Coffee Floats and Tea Sinks? Where To Put Your Leaves?

"Coffee Floats and Tea Sinks" is apparently the title of some book, but it was a book about coffee, so I didn't bother looking at it much more than that on amazon.

Today, kind of like usual, I was looking around online for a nice Gongfu tea tray. Upon looking around, I found out that some people call it a "tea sink"! I started looking for one using those keywords, but came across something interesting about tea leaves sinking into the water instead.

Vicony Teas Tea Encyclopedia How to Brew Tea

I'd never heard of this before, but apparently there are 3 different methods of brewing tea concerning when you put the leaves in the water. Most of us use "Bottom-Putting Method" (下投法), but it appears that for green teas we should be either using "Middle-Putting Method" (中投法) or "Top-Putting Method" (上投法). What is the difference between these 3 methods? Well simply put, it has to do with where you put the leaves in the water.

For those of you who don't know, this can be important to consider because some leaf flavors are more sensitive to heat than other. My favorite tea, Gyokuro (a Japanese green) is a perfect example for what the different temperatures of water do to the flavors. Green tea in general likes water at about 175 F. Personally, I never like my greens at anything higher than 160F (unless it's Houjicha). When the water is too hot, it brings out a very disgusting bitter taste in green tea. When the water temperature is correct, you will taste sweeter, grassier, more flowery and vegetal flavors instead (unless your tea is either crap or too old). About every 5-10 degrees between 35F and 140F (the highest I'll ever go with Gyokuro), you will notice a difference in the flavor of Gyokuro. Why? Because different chemical components of the leaf are being pulled out (lower temperature= more L-theanine, less caffeine) and the temperature also highlights different flavors too. Ever notice how American beer tastes like crap at room temperature, but the Germans think we're insane for drinking beer cold? Or how ice cream is way too sweet when warm?

As I tried to imply with Bottom-Putting Method (henceforth BPM), this is where you put the leaves in before putting the water on top. This is what most Americans use, probably because we're so used to doing dry ingredients before wet ones when baking. You're really never supposed to do this with green tea because that's too harsh on the delicately steamed leaves (or pan fried if they're Chinese). This source seems to suggest that you shouldn't really do that with any type of good quality tea, but I guess I'll have to do an experiment with that using pu-erh and oolong (I don't have any black teas) and see if there's any reason to fuss about that with the hardier, more oxidized teas.

Middle-Putting Method (MPM), seems pretty interesting to me. In this method, the source says to fill the brewing container about 1/4th of the way with water at brewing temperature. Then you need to put the leaves on top of that and let them soak a little until they start to float down (vessel may be shaken slightly). Finally you fill the rest of the vessel with brewing water and then wait until the leaves fall to the bottom (it suggests that if they don't then your water is too cool, but that appears to be partially because it looks like they're suggesting drinking "Grandpa style") and then wait for it to brew (about a min or so) and only then drink. This is suggested for Chinese greens like Longjing (Dragon Well) and Huang Shan Mao Feng (Yellow Mountain Fur Peak) with are both delicious.

Top-Putting Method (TPM) is where you put the leaves on top of the brewing water. They recommend this for even more delicate teas like white teas apparently (they say Bi Luo Chun, but I haven't ever had this one or seen it before which isn't surprising because I'm not typically a white tea person).

I'm curious to see if these really do make an impact on flavor. For more delicate teas for sure, I would imagine that they do, but I'd like to try it out for myself too. If any of you have experience with this as well, or know anything more, please feel free to comment on this post!

On a more personal note, I'm down to my last 5 grams of my absolute favorite 2898!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my goodness. When you get a new brick, it looks like it'll last you forever, but I'm down to the last tippy little corner now, and in another 2 hours or so it'll be gone. I'll possibly post something in it's memory. Hahaha. But funnily enough, getting a larger gaiwan and hand strainer has really increased my tea consumption. I had nearly 50 grams still left a month ago when I came back to Seattle from Mount Holyoke. Hahaha. Oh well. I've loved every drop of it!

Dang Seattle Rain and High School Graduations!!

My dear friends could not join me in any tea adventures today due to STUPID things like IMPORTANT HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION HOMEWORK and DANGEROUS DRIVING CONDITIONS so there was no tea adventure. But I stopped by New Century Tea Gallery after service at my Choeizan Enkyoji Nichiren Shu Buddhist Temple to inquire at the very least about this year's spring harvest and found that the owner would be bringing it all back from China on June 1st! I'll have to stop in after that date instead then, which is fine and actually makes me pretty happy because then I get super fresh green tea! Woo!

In preparation for this I have broken in my beautiful new Kitani with a delicious Western Zhejiang Long Ding from Tea Trekker back in Northampton, MA. I need to drink all the Chinese greens I have up faster so that I can get more and have room for some Japanese greens too!! Hehehe. I'd really love to get some more Gyokuro, but I'm afraid my budget may limit me to Sencha. I love Sencha too, but oh my fluffy bunnies from the land beneath the bed, Gyokuro is just heavenly to me. So we shall see. It's also quite likely that I'll finally start experimenting with Matcha. Matcha is really great, I think, because I can just put it into a bottle and shake it up. Hahahahaha. Just like with putting a Chinese green into a Japanese tea pot I feel kind of sacrilegious, I also feel kind of sacrilegious for shaking up my matcha in a plastic bottle. Hahahahaha. But since I'm in college, I consider everything fair game.

And I swear to those fluffy bunnies again that ONE DAY I will summarize a few original research articles for you all here! On my list is Caffeine content, L-Theanine content and effects, and I should probably do EGCG too since everyone's always going on and on and on about that. But of course, I also want to focus on whatever cool things I can find out about Pu-erh or Purple tea. Maybe tomorrow.

May Puer Tea Appreciation Club of Seattle Meeting!

Today was the month of May's monthly PTACOS meeting! We met at the awesome Phoenix Tea shop in Burien, WA and it was lots of fun! This also means I'm home for summer vacation now! Yay!

We tried a lot of extremely delicious Puerhs. Cinnabar wrote them all down, but I don't have the intention of making this a tea review blog, so I'm not going to go into great detail about that. There were a large number of us drinking today it seemed, and we had a whole bunch of great and crazy conversations that I'm sure we'll all burst out laughing about as we randomly remember the crazier tidbits later. I really love these kinds of get togethers and think that there should be more joys in life like this. While talking I learned about several different cultural and art events happening in the area, about other artists in the area, spas, and of course just a lot of interesting story telling about one thing or another. Delicious tea and interesting people and conversation, what more could one ask for? These meetings are the best and really make me want to be the Tea Hostess for my dorm again next year and have similar weekly meetings.

Then of course afterwards I finally did a bit of tea and teaware shopping that I'd been dying to do! Hehehe! I scored a GORGEOUS kyusu set from Kutani by someone named 栄峰 (not too sure yet how to pronounce this name). I'll put up a picture of it tomorrow. It's really lovely with pictures of camellias and ducks on it. As a set, it came with one cup with a lid. I am extremely happy to finally own a kyusu! Finally I can brew Japanese green tea in a Japanese pot instead of feeling sacrilegious by doing it in a Chinese one. Hahaha. And it's a larger pot, so I'll be able to do larger tea servings! Woo-hoo!

In addition to that I finally bought a nice puerh tea pick, a fine mesh strainer to pour through, and some very nice smelling rooibos chai tea. Like I mentioned before, pictures soon! I meant to get some purple tea too, but somehow I completely forgot!! Super sadness, but I'll just order it fresh in September if I don't manage to get over there again before leaving for school again.

Tomorrow the hunt is on for some possible cups, some possible green tea, and some possible fun things. WITH A FRIEND! Ahhh, exciting times!

Necessary Study Break Quick Comment (Library tea, Mother, Oolongssss!!, and the great Japanese Green Tea Shortage of 2012)

My mother thinks me caring so much about how to make tea is ridiculous. Hahahaha. I posted a status on facebook about how while they had good Sencha leaves at the coffee shop in Mount Holyoke's library (FREAKING AMAZING LIBRARY, by the way, except that it exceedingly reminds me of something you'd see in The Shining and is a horrendous maze for about the first 5 weeks...), but that they were going to put it into too hot of water before I requested ice to cool the water down (thought about just asking for hot tap water, but alas no matter how much I want it to be, sencha is not gyokuro), and then in addition to then almost ruining the whole point of putting in the ice they poured in the hot water directly on the tea leaves (which they put into a bag, but I forgive them for that) and didn't even bother to tell me how long to let it steep. *rambles and rants about why people mistakenly think green tea tastes horrible and bitter* But anyways, so my mother then comments something to the effect of "Whatever. Add water, let sit, drink." Hahahahaha.

Dearest Mother,

You are mistaking tea with instant coffee. Please note that not only are the two spelled differently, they come from different plants, are different parts of the plant, taste completely different, are biochemically almost completely different, and are definitely prepared completely different. Would you bake a salmon the same as a black berry pie? Never!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,
Your Adoring Daughter

Also, three amazing teas arrived from Phoenix Tea for me yesterday! They had a really cool opportunity that day at just the right time where I received not only my tea, but two awesome samples! I'll let you know what arrived tomorrow hopefully. I've been two busy today to try them, but I will let you know that I received two DELICIOUS smelling oolongs and one 2007 sheng pu-erh! But really, I've been starting to crave oolongs like the ones I ordered for a while now, so I'm super happy that I received two of them!

And as most of you may know, the Japanese tea picking season does not begin until next month.

...

NEXT MONTH.

Argh! Why did my Japanese green tea supply have to run out now??!!! Because now it's more economical for me to just wait than it is to buy some older stuff! But I'm so addicted to delicious Japanese green tea!!!! I suppose I should just save up my money in the meantime and splurge on more gyokuro. But I also really want some of the special green tea at the New Century Tea Gallery in Seattle, and I want some sencha this time too... Though maybe I should go for a fukamushi instead. Fukamushi was the first Japanese lose leaf green I ever purchased. Sadly, I had no idea how to make it or what made it special, so it was overwhelmingly wasted now that I look back on it. But maybe I should try it again now......... Too many choices!!!!! Also, the place I wanted to buy my new stocks of Japanese green are in South Hadley, and next month I will be in Seattle. Oh well. I'll stock up on the other smaller things I wanted while in Seattle and save a larger supply purchase from them in September so that I don't have to worry about shipping and hopefully they'll be better at storing than I have the ability to be. Haha.

I'm really a crazy tea fanatic. Hehehe. Loving it~~!

And now back to my work. I've put at least 8 hours into this now, and looking at examples from other classmates, I think I've put in too much effort already. Hahaha. Oh well. Hopefully that means this will turn out amazingly and my professor will be so impressed she'll finally stop giving me an exceedingly large number of +'s after my B's and finally give me an A on something. Seriously! How many +'s does it take to turn a B into an A??? Hahaha. But anyways. I know what I need to do, but without my green tea supply it's super difficult to do! Hahahahaha. Now! Homework!

Chai Masala Party! :) And my preliminary theory on the occasional metallic taste in cooked pu-erh.

As the tea hostess of my dorm, one of the fun things I get to do is host tea parties! Woo! Last night was the first one. I wanted to make sure people would definitely like what they tasted there, so I made my super delicious Chai Masala. I don't have a link for this one, since I got it from Uwajimaya and don't really care to go through their product list right now to find it if they even had a product list (I don't think they do). It's certainly very delicious though, using mustard, cloves, cinnamon, cardamon, pepper, and ginger to spice the Indian black tea. The mustard, pepper, and ginger create a wonderful heat that spreads through your mouth and lingers in the back of your throat. When you add milk and sugar (which you're supposed to do while making it, but in case anyone had lactose intolerance or didn't like milk I left it out and left the sugar out separately too so that people could decide how sweet they liked it), it tastes like spicy chocolate milk to me.

This chai is my favorite winter drink. It's not winter right now, sure, but if you were kidnapped one day and kept in a dark box for so long you lost track of the days and was then released into South Hadley right now you would think it was. Hahahahaha. We heard there was a risk for snow this weekend. SNOW. IN MARCH. And not even the middle of March, the VERY END! Crazyness. So spicy chai it was.

I have some pictures, but I need to either get permission or edit people's faces out of them first before I put them up. Forgot about asking about that last night. Oh well. Hahaha.

We all had a great time and I got to teach even more people about the differences between herbal teas and actual ones. Haha. I really need to add an oolong to my collection though, because I really only have pu-erh and green tea. I don't have a white tea either, but I don't really like white tea, so I consider my white pu-erh and pu-erh buds to be good enough. Hahaha. And my chai is the only black I'm ever going to keep in my collection, thank you very much. Ugh. Black tea just tastes so horrible to me. It tastes like orange peels! But not as sweet! Maybe I've only had bad black teas, but black tea is really not my thing. I think I had the purple tea from Phoenix Tea's as a black tea though, so maybe I do like one kind of "black tea" (all these colors and confusing me now hahaha), but I might've had it as an oolong instead. Either way now that I'm thinking about that one I need to add it as well. Haha

I think I need to make a graphic about the different kinds of tea here soon. It seems that enough people read this. And on that note, yay! Thank you all so much!! It makes me really happy and encourages me to keep writing. Hehe.

Today I am drinking my special little 2008 Menghai Hong Yun. This was the first pu-erh that I bought, and I was lucky that it was especially delicious, so that's why it's special to me. It's not the best shu I've ever had, but it's been really kind to me. Interestingly enough, sometimes it tastes better than others. Most times it comes out dark ruby red, and it's earthyness is sweet and smooth. But sometimes it gets that accursed metallic taste! UGH! I hate it so much.

I thought at first it must be because of the water, but changing to spring water didn't help. So then I thought maybe I had ruined it by improperly storing it somehow, but then it came out good the next time. Today I thought it might be because I made the chai in my Breville last night (it's essentially a pot, so I use it like it and even make spaghetti in it hahaha), which left a distinct chai smell to it that I thought I'd gotten rid of until I boiled some water in it and smelled the water after I noticed the tea tasting bad. So I washed it again (both the Breville and the tea haha), and the tea tasted better!!!

But five washes! Five!!! They were all very short, but FIVE!!! I might as well go for the full seven or something now! Hahaha. I say that because I was told by a Chinese friend of mine here the other day that the usual number of washes was at least three, and if you wanted to be really traditional and ceremonial then you'd do like seven or something. I can definitely taste the chai in my tea now though (terrifying!), so I'm going to do a super cleanse on my teapot and boil lemons in it twice or so. That works really well and makes it look really pretty.

But back to the tea. I think I need to start exactly timing how long each of my washes are for, if not the temperature of the water too. Sometimes I think cooler water (190 instead of 200+) works better, but that doesn't exactly make sense to me. Hahaha. That doesn't mean it isn't true though. So I guess I'll have to test for that as well. But I definitely want to know what it is that makes that taste and how to avoid it because I really want to do a pu-erh tea party next, and nothing is more of a real tea turn-off than metallic tea.

Maybe I should start with green tea instead. Hmm.

By the way, RACHEL MADDOW IS COMING TO MOUNT HOLYOKE TONIGHT! Aaaaahhhh!!!!!! It's so exciting! I love Rachel Maddow. She's really straight forward with her opinion and puts together a lot of complicated pieces that others don't seem to do. Plus she has a sense of humor. Sometimes I think her analysis of what some people mean when they say things is a little too simplistic, but I like how on top of the non-mainstream things she is and the direct points she makes about all things politics, and she is always stunning at analyzing the consequences of what people say. From what I've heard about her book, Drift, it sounds very interesting and I'm excited to see her tonight not just because of her, but also because of what she'll be talking about. But all of that is besides the point of tea, so don't worry I'll stay out of politics here except for this one little post. Hahaha. Unless they have to do with tea, which economic related things might, but I sincerely doubt it for now, and I've already basically signed this blog up to do so many things that I figure that unless I take a class about the politics of the tea trade, politics really can stay out of this blog just fine. Hahaha.

Library Green, Basil Sheng

First off, I would like to mention here that if I could drown in any spice, my choice would be that of basil.

I. Love. Basil.

Basil is the heart of food. A world without basil... is chaos!

And sadly my school does not use basil very much in anything but soup it seems. And even then, it still doesn't use as much as they should. So I bought my own thing of basil. And now I'm making split pea soup from scratch (it was a mix, but a mix of scratch ingredients! Lol), and it has a ton of basil and is making the entire first floor smell absolutely wonderful. I love it so much!!!! I just want to bottle this scent up as perfume. Hahahahaha. Eau de Basil. Or something like that. I speak not a word of French, sadly.

Speaking of languages, I need to decide which one to learn. It's almost definitely going to be Mandarin, because an extraordinarily amount of research now days is coming out of China, especially in areas I'm interested in. So that should help me there. Also, there are economics programs in China, so if I double major in Biology and Economics, then I'll have a program I could go study abroad with and get credit for! But on the other hand, more countries speak French or Spanish, and I really also want to learn Korean.... But that's alright. I will learn them all one day!!!

Anyways, on to the purpose of this blog. Haha.

Today was like 80 degrees out. Way too hot! I like it 50-60 and cloudy. At 80 and sunny my eyes are blind! Blind! I need clouds. Otherwise I look like I'm about to unleash the fury of the seven hells on everyone and everything around me. Hahaha.

So I brought my portable tea tasting set, a clean water bottle, and some green tea with me. Hehehe. And then I filled up my water bottle with the filtered, cold fountain water at the library, and made delicious green tea for me and my macroeconomics study buddy. I'm very happy to announce a new tea convert!! Hahaha! She thought that green tea was normally bitter. Augh! The anguish! So I had her try my Gyokuro (yes, its been a while since I got it now, its on its very sad last legs, but its still good for at least 3 brews!) and she loved it! Yaaayyyyy! So that was fun. And I got to explain all the different kinds of tea to her, so we had a good time. And then we studied macroeconomics, and I had even more fun. Haha.

Then I went home, and decided to try my new sheng pu-erh. That's right! I finally have a sheng in my possession!!!

On Wednesday my friends and I decided that we wanted to escape the clutches of campus. I love Mount Holyoke campus. It's beautiful and peaceful and quiet and pressure free. Other people though tend to see it differently it seems. Many of my friends refer to it as a "bubble" and always talk about how bored they are and how much they want to escape the bubble. Haha. I don't like going shopping because it reminds me of money I do not have, so I don't really mind staying in a pretty much store free bubble where there are lot of events to go to and clubs to take part in and people to talk to. Sometimes the food gets kind of dull, but I just need to hit up Goodwill here one of these days and pick up some pots and pans and things and sneak over to the Big Y too so that I can get some ingredients and just start cooking to alleviate that stuffiness. If I have things to do, I'm a very satisfied person. Boredom is the worst thing in the world. I'm saving up my money to go back to Japan here soon, and I'm making sure to bring some sleeping pills with me this time because there is no way I'm riding that 11+ hour flight conscious again. Never never never never.

So we went to Northampton! Northampton is the home of one of our little sister colleges, Smith College! (I say little sister because Mount Holyoke was the first of the seven sisters hehehe!) We obviously didn't go to Northampton to go to Smith though. In Northampton, there are a lot of really cute little restaurants and shops. So we went to go look at all of those. We stopped by some piercing places (pictures soon! Just kidding, hahaha), a frozen yogurt shop, had lunch at a Japanese restaurant (I'm feeling really homesick for Japan funnily enough), and just generally walked around and had fun with each other. At one point, just after I'd been talking to one of my friends about the virtues of loose leaf tea and being sad that there wasn't any loose leaf tea stores in the area, I caught sight of something amazing! A culinary shop that also advertised loose leaf tea! Oh my goodness. You have no idea how excited I was. Actually, you might be able to imagine. But either way, I was really, really excited. So of course we stopped by over there.

The store is called Cooks Shop Here! and the tea company located inside it is called Tea Trekker. I like their name. I also loved that what I found on their website which I glanced at briefly before going in (ah, the magic of modern smart phones), which was that they go to the farms themselves in many different countries to secure their stock. Plus, they had Pu-erh in it's own category! I should really expect that of tea stores by now, but way too many still put it under black tea. UGH! The tragedy of it all.

I was really hoping that they would be like most of the shops in Seattle and do on the fly tea tastings for my friends, but sadly this was not that kind of store. They have more scheduled tastings instead, that you sign up for online it seems. But that's alright because at least they did sell very small samples of tea for very reasonable prices, and the owner was very knowledgeable about all of his teas. Plus one sign that I really liked about his store was that he had the same Red Label Dragon Phoenix Constellation (龍鳯星座) that I have thanks to the amazing Phoenix Tea Shop. So I figure the owner's tastes must be fairly similar to what I'm used to and good. Hehehe. 


As you probably know already, I'm a really big lover of the dark earthy rich shu pu-erh. Mmmmm. Just thinking about my 2898 makes me happy. Because of this, I've focused mostly on expanding that part of my library as opposed to the sheng side, leaving me with well, no sheng. Hahaha. And this wasn't a problem when I was just serving myself and sometimes family members, but now that I'm at college where I have a lot more people over more frequently (and I'm now the tea hostess for my dorm! Strangely enough, this is a legitimate position hahaha), so I want to show them as many sides of tea as I can, which means I've come to need a sheng. 


Right before I left Seattle I did a little bit of sheng searching. I went over to Healeo since McIntosh Tea is more or less located there as far as I understand it. There I found one really REALLY great little sheng that I absolutely loved. It's hard to get me to actually buy anything though. I typically need at least 3 days before making any purchase over $15, and honestly it was just a little small for me and felt a little too high quality for something that I was probably going to go through fairly quickly in college. So I passed it by and kept on searching. Obviously I did not find my sheng before I left Seattle. But that was also a space issue. I already had so little space, there was really not a good possibility of me being able to take much more with me. Hahaha. So I figured I'd search for something in real life, and then think about what I'd tasted, and then maybe buy it online once I'd gotten into South Hadley. This didn't really happen either, so again, I was left without a sheng.


But when I stopped by Tea Trekker, I found a really nice sized sheng that was within my price range and actually even older than the shus I have! So happily, I purchased this cute little 2007 Rong's Mengku (勐库戎氏) sheng. (As mentioned earlier, I do not know Chinese, so please forgive any poor translations I may make. I'm working off of Google translator and what I know from Japanese.)

Honestly, I'm a bit surprised now that I look at the other teas by the Mengku tea factory that I liked this one. Though maybe that's not so surprising, I don't know. But either way, this is apparently the company of my absolute worst ever experience with a pu-erh. Hahahaha. I think it was the 2008 Mu Ye Chun "99801" (but don't hold me to it!) that I tried from Uwajimaya (it was the 2nd one I'd ever bought! Go easy on me! Haha) and it was HORRIBLE. Ugh. I don't want to think about it at all. It was so bad. Seriously, let's not go there right now. Hahaha.

So of course now that I have this sheng, I have to try it out and share it! So I made it while making my basil crazed split pea soup, which I didn't really get to eat with it because it took freaking two hours to cook and by then I'd given up on eating that soup and just ate some leftover udon and drank my tea. Hahaha.

I was really surprised by the first brew, because it was a lot smoother and sweeter than I expected. In fact, I really didn't consider it to have that much taste at all. But it did smell wonderful! Haha. But then, in the second brew, helloooooo sheng! Yup. That's when it finally woke up. I don't think I washed it well enough maybe. Either way, the next few brews were really delicious. I got at least 3 more good ones before I started to need to keep it in for longer, and eventually I got I think 6 brews out of it before I decided it was done.

Those 4 after the first one were wonderful. This was a mellower sheng, but it still had a what I will always associate with as tobacco zippy spicy flavor that I really enjoy. I don't like smoking though! Once I tried to convince my mother to make a bet with me that if I could go through high school without doing drugs then she'd have to give me a few hundred dollars. She laughed and said, "Yeah right, like you'd do drugs." And it's true. Hahaha. I don't need anything to make me more outgoing or happy so there's no desire to use them and adding on the fact that I like using my lungs too much makes it even less likely that I'd ever do anything like that. But I still like that smell and taste in my tea! Haha. One of the girls I was sharing it with described it as smelling like henna too! I was really surprised, but it makes sense because henna usually has tea tree oil in it (from the melaleuca plant, not camellia haha) which has the same sort of spicy kick to it that this did. It was also slightly sweet and reminded me of spring sunshine.

I actually like it so much that I'm considering getting one to let age. But I'll keep drinking this one for now and we'll just see where that goes.

Now comes a big question, should I try this one out in my Yixing pot or not?

It Was Raining!

I am from the Northwest. Born and raised, I love the rain. I love, love, love, love, love, love, love, LOVE the rain! The rain is so soothing! The sound of it as it grows from a silencing mist to a pitter of small drops to a rumble of larger ones on the roof, then the splats as it falls off the edges of the gutters on to the cement, and then the inconsistent plops as the clouds fade away, but the water remains and runs down into the dirt or drains or wherever. And then the smell! Did you know it has a word?? Petrichor. Look it up. I learned it on Doctor Who. Yay for British Sci-Fi!!!! (But seriously, Doctor Who is AWESOME)

So anyways, it rained today here. Normally it's either dry and cold, or snowy and cold, and I've been told it's supposed to be even more snowy and cold than it's been this time of year, but today it was like 40's and raining! Very NW weathery. I felt nostalgic, and gave up my normal super warm eskimo coats for a super West Coast represent hoodie. And of course, I did not use an umbrella! Because umbrellas are for wimps when it's not raining hard enough to make them useless anyways. Hahaha. (It was only misting anyways, but I still saw people with umbrellas and hoods up! Haha!)

There aren't too many other people from the Northwest here, but one of my good friends is and as I was putting up news posters around the dorm she came in from the outside, SOPPING WET. Hahaha. (It apparently started to rain a lot harder after I'd gone inside a few hours earlier). We laughed for a bit and then she had the greatest idea ever, "Hey, do you want to go out and have a mud fight?" Hehehehe.

Mud fights are wonderful. It was really hard to find good mud, but eventually we found something that'd work and went at it for long enough to cover us with mud. Hahaha! So much fun!!! But it was getting colder, so we were freezing and decided to go take some hot showers, and then regroup in the common room for tea. :)

Because tea always just adds an extra perfect touch that finishes off a great evening of mud flinging on a Friday evening. ^^

Yeah, Yixing Teapot!

Yay! I have finally broken in my first Yixing clay teapot today! Isn't it adorable? I didn't have any room while moving from Washington state to Massachusetts so I had to leave my large teapots and only brought my two little ones (this one and a ceramic one).

I've been really curious for a long time what effect brewing tea in a clay teapot had on the flavor of the tea. Certainly it made me feel a lot more special, and I enjoyed my tea more, but I wasn't really interested in drinking two full pots (albeit small pots haha) of tea so I'll wait for some time next week when my friend whom I think I might have hooked on pu-erh (which is only what I'm going to use in this pot) comes back from afar. I would say that my tea tasted better than usual, but it's REALLY good pu-erh (LongRun's 2898) already, and I just recently read an article about how people couldn't tell the difference between dog food and some french dish when it was dressed up properly... Haha. So I will do a blind taste test on myself here soon, brewing it in both the Yixing and ceramic teapots. Certainly though, when I put hot water in the yixing teapot, WOW. What a SUPER earthy smell!!! Geez! It was like I had my face pressed to a wet forest floor! Hahahaha. It smelled great. I also had my roommates smell it, and they were shocked that a teapot could smell like that. Hehehe. I love introducing people to new things about tea.

Which apparently I need to do even more of. Yesterday, I decided it would be a good idea to eat some chocolate cake. This was an actual thing I had to think about for a few seconds, because I really dislike chocolate. I love chocolate milk, but actual chocolate gives me a headache and really upsets my stomach. I have a legitimate reason for disliking chocolate!!! Stop hating on me!!! Hahaha. You have no idea how hard it is to go to a woman's college and dislike chocolate. But anyways, I said this, and one of my friends started hating on me. So I told her I had this great tea (2898 again) that tasted a lot like it (it's so THICK and has a really sweet and dark earthyness) and suggested that she should try it. Then, she had to go and say the most nonsensical sentence ever that way too many people say all the time:

"I don't like tea."

BULL FREAKING S****.

The best tea people who say crap like that have ever had was either Lipton or whatever they just willy-nilly serve at Chinese restaurants (I'm assuming it's most commonly an oolong). Their green tea was always probably burnt, and well, I'd say their black tea was over brewed or something, but I don't really like black teas at all in general unless they have a ton of milk and sugar in them (a sin, I know!!). Haha. But they've definitely never had a quality Dan Cong oolong that tastes like honeysuckle, the new Purple Tea, Gyokuro made over ice, or one of the owner of New Century Tea Gallery's green teas from his family farm (not all on linked page are from his family's farm) or Moon White Pu-erh. HONESTLY. Just because you've had some stupid Lipton tea, or some super sugared up Snapple iced tea does not qualify you to say you dislike all tea!!!!!! AT ALL. GAH.

Also, I can't tell if I have a perfect opportunity to help change a bit of this right now or not haha. I was offered a chance to run a tea tasting event for a club fundraising event on campus today, but then the girl started talking about flowers and spices and I realized she (and so many other people) just lump all "tea" in one word and consider any other dried plant piece that you can put in water and drink as what gives tea its flavor. *SIGHS* We'll be discussing this further. To do anything though, I'd either need more gaiwans/pots and cups, or at the very least more strainers. Technically I have a ton of little tea bags you can use to make yourself, but tea bags suck. A lot. I tried making Gyokuro in them once. I would have gotten better results from holding them down with a spoon. Hahaha. It was like there was no infusion! So disappointing. So yeah, I think tea bags are a bad idea. I suggested we do a chai event, but again we'll have to discuss and think this through further. 

Watch out for my next post, I have time this weekend to read and analyze a few scientific articles. Comment with suggestions about what you'd like to know about tea if you'd like and I'll see what I can find. :)

Something I Made While Obviously Not Procrastinating