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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hong shui spring for fall
How to describe this tea experience? This spring 2010 Gao Shan Hong Shui (or Hung Shui) has the aroma and taste of plum and baked apricot. Caramelized layers surprise me, coming from a flaxen gold liquor. It doesn’t have nearly the darkness that I’d expect in a similarly aromatic Tie Guan Yin. The aroma is
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Old Tea: 2010 Winter Alishan Jin Xuan
Another among the teas I decided to test in my grand (old) tea tasting experiment of this summer. Another Ali Shan Jin Xuan (I have a lot), these particular leaves are the last remnants of one of my favorite teas of all time. Unless I’m misremembering, I purchased this tea from DigniTea in Taipei, a
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Old Tea: Pinglin Bao Zhong
This is the second tea I decided to test in my grand (old) tea tasting experiment of this summer. Another from Taiwan in 2011, drinking this tea is always a step back to rural Pinglin. We had taken a bus to the town hoping to find a plethora of tea shops, but we were surprised
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Some Teas to Test
A little preview of a new project of mine. I have a big cabinet of tea, much of it left over from China and Taiwan, much of which is not really cutting it any more. I find myself more and more frequently disappointed by the oolongs I’m pulling out of my stash, but knowing how
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The Size of The Teapot
Many months ago I wrote a post on Dobra Tea’s blog about tea pot sizes. This is an updated version of that post. I often joke that the more I learn about tea, the smaller my teapots become. There’s quite a lot of truth to this, and I thought it might be valuable to explain
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Brazier Experiments Three
Significant progress with the tea stove! One of our biggest challenges was lighting the charcoal, and so we thought, “let’s go buy one of those charcoal starter chimney things“. When we were in the store looking at them, though, it seemed to me that their design was really simple. Just a grate to hold up
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Puer is always appropriate
There’s very rarely a time when I’m not interested in drinking some puer. This is not true for other styles of tea. There are definitely days when a green tea seems out of place or a black tea too bold. Puer (good puer, anyway) seems to meet every situation with just the right amount of
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More adventures with the Brazier
With some success on our first try, my fiancée this afternoon attempted to speed the process of heating the charcoal on our ceramic tea stove. While much was learned, the resulting water was not as hot as we could have liked, and so we searched the tea cabinet for a tea that would fare well