Tea and Zen

Something I am asked very often by friends and family is how I became so interested in tea. The next question is how I came to know so much about tea. My family has begun to call me "tea-tea" after my younger sister conjured the nickname. Despite the fact I tell my friends I'm far from a "tea master" several insist I am.

How I got into tea is a lot more boring than people assume. From others I've heard that they walked into some Mom & Pop tea shop, tried tea XYZ and were converted for life. Others went to China, India, England, Japan, or elsewhere, and had a taste of a quality loose leaf.

I tried Twining's Irish Breakfast Tea. Super exciting right?

Growing up I had access to the bottom of the barrel quality tea: Lipton Tea bags and their iced "tea" sugar mix. Because of this I was sure I didn't enjoy tea for the longest time. I would load it up with sugar and call it a day. It was bland, bitter, and all around terrible. In fact, when I was little I heard of the Japanese Tea ceremony and the first thing I thought was: "Why would there be a ceremony about tea? It isn't even that good."

Twining's had much more flavor than Lipton. My mother had won this package of 20 teabags, among other stereotypical Irish things at a St. Patrick's Day event. I was sure I knew everything about tea after that. Black tea was the only good tea and green tea was horrible. It was bland and bitter, who would like that?

And then I stopped drinking tea for a while. Despite this, I'd talk about how much I knew about tea and loved it. Did you know green tea and black tea come from the same plant?

Because of this tooting of my own horn, my grandma bought me Bentley's Classic Tea Collection for Christmas around '06-07, I don't remember which. I was ecstatic. 120 tea bags, six different flavors. Who could ask for more???

I never finished them. Last year I gave away more than half to a friend of mine because there was no way I was going to get through them all. They were not foil sealed so the Earl Grey tainted the Orange Spice, which tainted the Peach, which tainted the Raspberry which-- they all tainted each other and made their already horrendous green tea even worse.

Sometime around 2007-08 I found anime. I was a weeb for a while and it makes me sad. This new found love (and lack of actual knowledge) of Japan and their culture, I loved green tea. It was the best thing in the world. Little did I know that green tea I was chugging was generic, pan fried Chinese teas.

Around the same time, for Christmas, my mom bought me a teapot very similar to this. Same design, the spout is just on one of the corners and stubbier. I was so happy! I now had a pot and a strainer. This meant I could make all of the tea. I had no loose leaf and didn't know where to get it, so it sat dormant in my room.

Come sometime early 2010 I was wandering around in a mall with a friend of mine and my eyes landed on gold: Sencha. I didn't actually know what this was, but it was from Japan (it said it was authentic and high quality so of course they're telling the truth) so I had to get it. The package said I needed to use 4g/8oz, use fresh boiling water, and let it steep for three to five minutes. It was from the Metropolitan Tea Company. 

I thought it was terrible, but I drank it anyway because Japan. I began to lose interest in anime and grow out of my weeb phase, and so tea left my life again for some time. I was still an expert though.

Around six months or so later I found myself loving tea again. It kept coming back into my life for years, and I had matured enough to realize I didn't know diddly squat. I had done a little reading on Japanese teas (specifically sencha) and soon understood why I thought that it was so horrid. The brewing directions were very wrong and the leaf quality was... not so great.

I kept reading and reading. I learned of this cool tea called Gyokuro. It was really expensive and shade grown. I learned about oolong's beyond the faux Wu Yi oolong tea bags I had sitting in my room. I learned about Yixing and the deep, dark rabbit hole that it is. I learned about the various Japanese kilns (Bizen anyone??). I discovered yellow and white teas, puerh, and a whole world of knowledge. After collecting all sorts of information over a year or so I was a wealth of knowledge. I knew how each category of tea was processed. I could tell you all the major growing districts in China and Japan. I knew what FTGFOP meant. I knew all the main brewing methods, what the general steeping temperature was for each category of tea and the appropriate tea to water ratio before you began to tweak. By looking at leaves I was able to determine if it was of reasonable quality or not. I had discovered numerous reputable vendors.

Yet, at the time, that was all in theory. It wasn't until sometime late 2011, early 2012, that I was able to put my knowledge into practice. At first, I was devastated. I couldn't pick up on all sorts of subtle notes that people said some tea had. I couldn't tell people what I thought the tea taste like other than "good" or any of the main categories (vegetale, floral, earthy, savory, spicy). Even then, sometimes I wasn't sure what category the tea fell under. I read on many blogs that as long as you drank tea every day, took notes, and continued to read you'd start to be able to talk about tea in depth.

A few months went by and I still couldn't do it so I started to give up on trying to figure out what I was tasting and just enjoy the tea. Sometime after, out of the blue, I had found I was able to talk about what I was tasting. I recognized that flavor! I knew how to describe how the tea felt in my mouth. My love for tea was rekindled once more, as it had started to deflate slowly.

I continued to grow from there and find myself where I am today. My tea journey was anything but exciting. Slow, broken, and pompous for quite some time.

So good reader, if you are new into tea, remember this: if you can't talk about what you taste too much, do drink tea daily. Try to drink it in smaller amount (less than 100ml brews) in order to appreciate and taste the tea more. Do try all sorts of tea, you never know what you'll like. Do play with the leaf to water ratio and temperature of teas. You may find you like a tea at a higher or lower concentration, a lower or higher temp, than what is recommended. Do join communities like Tea Chat, /r/tea, and local communities to learn more about tea. You'll never know everything!

Do not get discouraged. You'll get there. Keep at it and before you know it, you'll be able to talk tea. I wasn't very confident in my ability to speak intelligently about tea until sometime late 2014, and even then I felt like I still didn't know enough. Now I know I can talk intelligently about tea, but I also know there is a wealth of knowledge I can still obtain. 

However, if you are very new to tea, I don't recommend investing a lot of money into tea ware. As I did many, many times, after the initial zing of tea dies off, people lose interest. Most never get back onto the boat many times like I did, only to plunge face first into the depths of tea.

In my next post I'll talk about how you can get into tea if you're not already. I'll include everything from the bare basics to fancier, more critical styles of brewing such as Gong Fu cha.