–is the coating of tea residue. Pitch black and the texture of sandpaper. Wow. Read the rest of this entry →

Our final stop of the day would be the Samovar Tea Lounge. Samovar is tea at its hippest, while at the same time reaching back into the cross-cultural history and roots of tea and the tradition of the tea house as a hang-out.

On previous trips to San Francisco I had been to their location on the border of the Mission and the Castro to meet up with business colleagues. Tea is far superior to meet over than lunch, because you don’t get overstuffed, and you are intended to linger over tea. Tea allows you to set the pace of the meal and conversation, rather than being lock-stepped through courses and perhaps hurried out the door. You have nibbles, you have steeping and re-steeping, and you have the weight of thousands of years of civilized conversation behind you.

Tea and writing go together as cornerstones of Sinified Asian culture, and perhaps that is where philosophy comes in.
Read the rest of this entry →

Next Midori took me to a place I never would have found on my own, the Lupicia tea store inside the San Francisco Centre, despite the fact it was a mere two blocks from the hotel I’d been in the week before for a conference. San Francisco Centre is a shopping mall. I’m not a big fan of malls. Having spent my teenage years in suburban New Jersey, the mall is a place that I associate with being trapped in a place where shopping to increase one’s social status is the only pastime. This is why I don’t live in the suburbs now.

The Lupicia store, from the outside, looks like a fancy cosmetics store. Everything is lit with the tiny bright jewels of track lights, some things in neat shelves, others in baskets… Seriously, it could have been bath soaps and skin care products they were retailing, like an AVEDA store.

However, it smelled far better than any cosmetics store I have ever been in, of course.
Read the rest of this entry →

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.” Read the rest of this entry →

Today I am drinking bubble tea, because I worked at my tae kwon do school this morning. Otherwise one would normally not see me getting up earlier on a Saturday than on a weekday. It’s a scorcher out there today (or as we say here in Boston, “ah scaw-chah”), so on the walk home I could not resist stopping at Tapicha, the bubble tea stand in the Porter Exchange (Lesley) building.

I’ll have to do a bubble tea review at some point, but today I’d like to finally start writing about all the tea shops I visited while on my recent travels in San Francisco, Montreal, and Washington DC.

Actually, on the trip to DC I was so busy I never made it to Teaism, which I recall liking very much on past visits, though I did have some surprisingly nice teas in the fancy hotel where the SABR conference took place. They had Republic of Tea in food service bags in the restaurant, and every day the maid refilled our selection of Taylors of Harrogate. The hotel was one of the more expensive ones I’ve stayed in, so it was nice that the tea was a little more upscale than what one often finds. At a reasonably nice Sheraton one will find Tazo, at a Holiday Inn Express, Lipton. (I bring my own teabags when I travel, since in some hotels one doesn’t find tea at all. This wasn’t the case this time, though!)

But a bagged tea made in a hotel room coffee maker is just to tide me over most days while I am traveling until I can have some real tea, either by returning home, or by playing tea tourist.

Tea tourist stop #1 on my trip to San Francisco was, accidentally, the Asian Art Museum (see previous post), but I made an actual plan to meet up with my friend Midori to seek out some shops in the city. Midori has many virtues as a friend, not the least of which are an automobile, fine taste in tea, and an unending ability to converse with me about all the intellectual curiosities of the world (people, food, culture, art, architecture, food, history, politics, literature, and did I mention food?).

Our day began with dim sum. We met a small group of friends at a restaurant just a few blocks from Chinatown proper, at 11:45am. I arrived at 11:40 and the place was deserted enough that I checked that they were open. By 11:45 four parties had been seated and I could literally see people coming down the hill and up the street from the financial district. I secured us a table for five and by 12 noon there was a line out the door.

It was dim sum, therefore we feasted. The tea was good, if unremarkable. Thus fortified we set out for the Ferry Building, which has become a gourmet shopper’s dream.

Handcrafted chocolates. “Tasty salted pig parts.” (As the Boccalone slogan reads.) Wild mushrooms. organic everything. And a tea shop. Read the rest of this entry →

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.