Some Tea With Me
A blog about the deep world of tea, featuring tasting notes, experiences, and instruction.
“Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence… It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.”
– Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea
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Horaido Gyokuro
October this year is a challenging month for me. There’s a lot going on! A lot of it is happy: several of my friends are getting married. The most difficult part, though, is that in a week I will need to travel a long distance to move my mother to be closer to her family.
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Some very old puer
Today I felt like having a Sheng (raw) Puer. It’s a sunny day and nearly Fall, and I wanted something energetic but comforting. I don’t drink my Shengs very frequently and so they’ve piled up for many years. I have a whole shelf of my tea cabinet packed with them, which makes for a fun
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Bai Mu Dan (White Peony)
Today I went back to one of the first loose leaf teas that I ever fell in love with: Bai Mu Dan or White Peony, a fairly high quality white tea from Fujian, China. As with every style of tea, white tea exists in a wide range. There are cake-pressed and aged white teas like
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Sapporo Shincha
Shincha, 新茶, is the first harvest Sencha of the year in Japanese tea gardens. When tea leaves are harvested, farmers pick the youngest, most supple leaves of the plant. As leaves age, they become tough and their taste becomes bitter, but the youngest leaves are soft and contain a large concentration of the organic compounds
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Japanese white tea from 7Tea+
When I was visiting 7Tea+ in Kyoto I asked for a recommendation to try a unique Japanese tea. Their tiny tea bar is so cute! Great selection and they clearly know a lot about tea from all over the world. Much to my surprise, the woman who was helping me suggested a 2022 white tea
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Yunnan green tea
I am always amazed by the variety of tea grown in Yúnnán province, the most south-western area of China. It’s extremely mountainous in the north and a tropical jungle in the south. In that large swath of land, they make every kind of tea. Although they are probably most well known for Puer, their red
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Tea in the past five years
Blogs are such interesting artifacts of our past. Before my most recent post, the last post I had written on this blog was from 2019, a full five years ago. Interestingly, it was about the same thing that I wrote about last week: a trip to Japan. But that’s not really what inspired me to
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Tea in Hokkaido
To old subscribers: hello and welcome back! It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here but it’s not like I haven’t been drinking a lot of tea. I decided to reinvigorate this blog a bit. To begin I’d like to talk about a wonderful experience I had in Japan this summer. This year
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Spring Sencha from Obubu
In my trip to Japan this spring, I was looking for a way to visit some tea fields and learn about tea production from farmers. Several people told me that this would be difficult given that I don’t speak Japanese. It turns out it wasn’t that hard after all, thanks to the wonderful people at