tea where you might not expect it

A weekend in a little bitty village (in the Ostallgäu region of Bavaria) called Pfronten. Fantastic hiking in summer and purportedly equally good skiing in winter, but I brought all the tea I'd need with me from home. It's not a big place. The shopping options were bound to be slim.

Upon arriving late Friday afternoon, I decided to take a walk into the town, and as I was peering into windows, I told myself, 'You might find a gift shop with some tea of questionable quality, but there's little or no chance of a real tea shop here.' Less than three minutes later, my eyes found the above-pictured door. That's a bonafide tea shop. I was pleasantly surprised.

Went in, looked around, chatted with the friendly tea-seller. The conversation consisted mostly of me saying how dumbfounded I was that there was a shop selling loose-leaf tea in such an out of the way village.

The woman laughed as she said that many people had expressed the opinion that a shop that sold only tea would never be successful. It was exactly the same thing that I'd recently heard (here) from Thia McKann at The Path of Tea.

Luckily, it wasn't to be the case. The shop is doing so well that they've expanded next door and are opening a Tee Stube (the German word for tea salon). I assured the woman that when I come back to Pfronten next year, I would be very excited to visit the Tee Stube.

Below is a photo of the wonderfully displayed tea tins. The likelihood that someone reading this blog will ever be visiting Pfronten down in southwestern Bavaria is small. But if you happen to be there, I have a tea shop for you that I can highly recommend.

If you'd like to see the website or peruse their tea selection, here they are: Elkes Teeshop. There's an Irish saying at the bottom of the opening page, and I like it so much, I'll translate it below.


'Whoever wants to be king, tea is the queen.'

dying of tea drinking

'King Gustav III (1746-92), determined to prove coffee was a poison, ordered a convicted murderer to drink coffee every day until he died. In an attempt to do things scientifically, he ordered another murderer to drink tea daily, as a control, and appointed two doctors to oversee the experiment and report on which prisoner died first. Unfortunately, both doctors died and Gustav III was murdered before either prisoner succumbed. The two prisoners enjoyed, or at least endured, a long life until the tea drinker finally succumbed first at the age of eighty-three.'
(source: The World of Caffeine p.93)

Have been thinking about prohibitions of many kinds lately, and it might surprise you to know that European leaders didn't always see the merits of caffeine consumption. For some reason coffee got the brunt of this over the years. It was a dangerous beverage.

I wonder what it must've been like to be one of these prisoners forced to play guinea pig and drink these exotic liqueurs...as punishment. If I were either one of them, but especially the tea drinking one, I'm not sure how easily I'd be able to deceive my torturers. Right?

Even if it was sub-quality tea, and I'm assuming it wasn't first flush Darjeeling, the ordeal of being forced to drink tea daily would be a welcome respite from the drudgery of prison life. If they got the idea that I was enjoying it, I'm sure the doctors might feel obligated to find an unhappier subject.

So, there I am staring over at my coffee drinking colleague. We both make as if this is really the worst misfortune that could ever befall such poor creatures such as we. But we're smiling inside. We guinea pigs.

tea-powered gore fest

Earlier today I was listening to an interview about a novel method of writing, and suddenly the subject of tea came up. In that moment, I knew this little nugget would be mined for the teablog. Such is the way of the teablogger.

But first the interview. Turns out a married couple, who happen to be writers, wanted to cash in on the success of the Swedish brutal-hyper-sexual crime novel (à la Stieg Larsson and his The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). In order to write together, they came up with a pseudonym Lars Kepler and they even went so far as to concoct a few specific habits, that are not their own, for this Kepler character.

One of them is that he's a tea drinker (in real life they both drink coffee), and they arranged to have what they call a 'tea meeting' when they'd actually sit down and write in the name of Kepler. They even brewed tea for these little sessions, and thankfully they actually drank the stuff.

While I was listening to the interview I was half-expecting the couple to say that they brewed the tea for their imaginary friend (sort of an empty chair for Elijah), and then poured the tea out after their session.

This would be a very different blogpost had that been the case. We don't take kindly to discarding perfectly good tea in these here parts. Not that whatever tea these two self-described coffee drinkers are brewing is necessarily decent tea. Can't imagine that it is even remotely acceptable, but you get my point.

I ask myself: What do I think about these two writers getting into character by coming over to the leaf-side if only for some sort of quasi-inspiration? I don't see much wrong with it. Why not? Maybe one or both of these writers will get ahold of some quality loose-leaf tea and start drinking the stuff on the sly. When the other one isn't looking. Stranger things've happened, right?

The original interview that I heard can be found here: The Authors Behind The Author Of 'The Hypnotist'. The book is admittedly a bit brutal and possibly not to be read after eating too many of the same lemon biscuits that the writers themselves enjoy.

But if you happen to enjoy gory crime novels, brew up some above-average tea and dig in.

the hotter the better

It's been exactly a year since I took my mother to Vienna. Was surprised at the variety of tea options there were in this coffee-centric city, and here's what I had to say about Wiens Teehandlung Schönbichler

It wasn't the date that reminded me but the warmer weather. It was actually really quite hot then, and I got to thinking about all the iced tea drinking I read about at this time of year.

I'm not an iced tea drinker. I really don't get it. All I taste is ice. Sure, I've had iced tea. And there were certainly times, when I was much younger, that I dumped a ton of sugar into a glass of iced tea and stirred to no avail...all the sugar sank to the bottom anyway.

Have no idea if this is scientifically accurate, but I've heard that it actually takes more energy for your body to convert the ice cold liquid to your body's temperature than to simply drink hot or even room temperature liquid. So, no matter how hot it gets, I still happily drink very hot tea. Happily.

accesible Gong Fu

When I think about who I write this blog for, other than for myself, I imagine people who're curious about tea and want to know more. There are certainly some rather knowledgeable people who come here, but there are so many beautiful and knowledgeable blogs about tea. I want to try and help demystify tea drinking a bit, and so I purposely write with the tea newcomer in mind.

Because I'm passionate about it in my daily life, I get a lot of earnest questions. I'm sure some of the more direct inquiries never get made. Along the lines of, 'Wow, this guy's a bit obsessive, isn't he?' But instead, people ask me a variety of questions both general and specific. And I figure such curiosity is the perfect sort of thing to write about here.

So my friend Gaby was over the other evening, and I offered her a glass of wine or some sort of sparkly fruit beverage. She knew I'd be drinking tea, so she insisted that sharing tea with me would be just perfect. I have a new Gaiwan that she hadn't seen, so I decided to go the way of Oolong. It wasn't immediately clear if I'd made the right choice.

Recently, I read something Alex Zorach said about not doing Gong Fu in a traditional way. Essentially his idea was, and I hope I'm paraphrasing it correctly, that he did a sort of a modified Gong Fu that might look a bit strange to a purist. Those are really my words, but the point was that he brewed in a way that worked best for him.

I think it's applicable if my above-mentioned goal was to make tea drinking a bit more approachable. As I poured the first infusion of the Milky Oolong for Gaby, she looked at the curious little snifter cup. 'Where did you learn about all of this?' It's a funny question. I've watched plenty of videos, been to tea ceremonies, peppered tea shop owners with a myriad of questions.

She didn't particularly like the smell of the first infusions of the Milky Oolong, so I didn't make such a big deal of sniffing every infusion. She did like the taste. She said it smelled like a flower you can get at the Viktualienmarkt, which is an open-air market in downtown Munich. Maybe it was called the Joshua flower, but she wasn't sure.

The nice thing was that she was so curious and so eager to try each new infusion. Although she preferred the taste of the tea to the smell, she continued to use the snifter cup. She liked the tea as it got weaker and lighter. As we continued through cup after cup, I tasted less 'milky' and more Oolong, but it wasn't the most complex tea.

What's my point here? Do I really think I can proselytise and convince everyone I know to not only drink tea, but go the way of Gong Fu brewing? No way. But it was a pleasure to see how accessible it was for a tea newcomer. It was nearly a foregone conclusion that I'd have a good time with all of this, but I was very pleased that Gaby did.

anything but a Tea Party?

As a rule, I avoid talking about politics or religion here. To be completely candid, I've broken my rule on multiple occasions. But still, it seems like me getting particularly vitriolic about something non-tea related might turn off someone reading, so I avoid it.

But ever since theTea Party has become so ever-present in American politics, there's been an interesting twist to being a tea fanatic. There's a Tea Party website nearly every time I make a general internet search for tea. Sometimes I actually click on the site before I realise it's a wacko site. But there I go showing my bias. Not the place for that.

I'd give specific examples of such illicit Tea Parties, but I don't want to be a party to driving any traffic to them, as it were. Anyway, you can easily use innocuous search terms including tea, and you'll find what I'm talking about. For example, punch in 'tea party socialism obamacare apocalypse', and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

But today I happened upon the inverse of this topic. What might that be, you ask? Well, the Democrats Abroad are very active around the world. And because there are plenty of Americans living in Germany, there are chapters of both major American political parties active in raising money and getting out the vote for ex-pats.

So here's what I read today:

'As a reminder, we are putting on a series of Coffee Talk videos, aka “Anything but a Tea Party”. Our thought is that you can watch YouTube in the comfort of your home while drinking a cup of coffee (or anything but tea). Then you donate what it would have cost if you had bought the drink at a coffee house or restaurant.'

This is their inventive way to raise funds. The money you saved that you would've spent in the cafe is what they're asking you donate to the cause. I get that. Since the seventies or eighties they've used the phrase 'for less than a cup of coffee a day' to get people to be more willing to donate to a good cause.

Children who're starving in Africa? You can make sure that at least one of them eats if you donate such a miniscule amount.

But 'anything but tea'? Did they have to call their Coffee Talk event 'Anything but a Tea Party? Really?

I know this is a backlash against the people who call themselves the Tea Party. The inverse of the polluted web search. But I still don't have to like it.

nostalgia for a place I've never been

I'll start out with a disclaimer. Bavaria is nothing like Darjeeling. Not at all. Not that I've been to Darjeeling. Not yet anyway. I'll go there one day. The more I read/hear about the mountainous region of northeastern India and its mystical air and bountiful soil, the more I desperately want to see it for myself.

So, instead I've been here in the Bavarian Alps for most of the last two weeks, and it's rained more than it hasn't. It's beautiful up here whether it's raining or not, but I love hiking and this torrential rain has definitely limited my opportunities to go up the mountain.

I was sitting here this afternoon, staring out the window at yet another dark and heavy cloud...I wondered to myself, 'What's the perfect tea for this weather?' Well, the mountain air and relentless rain is very similar to what I know of Darjeeling.

I've written quite a lot about Darjeeling in these pages, but here's one of the posts I liked the most. Actually, the comments/discussion after the post is what I liked most of all. Check them out: soil from which it came.

Had a few infusions of the Singell Estate first flush that I wrote about in the previous post. As good as it was down in the Bavarian capitol, it was somehow even more delicious up here at the higher altitude.

I somehow feel nostalgia for a place I've never been. Just thinking about is making me thirsty.