a turtle and a strawberry

Welcome back to the new and improved Lahikmajoe Drinks Tea.

Have had a bit of a break due to my day job, but hopefully that's settling down so I can devote more time to teablogging. After all, that's what really matter, right?

Some have asked me if I'll ever blog again? Well, I suppose this is an answer to that.

Want to see a photo of a turtle and a strawberry?

Really?

What other teablog offers you something like this? None! None, I tell you.

As a matter of fact, this is the first I've ever seen such a photo on a teablog. What does it have to do with tea, you ask?

My answer?

What doesn't it have to do with tea? Strawberry tea. Turtle tea.

My friend Diana, when we were touring in Japan in the early nineties, compared the taste of green tea to turtle pee. After the obvious enquiry as to whether she had personal experience with drinking the urine of the testudo, we agreed that the tea we'd been served by our host actually smelled like turtle urine must taste...to someone who had actually tasted turtle pee, which we hadn't...not us.

What?

Oh, you still want the photo, don't you?

Well, here it is:

Abwarten und Tee trinken

Did something a bit abnormal yesterday. Not that this'll surprise many of you. I make a habit of the less-than-normal. It's my usp (unique selling proposition)...if I have one.

Here's the thing: I have a teablog. You're looking at it. I write about tea and tea-related topics. That's rather straightforward, isn't it? I tend to think so.

In the past, the only blog I had was a teablog, and I often found myself talking about subjects that at first glance were distantly (if at all) related to tea. It's still part of the enjoyment I have here. To come up with a topic far, far away from tea, and to somehow find a connection.

But now I have a NonTeablog (lahikmajoe's general and rather abnormal blog). It's great fun. I write about a variety of things and it's a portfolio for when someone wants to see examples of my writing. I've made a concerted effort to not let the quality of my teablog deteriorate just because I'm writing over there, as well as other places. For the most part, I think I've been successful.

Although it must be said: the topics that earlier were creatively linked to tea normally find themselves on the NonTeablog. It's sadly a more natural fit.

What was the abnormal thing I did yesterday? Well, a topic that most likely belongs on a teablog was somehow more appropriate over there. You don't believe me? Take a look for yourself:

wait and drink tea

So I decided to pull it over here. Even the title is screaming out to be shared on a teablog. And I know just the one. This one...the very one you're reading. Here's how I described the German idiom that is 'Abwarten und Tee trinken':

'Literally it means ‘wait and drink tea‘. Yet as with most idioms, the literal definition is only part of the story. Wait and drink tea is used specifically when adding pressure to negotiations won’t help. When the best thing to do is to do nothing at all. So, you have to wait…and while waiting, why not brew some tea? It’ll at least make the wait a bit more pleasant.'

Not  a bad phrase, is it?

So what am I drinking right now while I wait? When I was at Laifufu Teesalon last weekend, I got this wonderful Taiwanese green tea called Bi Luo Chun (2011). Want to see the leaves? Here they are:

Bi Luo Chun green

How was it? How did it taste? A bit grassy...like a Japanese Sencha. But not too much. Very light, vegetal flavour that was terribly pleasing. Not all green tea will taste as good the second time around, but this Bi Luo Chun was as good if not better.

I know Ya Ya at Tea Trade got some of the same tea, and I'm curious what he has to say about it. The story of this specific tea's picking and processing was really quite intriguing, but I think Ya Ya understood it better. I'll leave it to him to explain it (only if he wants, of course).

Here I am savouring the second infusion of this delicious tea directly from Taiwan. I'm waiting and tea drinking. As is my wont.

some very exhausted green tea leaves

you can brew tea in cold water?

that's Tie Guan Yin on the left and Silver Needle on the right

This is really a post for summertime. So all of you in the Southern Hemisphere will be happy. The rest of you are probably asking, 'Why not wait until it's seasonally appropriate? What's the story on a summer topic in the opening days of winter?' Well, in my defence, I started thinking about this in summer. And if I try to wait for the right time, I just might forget.

Over the summer, I read people talking about cold-brewing tea. Putting leaves in cold (not remotely warm) water and waiting until the leaves naturally steep into some delicious goodness. You can do that? It works? I'm here to tell you that it does.

Those of you that already know this are going to think it's a non-story. Of course it does. Why wouldn't it? Now I know that...but it was somehow beyond my understanding. My mother made sun tea when I was a child. In her case it was tea bags in a container of water that was set out in the sun. After several hours, the warmth of the sun had brewed up a really strong tea (that people ruined with ice cubes and various forms of sweetener), but that's because of the heat. Right?

If you want to make tea, you need either hot water or you need to add some sort of heat. Isn't that correct?

Not necessarily. Why have I been sitting on this since summer? Well, it's simple actually. I had to try it. I had to know it was true before I went off half-cocked about it (I know that's not my normal way-I'm well-known for going off half-cocked). And once I got started experimenting with cold-brewing tea, I couldn't stop. It became a sort of obsession.

That's why it was so timely when in the comments of a recent post Tea Trade Peter mentioned drinking white tea cold. Here's how he said it:

'Let’s start with why does tea have to be drunk hot? I like white tea, but when it is hot, I find that I cannot appreciate the flavors, but when it is just warm, or at a temperature just slightly above the room temperature so you still get the aromatics (though, I think they still come through at room temp). I’ve gotten to the point where I’d rather let my white tea cool off before I drink it, it just seems better that way.'

Now, he's talking about brewing it hot and letting it cool. It's not the same thing. But when I read what he'd written, I had unintentionally been doing exactly that with various white teas. After I got as much out of the leaves as I could with hot water, I went on and soaked those same leaves in cold water overnight. With astounding results.

It's not the same as tea brewed with hot water. There are times when the result is something like faintly-scented water. It's subtle...a lot like what I've recently written about white tea in general. There are also times that I've left leaves in cool water, forgotten about them entirely, and after a day or so, the resulting tea was as strong and flavourful as any hot-brewed concoction.

Here, let's move in a little for a closer look:

Don't really drink the leaves, ok? Pour these through some sort of filter.

My question is: Have you tried this? What were your results? Though I don't think I'd do this with any black tea, it's had unbelievable results with Oolong, green tea, and white tea. How about you? Any experience?

the dragon sleeps tonight

Sleeping Dragon leaves presteeping

Relatively often, I hear about what a wonderful community we tea bloggers have.  Tea obsessives go to the World Tea Expo or World Tea East and wax poetic about the generosity of the people they meet there.  

Although I've met many tea shop owners here in Germany (and some in England and The United States), most of my experience with the people who populate the world of tea has been here in cyberspace.  I'm not complaining.  Am sure I'll make it to a trade fair at some point.  Until then, I intend to continue taking advantage of the fantastic opportunities to connect with tea drinkers online.

A week or so ago, I read about a tea tasting that Courtney Powers (otherwise known as @ThePurrfectCup) was hosting where she'd be introducing several sorts of green tea.  Jokingly, I said that I wish I could magically transport myself to Upstate New York and try the tea she was talking about.

Like I say, I was kidding.  There was no way I was going to make it the next day to Courtney's little tea shop.  But she offered the next best thing.  She got my address and sent samples of the tea along.  What an unexpected surprise.

I read her recent blogpost (A Green Tea Tasting) with a different perspective, because I knew that soon enough I'd be able to actually taste the tea she was describing.  My plan was to actually brew up each of the teas she served and pretend I was there.  

Alas, it wasn't to be.  I got distracted steeping and resteeping Sleeping Dragon from Adagio Teas, and then ended up writing a tea review about it.  

I'll link to the tea review when it's been published, but suffice it to say I enjoyed this tea. 

Not sure why they bill it as a tea for a green tea novice, but as advertised it wasn't remotely grassy.  

The best part?  Well, the time that I set aside for multiple teas, I spent really focusing on just one.  The last few weeks, I've been drinking tea functionally.  Good tea-no question. But tea on the run.  Tea for the train ride.  A pot for the other musicians and me before a rehearsal.

In this case, I really gave my full attention to each steeping of this Sleeping Dragon.  It was worth every minute.  Even got a little tea drunk in the meantime.  As a result, I think I might even sleep as well as the dragon.

Thanks Courtney.

caffeine in green tea

a very green path to Weimar

I've made a point of writing this blog partially for people new to tea drinking or curious about tea.  Periodically, someone will ask me a question, whether it's in my daily life or on twitter, and I assume that others are wondering the same thing and just not asking.

So earlier this evening @allisonjp asked me, 'Is there caffeine in green tea?'


Let me be very clear on this one (it's important for a couple of reasons)...there is definitely caffeine in green tea.  Definitely.  Yes.

Why is he making such a big deal about this?


Because there's a lot of misinformation out there about caffeine and tea.

Some examples of things that're absolutely NOT TRUE:

Most of the caffeine comes out of the tea in the first steeping.  After you've steeped the tea once, it's safely decaffeinated (This is completely false.  There might be less caffeine the second or third time around while steeping a tea, but it's not without caffeine).

Green tea and/or white tea doesn't have caffeine (Again...no way.  Don't believe it).

I've read a few reliable studies about how much caffeine is in different sorts of tea, and at some point I'll blog more thoroughly about it.

In the meantime if you don't have a problem with caffeine, enjoy that green tea.  With all of its delicious caffeine.

and I don't care how disgusting it tastes

One of the only reasons I ever bother wandering over to facebook anymore is because of this fantastic tea group there called Teefreunde (tea friends). Although it's primarily in German, there are a handful of English posts and these people are properly obsessed with all things tea.

So one post earlier today was written as such:

Gerade eben: "Ich hätt gern n grünen Tee, der darf auch fies schmecken. Hauptsache er ist gesund und nicht so teuer." (Immer nett lächeln) (My translation - just a moment ago: 'I'd like a green tea and I don't care how disgusting it tastes. All that matters to me is that it's very healthy and not too expensive.' I continue to smile nicely.)

What a funny interchange, right?

I wrote about the curious way that green tea is seen by the general public in: why does green tea taste like dirt?. It continues to astound me that people think green tea has to taste horrible. What an uphill battle to change this supposition.

But here we are again. Fighting the good fight. There were plenty of positive and helpful comments that you'd expect about water temperature and green tea of questionable quality (Gunpowder tea was the one that got the worst treatment), but my question is

Why does green tea continue to be so derided?

Is there something more that we can be doing?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

that wet earth smell

Am on a bit of a blogging tear right now, but it's hard not to be when there's so much going on around here. There was a nice mix of sightseeing and tea drinking today, but I wanted to quickly talk about a tea that Xavier brought along with him.

It's a green tea from China that he got as a sample from Le Palais des Thés, which is a tea seller we both like quite a bit. The tea's called Gu Zhang Mao Jian, and the package says that it has, 'the aroma of wet earth after a storm that is so popular in China.'

We spent an inordinate amount of time trying to detect that wet earth smell. But now that I have a bit more time to think about it, I wonder if the Chinese really have such a fondness for this scent of damp soil. If so, why?


But enough about that. Here's how the leaves looked before they got all earthy wet:

I thought it looked almost like a Darjeeling, but it tasted like anything but.




The first infusion was nice but alas, as you might've expected, no wet earth smell. Maybe it'd materialise upon further brewings (it didn't). There was a freshness to this Gu Zhang Mao Jian that I almost want to call grassy. Nothing like a Japanese Sencha, but very vegetal.

There was something that almost tasted of asparagus in there, and that sent us down the rather confusing yet enjoyable path of finding the French word for asparagus (it's asperge by the way). The asparagus-like taste only became stronger on the second infusion.

The smell of the leaves afterwards was so delicious. Almost wanted to go search for something about cooking with green tea leaves. Almost, but not quite.


Here's how the leaves looked after the thorough workout we gave them:

Unfortunately, you can't smell the asparagus in a photo. Use your imagination, ok?




There'll be plenty more about the weekend that all these tea people came to visit, but I wanted to include this tea review before things got under way in earnest. There will be a bit of earnestness, after all. You don't believe a word I'm saying, do you?

all this tea and I'm still thirsty

Die deutsche Version findest du unten.

Drank this whole pot of tea and I'm still thirsty. It was a smoky Grand Yunnan, and as much as I enjoy the taste, it somehow didn't affect how thirsty I am. As if I hadn't actually drunk any tea.

Yesterday I noticed that I was rarely satisfied after drinking a Bancha, and Verity Fisher responded with 'I never find green or roasted teas to be thirst quenching, but Indian/African/Ceylon blacks are. Odd, isn't it?'

It was such an interesting comment, and I've been pondering it ever since. Why do some teas simply not quench my thirst? What an intriguing question.

There's probably a scientific answer for this, but I can't begin to assess it. It's beyond my understanding.

But my personal experience? My objective opinion? I have plenty of that.

As much as I love the taste of a smoky Lapsang Souchong, it doesn't make me any less thirsty. And I seem to respond similarly to other smoky teas. I can't make a blanket statement about all green tea, but there are certainly some I can think of that fit in this weird category.

Many strong, dark teas do quench my thirst, so it has no direct connection to that. I know I was a little rigid about milk in my Darjeeling in my last post, but I still put milk in some tea. When I drink those (an Assam Harmutti or Ceylon BOP Uva) with a bit of milk, I know I won't be thirsty afterward.

Maybe you know of a chemical or physical reason why some teas are like this. If you do, I'd love to hear it.

But otherwise, have you noticed that certain tea quenches your thirst more than others? Which tea?



Eine ganze Kanne Tee habe ich getrunken und ich bin immer noch durstig. Es ist ein Rauchtee und obwohl ich den Geschmack mag, hat er irgendwie mein Durst nicht gelöscht. Als ob ich gar keinen Tee getrunken habe.

Gestern habe ich bemerkt, dass ich selten zufrieden bin, nachdem ich ein Bancha getrunken habe. Verity Fisher hat geantwortet: ‚Ich finde grünen oder gerösteten Tee nie durstlöschend, obwohl wiederum Tee aus Indien, Afrika und Ceylon (Sri Lanka) den Durst stillen. Komisch, oder?’

Die Idee war so interessant, daß ich seitdem immer noch darüber nachdenke. Warum löschen manche Tees überhaupt nicht den Durst? Was für eine Frage.

Wahrscheinlich gibt’s eine wissenschaftliche Antwort, aber ich kann damit überhaupt nichts anfangen. Das ist wirklich mehr als ich wissen kann.

Aber meine persönliche Erfahrung? Eine Meinung? Das habe ich natürlich.

So sehr ich ein rauchender Lapsang Souchong gern trinke, er mach mich nicht weniger durstig. Es ist ganz ähnlich wenn ich andere Rauchtees trinke. Ich möchte nichts über alle Grüntee-Sorten sagen. Trotzdem kenne ich viele grüne Tees die auch in dieser merkwürdigen Kategorie passen.

Viel starker, dunkler Tee löscht meinen Durst, so es hat nicht direkt damit zu tun. In meinem letzten Blogpost war ich ein bisschen rigide über Darjeeling mit Milch, aber manchmal trinke ich Milch in meinem Tee. Wenn ich Assam Harmutti oder Ceylon BOP Uva mit einem Schluck Milch trinke, weiß ich, daß ich nicht mehr durstig sein werde.

Vielleicht weißt du einen physicalischen Grund warum das so ist. Wenn ja, dann würde ich das gerne hören.

Andererseits, hast du bemerkt, daß spezifische Tees deinen Durst löschen als andere? Welche speziellen Tees?

why does green tea taste like dirt?

Green courtyard to go with the green tea

One of my intentions is to write this blog not just for those initiated to tea, but for people curious about tea, as well. Maybe they've had teabags and don't really get what all the fuss is about. Or they only drink tea when they're ill. Or they bought a box of teabags three years ago and periodically pull it out to brew a dusty old bag. With terrible results.

So, a good acquaintance on twitter (look how far we've come with all of this) complained about green tea today, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to give a few simple tips for brewing this stuff.

First of all, here's @CherylAnneNY and if you roll back through her tweets, you'll see that she's less than impressed with the green leaf.

I'm sure we could find a really pedantic site that explains brewing green tea in a really intricate and obsessive way. We're going to avoid that route entirely. I found a clearly written, short article about it (How to brew green tea), but I can already here you kvetching about each of the little things mentioned.

Here is a direct quote of the four main points:




1. Use loose tea

2. Heat fresh cold water to 165-170 degrees F in a non-reactive teakettle.

3. Let the tea expand while steeping

4. To adjust the taste, change the amount of tea, not the brew time






'Loose tea?', you ask. Is that really necessary? You want as little mess as possible. I know where you're coming from, but it really makes a huge difference. Quality and temperature of water are also crucial, but if you're using tea of questionable quality, then you'll get tea of the same questionable quality.

We want to keep this simple. Although filtered water is best, the most important thing, in my experience, is how hot the water is. For a long time, I let the water boil and added cold water to it. I've since learned that the water's properties change when you let it get to a rolling boil.

If you don't have a thermometer to check that the water isn't hotter than 170°F, then simply let it almost boil. I know that's not at all scientific and there are tea obsessives out there who'll insist that this is leading you down the wrong path. We're going to ignore them for the time being.

We just want to make it more comfortable for you in here with us tea drinkers. Once you taste how much better the tea is brewed with cooler water, you're more likely to ease in a bit deeper and start juggling thermometers and the teapots that're more ideal for green tea.


Until then, play with it. Use more leaves or less. Brew it for shorter than you think you should. It doesn't matter if the water is such a light shade of green that it looks like yellow water. How it looks is far less important than how it tastes.

I'm going to end this post by begging for responses. Cheryl agreed to let me mention her here by name, and then she pleaded, 'Hopefully you will suggest brands that don't taste like dirt.' Help me out here my loyal readership. I don't know American tea brands very well at all. What should she start with? If she has to go with teabags to start out, what's a brand of teabag that's not that bad?

Come on people...jump in here and help us out.

'Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.' -Princess Leia

Don't destroy your green tea!

Regularly, I assess how this blog lark is going and have been candid about what is and isn't going well. I've also been rather clear about the weak spots in my knowledge and what I most like to focus on here.

When I imagine who I'm specifically writing to, it's rarely the tea experts whose sites I love to read. I often finish reading one of their posts very aware that they've not only been into tea far longer than I, but have a breadth of knowledge that I can't even aspire to. Not yet anyway. Possibly never.

I want this to be a place where people want to come to find out about tea, but not be made to feel ignorant. Because I've purposely reached out to people new to tea, I get really good questions. Questions that I'm sure others have, but don't want to ask. For whatever reasons.

The one I've heard lately has to do with Oolong, green and white teas. First of all, are these teas an acquired taste? Also, do you prepare these teas similarly to the way you make black tea?

I'll answer the second question first. Black tea needs to be steeped in boiling water. The pot needs to be preheated, so the water temperature doesn't drop dramatically when you pour it into a cold pot. If you do that with green/white tea, you'll destroy it. The taste of the tea will truly suffer. Because these teas are so sensitive, they should be made with water that's not quite boiling.

I use a thermometer and aim for 80° C/175° F when I make any of these non-black teas. Although it's not in any way scientific, a simpler way to do it is to either stop your kettle right before the water boils, or to even pour boiling water into your pot and then half a glass of cold water in on top of it. In my opinion, the most important thing is that the water isn't as drastically hot. The method definitely works in a pinch.

What about steeping times? Everyone figures it out for himself/herself, but you can find good estimates on tea sites. I personally steep most green teas for about 3 1/2 minutes the first time round and then closer to 4-4 1/2 minutes on the second infusion.

And as for the first question: it really depends upon the specific tea whether you have to acquire a taste for it. I think white teas are relatively easy to take to because they're terribly light. As for greens, Asiatic Fox talks about a Chinese word that means 'good bitterness' that's often used in describing a tea's bite. I think if you're not yet used to that 'good bitterness', it might make some of these teas more difficult to stomach.

The wide variety of these teas that are grown in China, Japan and even India (yes even Darjeeling grows lovely greens and Oolongs) makes it possible that were you to hate a specific green tea, you can find limitless other options even from the same region. If your tea-sellers know what you liked or didn't like, I'm sure they'd be happy to find other teas that you will enjoy. As always, I'm happy to make suggestions. It's what I find myself doing more and more.

Schieß los!/Shoot!

Drink your vegetables

There are certain diseases and afflictions that I just have no connection to. I know a woman who's very active in Aphasia awareness and therapy and because I have no connection to it, I have no clue what Aphasia is. None. But most of us have some connection to Cancer. Some form or another. I'm constantly amazed at the general knowledge that the common person has about which Cancers are most fatal and what may or may not cause it.

A close friend of mine was diagnosed with not one but two forms of the really horrid varieties of Cancer. Won't go into any specifics about him here, except to say that this has completely changed the way he approaches nutrition. He's taking advantage of all the advantages Western medicine has to offer, but before he did any of that, he became quite an educated layman about what foods are and aren't safe.

When this blog was just getting off the ground and I wrote quite a lot about drinking tea with or without milk, he had some interesting points to make about the health benefits of avoiding cow's milk. Since then, he's kept me very well informed about different articles extolling the health benefits of green tea. If you're already into tea, this'll come as no surprise. Nevertheless, I do want to call attention to this.

Here's a page from the National Cancer Institute that says the results of tests are inconclusive:

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/tea

But notice the green tea seemed to show results with stomach or throat Cancer, while researchers weren't able to prove black tea had any direct link to preventing the same Cancers.

And the link he sent me was promising because it showed a direct link between certain specific fruits and vegetables and their ability to help prevent specific forms of Cancer. You can see it for yourself here:

http://www.anticancerbook.com/post/Cancer-Prevention-Some-Fruits-and-Vegetables-Bring-Specific-Protection.html

I love it that this delicious, soothing beverage is also aiding my body in warding off toxins, and even though I write much more about black teas, I drink more than my fair share of green and Oolong. There may be no scientific correlation between how well I feel and the obscene amounts of tea I drink, but it certainly doesn't seem to be hurting.

Aside from having to get up in the night to empty my bladder that is. That's the one downside to all of this tea.

Quick jump from Sino to Nippon

Roughly a week ago, I decided I'd done a passable albeit brief overview of black teas, touched on Oolong (back at the ooutset of this teablog lark), and had ignored green long enough.

Knowing that the best way for me to talk about specific teas with specific examples, I ordered a selection of different green and white teas, and went back to my daily grind. Didn't exactly forget about the shipment coming my way from Hamburg, but it certainly wasn't in the forefront of my mind.

It arrived and I tore into the parcel like a kid at Christmas. Or Chanukah or Kwansa or insert appropriate winter solstice holiday here. I was überglücklich.

There's an old Buddhist saying that, 'The taste of ch'an (Zen) and the taste of ch'a (tea) are the same.'

So if I plan to ignore China for the time being and go right to Japan, which I do, then I need to talk about tea ceremony and the history of tea's arrival in the Land of the Rising Sun. There's truly nothing I'd rather be doing right now. I'll try to keep it short for those I can already see yawning.

The way the Japanese prepare tea and present it is an aesthetic experience like nothing else I've ever seen. So exquisite is this experience that I wish all of you could just come with me to the tea shops I visited in Tokyo and Hammamatsu and other places. That was back before I had any idea that I was going to become such a tea whacko. I was there for the experience. Today I'd be there to grill the owner about the tea. You can imagine how tea shop owners cringe when they see me coming back to ask more questions.

But the main point I want to make here is that this tea preparation is a corollary to how the Japanese see life and the things that are important. They prepare the tea carefully and specifically, because that's how they view existence. It'd start sounding a bit esoteric if I went on much longer about this, but I needn't go any further. Here's what one of my favourite books said about this:

'...taking tea was said to be an earthly finger that "pointed to the moon" of enlightenment, the awakening to which all Buddhists aspired.'

from The World of Caffeine by Weinberg/Bealer