That's right. You heard me, people. In about one week I am going to lose basically an entire day to airplane travel as I fly over the Pacific Ocean to the Land of the Rising Sun.
I haven't finished my travel plans yet, but for the most part that's perfectly fine with me since I just want to go out and about to as many places as possible. Some others who travel there frequently have suggested that I just get on a train and go to a more rural spot to walk around instead of visiting only the big cities, and I think that sounds like a fun idea. I almost definitely want to do this in a tea growing area too. But we'll see, we'll see.
My roommate has already left for her winter vacation so I'm stuck drinking my tea all alone tonight. I have three new plants that I love and adore. I haven't given them names yet, I suppose I should wait to see if they can survive the winter without me before getting too attached. You know, like how in Game of Thrones the Wildings don't name their children until they're 3 years old? Hahahaha. I'm going to put a bowl of water on top of the heater to humidify the room for at least a portion of the time I'm away, which will hopefully help them out at least some.
In my loneliness without my roommie, I've also taken to spoiling the heck out of my teapets, ShiShi and KanKan.They're just so adorable and sweet that I can't help but pour delicious tea on them! I really enjoy seeing ShiShi turn dark because of the water and tea and KanKan turn light because of the heat.
The other day I was drinking Fenghuang Dan Cong Oolong from Phoenix Tea (which is AMAZING by the way) in the kitchen and noticed something really pretty. There was a rainbow coming from the window and running over ShiShi's nose!
The sweet smell of the tea, the peaceful lack of any noticeable sounds, and this colorful presentation made that a very wonderful morning.
Congratulations College Tea Time blog readers! We have managed to pass 500 views! As much as that makes me happy, I don't really think it means too much important though, especially since I still only have 8 comments, and I think at least 3 of those are mine. Hahaha. So I'll cheer a lot more when the number of comments goes up.
On this unfortunately hot summer night I'm drinking more pu-erh like usual, listening to enya, and enjoying frozen fruit popsicles while reading. It inspired me to write another haiku. So here I am, forcing my silly and poor haiku skills on you.
Frozen fruit and tea,
On a hot summer evening,
Makes a happy me.
In addition to this, I've been thinking a lot about the best way to fill up a tea cup. Quick note, I don't think this actually affects the way the tea tastes. Hahaha. But it's certainly important for a few things things.
First off, not burning your or your guest's hands/fingers/mouth.
Being that I value my cups and brewing vessels more than my skin (skin repairs by itself for free, but broken teapots/cups/gaiwans do not and cost money), I suffer finger burns quite regularly. It hurts. Only once it's gotten to the point where a blister formed, but I've had to put on burn cream quite a few times anyways, and did I mention it HURTS??? Hahaha. So I've done some troubleshooting. Normally, as an American I think, I love a full cup. When I worked at Teavana, I noticed customers always acted like the shop and I was being really stingy by only filling the little sample cups 1/2 full.
Dear sweet customers, the tea is VERY HOT and those iddy bitty paper sample cups are not heat resistant at all. There may be a bit of stinginess involved since it takes a long time to make enough tea to fill those things once they're empty and that's especially troublesome when there are a lot of customers, but really we were hoping that you'd be able to taste the tea in a timely fashion and without causing you physical pain. It's not a conspiracy to steal food and drink from you.
If you think about it, there are three causes of this problem and more or less three solutions to keep in mind when pouring tea for either yourself or guests.
You could brew the tea at a lower temperature and just save yourself a lot of trouble. For green and white teas, this is pretty much my solution. Although that's also because I just plain like the taste of those teas better when I brew them in cold or lukewarm water.
But for herbal tisanes or oxidized teas such as oolongs, blacks, and pu-erhs though, that's really not the way to go. I suppose you could cool the tea down after you make it, but you've got problems with that too. Tea really does just plain taste better fresh. I am not a bottled tea fan, no matter the brand (out of any I'd probably trust Tao of Tea the best, though I noticed that Smith's has released a line of bottled teas too), because I'm pretty sure the longer the tea is in water the more it keeps doing. I don't know all that it does, but it does something. Hahaha. It's most noticeable with green teas where if you brew it at a higher temperature and then don't drink it quickly the tea will (if originally green in color) turn more yellow usually. I'm pretty sure this is the reason why I have never seen bottled green tea that is actually green unless they put coloring in it. But this is also the reason why I don't suggest putting the tea in the fridge. I will do that every once in a while just because I hate wasting tea if I don't have time to drink all that I made, but like I said, it's not my favorite thing to do.
Putting in ice is also not my choice because then when the ice melts (which the first few cubes will very quickly) you will be diluting the tea. Some people like to dilute their drinks, but cranberry and grape juice is the only thing I'll do that too. Would you dilute your coffee with water?
Of course, that brings up putting in milk, which I find a fairly acceptable idea for teas with spices or flowers or just plain black tea. I've never done that to an oolong though and I haven't had enough pu-erh that I wanted to waste to try it out with pu-erh except for one time when I was particularly tired which put me into a super childish "let's mix everything!!!" kind of mood. It did taste good though. And it turned out pink which was really weird. But anyways. That's a topic for another day's post.
If you were absolutely desperate to maintain your tea's flavor and cool it down quickly, I think I'd vote for freezing large glass marbles and using them like ice cubes. The glass won't interfere with the flavor at all unlike unglazed ceramic balls (commonly used to clean water and I've heard it improves tea's flavor, but that's still changing it), rocks, or plastic ice cubes (my fear would be that the heat of the tea would release BPA from the plastic into your drink, and plastic is weird in many other ways). If figure large glass marbles aren't particularly hard to find, and I'd think they'd take the change in heat pretty well which is something I'd worry more about with freezing the cup and then pouring hot tea into the cup. (I like my tea cups a lot)
Which brings me to different cup types! There's really more in choosing a tea cup than you'd imagine. You don't just want to find a pretty one or one with a texture you like in your hands and on your lips or a color to enhance your tea's color, but you also want to consider how big the cup is, the shape, and how thick the walls of it are.
You wouldn't believe the debate about which type of cup holds heat better. Thin vs. thick walled cups. I've heard that many people find that bone china (very thin walls, lovely stuff) keeps the heat in well, but I know that in Japan, winter cups are very thick. I haven't taken any thermodynamics yet so I don't trust any theories I have enough to tell you what I think. Maybe I'll test it out here soon. My mother has a huge (and gorgeous) European tea cup collection which will provide me with cups of much thinner walls. (But yet she drinks instant LIPTON. You have no idea how much it murders me when I see her doing that. It's not like she even uses a bag for crying out loud. IT'S INSTANT. *shudders*)
In some countries, tea cups have lids. I think this mostly goes for Asian ones. Almost all the infuser mugs you find from China have lids, and fancy cups for guests in Japan have lids. The idea in Japan at least is if your tea is hotter for longer, your guest will feel more welcome and stay longer.
Then of course, how much you put in the cup probably makes the most and easiest difference. If you fill up a cup all the way, it will take longer to cool down (and to drink, even those little tiny cups can manage two drinks if you fill them up too much) than if you don't. Furthermore, the tea will also heat up the cup. The advantage of European style cups is definitely their handles. Especially initially, the cup will heat up to only slightly less than that of the tea to where the tea level is inside. So if you pour in the tea to the top, the cup is also going to be hot all the way to the top. This makes it hard to hold the cup without burning your fingers when you're trying to pass the cup or just pick it up to take a sip.
If you cannot hold your cup properly, you're also likely going to spill.
Which means wasted tea, a mess, and probably burned fingers as well.
Not filling up the cup all the way is an easy fix to this, but not a perfect one. People are still going to spill tea and be clumsy. But still, better something than nothing. It's really not like it hurts anyone to force them to have to refill their cups if they want more. Honestly. I could completely rant here about over-sized USA and that NYC law, but I'll just leave it at that. Hahaha.
When your cup is filled too high it takes more times of drinking to empty it, changing the heat between each drink, making each taste colder than the last till finally you're probably like me and throwing your last half of your cup back in to your pot (I don't do this when I drink with people!) because you want at least warm tea.
Drinks and food taste different at different temperatures. Surely you've noticed that you hate cold mashed potatoes (or something), that ice cream tastes terrible when warm, or that Europeans generally think US beer tastes weak and disgusting because they drink theirs warm (sometimes I hear differently, but I really couldn't say since I don't drink beer)? Heat brings out more flavor. You want your tea to be at its best brewed temperature. But of course you want to drink it. Solution? Just don't pour in as much. Then you get to keep the majority of your tea in the pot where it'll stay hotter for longer than it would in your cup.
What's that? All of those problems had a common solution?
Just don't fill the cup up all the way. :) Ta-dah!
Today was the transit of Venus in case anyone failed to notice! I remember seeing it in 2004 when I was in elementary school still, and although today was cloudy thanks to NASA I still got to catch the beginning and the end on live video stream from Hawaii.
(Photo rights to STAN HONDA/AFP/GettyImages from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/venus-transit-2012-live-c_n_1571654.html#s=1061477)
To mark the occasion, I decided to pull out my plum blossom gaiwan set and drink some delicious Guangdong Dan Cong from Phoenix Tea (listed in English as Phoenix Oolong when it's available). I love Dan Cong because it tastes like Japanese andromeda and clover nectar. When I was in elementary school, the green was made of mostly clover. We all loved it when it blossomed, and one day some of my friends showed me that you could get what we thought was honey at the time from the clover petals. You pick off one single closed petal and lightly bite the end of it essentially. It was really delicious as a kid, but having such a short attention span, we only did that on occasion. Haha. But this tea reminds me of that smell and taste.
I mentioned it also reminds me of Japanese andromeda. When I was even younger, before I was in elementary school, I lived with my mother at my grandparent's house. In their backyard they had huge Japanese andromeda bushes.
(Picture from http://www.plant-care.com/japanese-andromeda.html)
These little bell flowers smell amazing when they bloom and I used to play on the bush. Haha. It was a variegata variety and they get to be almost small trees when they get large. Inside the bush there weren't any flowers but just these huge branches that I could climb on and sit on and pretend I was Tarzan in. Drinking this oolong reminds me of those very fun times and so I love it.
Today, June 5th, 2012, with the Venus transit and Phoenix Oolong, was a wonderful day.
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!
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. :)
