a Tea Manifesto

Since the madness in and near Oslo occurred last week, it’s been hard to avoid details of the meticulous organisation of the murderer. We’ve even been shown his manifesto that he released explaining his reasons as well as his regimen of precautions and planning. My first thought was, ‘Wait, does everybody have a manifesto? Is this some sort of requirement of living in modern society?’

So I’ve been trying to devise my Tea Manifesto, and I need a little help. Truly. There’s the obvious stuff about loose-leaf tea rather than bagged. And the whole idea of not selling tea as Darjeeling if it wasn’t, in fact, grown in Darjeeling. Those are pretty straight forward. And at least fellow tea obsessives will in all likelihood be on board with such things. But what else? What else belongs in a Tea Manifesto?

Here’s the problem I found as I tried to come up with a list of platitudes and guidelines: it doesn’t seem like it’ll be easy for me to get terribly rigid about my beliefs here. Something about all this tea drinking that necessitates that I be a bit forgiving if someone doesn’t do things exactly as I expect or demand.

Maybe if it were a Whiskey Manifesto, I could get blustery and radical. And after a pot of coffee, I could imagine my heart-rate boiling and my thoughts turning to a bit of revolution fomenting. But here I’ve just finished a nice day of reading and walking in the park and then more reading. It was all fuelled by pot after pot of delicious tea.

First a bit of Assam Mangalam, then onto some Ceylon Nuwara. After being outside, I turned to a bit of first flush Snowview Darjeeling. It was so good, I infused it once more. There’s another possibility for my manifesto…don’t throw away leaves that’ve only been used once. Some tea really is excellent he second time around.

What do you think? What belongs in my Tea Manifesto? Need your help with this. Desperately. Unfortunately, I’m just a bit too measured in my rabble rousing.

The tea that got me through

So it's been a long trip for a tea drinker in a coffee drinking culture. Have had my share of Greek coffee with the grounds sifting to the bottom. If you want to be a tea snob on this tiny little island in the Aegean, you have to bring your own. And I did.

Have already written about the teas I discovered in Athens, but there are a few mainstays in my tea chest that got me through.

If I wasn't drinking the new Grand Yunnan first thing in the morning, I was happily guzzling either Assam Khongea or Ceylon Nuwara. Here's the roof terrace where I'd try to have a cuppa before the heat of the day was so strong.


















That took me through to early afternoon where I often switched to either Darjeeling Singbulli or a variety of Oolongs that I'm a bit obsessed with right now. The Formosa Oolong was a fall back if I couldn't decide on another, but often I was dipping into the ones I've been talking about here lately. Especially the Bao Zhong Imperial. I get thirsty just thinking about this tea. And after four, or even five, steepings of the Oolong, I'd move onto some green. More on that later. Off to the airport on a tiny propeller plane to Athens. Then home to Munich.






The above-mentioned transition from Oolong to green often happened while I was watching the sunset from the roof terrace. Nice, eh?

Tea in rough waters

Have had a decent day today. Stressful, but all of what was thrown at me, I dealt with relatively well. To what do I attribute my ability to deal?

Well, tea obviously.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. I dealt with a frustrated client early this morning, and while I calmly explained how I could help him solve his problem, I was sipping on a Ceylon Nuwara.

Then packed up my tea in my bag that I take on the train, and went to an appointment with a client who's not yet paid me for work I did in March. Was still very calm. Somehow. And while I was talking to him, there was Assam Sephinjuri coursing through my veins.

Taught a class to a group of lawyers, while I polished off the Assam, and grabbed a Chai from an evil corporate coffee shop, who I've mentioned before but won't name again.

But the real stress of the day occurred when I got home for lunch and there were multiple emergencies (personal and business-related). I was drinking Jun Chiyabari Oolong at this point, and I assure you it helped.

Now, I'm off to proctor a test that I spent a good deal of the weekend preparing, and I've packed a thermos of Assam Mangalam, as well as a travel mug with China Wu Lu green tea in it.

Am sure I'll be fine the rest of the day. Am even rather certain that the evening will be ok.

Going to Darjeeling in my mind

‘The name Darjeeling came from the Tibetan words, dorje (thunderbolt) and ling (place or land), means the land of the thunderbolt’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darjeeling_district).


When I started this blog, I wrote a post about wanting to go to the Nuwara plantations in the mountains in Sri Lanka to see where one of the nicest Ceylons is grown. It was still the dead of winter, and I looked out at the Bavarian snow-covered rooftops. I imagined a nice, cool summer day in the Sri Lankan mountains, where maybe it was warm in the daytime but cool at night. So now my dream is to go to the Darjeeling or Assam region of India. But because I’m getting more and more into Darjeeling tea, I’ll start there.

I’ve been poring over travel guides/websites while I pour my tea. Haven’t yet been to India. Over the years, I’ve tried to plan the perfect first journey to the subcontinent. It’s all a bit daunting. Honestly? I don’t even know where I’d want to go first. Someone told me I should definitely start in Mumbai the first time around just to get acclimated. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

The things most often associated with Darjeeling are the world-renowned tea and Tenzing Norgay (Sir Edmund Hillary’s Sherpa). All over the region, you’ll find references to Tenzing. From shop signs that use his name to attract your business to people naming their children after this historically important man.

Read an article in the FAZ about Darjeeling, and now I’ve decided I’m going there. As soon as possible.

Daydreaming in Sri Lanka

Wrote about this tea in an early blogpost, but every morning, when I’m deciding which tea to start the day with, I keep coming back to Ceylon Nuwara. As I read from numerous sources, this is the Champagne of Ceylons. Full-bodied and really tasty.

It’s the dead of winter, and I’m sitting in the pre-dawn hours dreaming of being in the mountains of Sri Lanka. I’m not a beach person, so when I dream about the summer, it’s normally somewhere high in the mountains. I’d love to see these tea estates. Apparently, unlike in Assam where excellent tea is grown at much lower altitudes, in Ceylon, as well as many other places, the best tea is grown at the highest altitudes. This Nuwara is no exception.

Here I am on an early summer day, looking out over Lover’s Leap, not remotely concerned with the troubles back home. As a matter of fact while I’m lost in this reverie up on the Sri Lankan cliff, I have neither troubles at home nor a home per se. I’ve tied up all my loose ends and have embarked on a trip through the Subcontinent and China to drink all the teas at their source. And write about them.

These are my longings as I imagine myself sitting high in the mountains in the Nuwaru region of Sri Lanka. More soon about specific teas. Just wanted to share a bit of my melancholy. Brought to you by Germany’s endless winter.

Milk-in-my-tea crowd

You know, thanks to all of you in the milk-in-my-tea crowd, I've gotten back in the habit of spritzing my tea with a bit of moo-juice. Read something somewhere recently that adding milk to tea destroys the healthy qualities of tea. And my answer to that? So...

Health benefits of tea are extra for me. I drink enough tea without milk or sugar that I'm sure I'm getting all anti-oxidised the rest of the time. Right now I'm drinking this cup for the taste. And some teas taste better with a bit of milk. Am really digging Ceylon Nuwara these days (wrote about it a while back), but for breakfast I'm drinking Ceylon Bop Uva. Tastes fine without the shot of lactose, but am loving it with.

White gloves and port not necessary

Have already mentioned my move away from Earl Grey, but when I did decide to go Bergamot-less, I was only aware of the general names for black teas. The big ones are Assam, Darjeeling, and Ceylon. But those are merely places or regions where the tea is grown. When you get more specific, there’s an incomprehensible subdivision of the teas that come from these places.

So I decided to begin with Ceylon for a few reasons. I don’t want to only talk about the way tea tastes and the manners in which it is drunk. The history of tea is really interesting to me as well, and what I’ve discovered about Ceylon will take a while for me to describe. The most obvious thing is that this tea really is grown on the island of Sri Lanka, which was once called Ceylon.

How I’ll do this is start with what I’m drinking today and work my way through some other Ceylons as the week progresses. The first one up is Ceylon Nuwara, which is grown in high elevations in the mountains of Sri Lanka. The more I read about the way it is grown, the more I wanted to book a flight to go there and see these places with my own eyes. One of the estates is called Lover’s Leap for the cliffs near where the tea grows. If I believed everything I read, I’d blithely accept that limitless jilted or unrequited lovers have hurled themselves to their deaths from these very cliffs. When I picture myself looking out from the cliffs into the clouds below, I’m not particularly bothered by these stories.

As I’m reading this and that about Nuwara, I come upon an ad for a hotel/inn not far from Lover’s Leap. I think to myself, “Yes. Now we’re getting somewhere. This is more like it.” But as I read on, the description goes into great detail about the very Imperial manner in which one can enjoy staying there. Formal dress code, required pre-dinner drinks and a choreographed seating ordeal in which the men cannot enter the dining room until the ladies have all been sorted. White gloves, sorbet and port…this is exactly the kind of thing that makes it so difficult to reject the preconceptions about tea and the people who drink it. If I really needed to go through all of this to enjoy this stuff, I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten very far.

I’ve read this tea described as “mellow” and “bright-flavored”. Nothing against those descriptions. There are some much stronger teas that I’ll soon delve into, but this is a good start.