The Way of Tea, (a way to a Kensho with tea?)

Kensho - a Zen term for a type of enlightenment.

If had had to describe the effect of this book on me, it would have to have been a form of enlightenment. It might just be I read this book at the proper time, and many different things fell together, but let me use the picture to help elaborate on how this book helped open my eyes to tea.

This book focuses extensively on appreciating tea for tea, and not attaching value to things real or perceived, just let them help make tea for you wonderful. The three Adagio tins in the picture are left over from a series of sampler packs I got over a year ago, simply put I did not like them, upon first taste and I set them aside basically forgetting about them. The Yixing in the picture was one of the two yixings I got on my first purchase, something I always considered as a bad purchase, and I resigned to the fact of placing it on a shelf for a bit of decoration.

But, somehow this book inspired me to try again, well as the yixing is incredibly large for my usual brewing, I looked at the adagio tins, and said, this would make a great teapot for casual brewing Hong cha (red tea). So I got it out and it made an absolutely delicious brew. But my mind was not on the quality of the leaf, nor the fact that the teapot was unable to pour without leaking even rather close to empty. My mind was on taking the tea for what it was.

This brings up a point that Tim over at the Mandarins Tea Blog wrote about the other day involving leaving prejudices about tea or basically everything behind before brewing the tea, and just let the leaf speak for you.

This book will teach you how to enjoy tea for tea, and it might just help you along the way to enlightenment as to the big picture of tea.

This book is not for you if you are not into the spiritual aspect of tea, or feel a scientific approach to tea is the only way to get good results.

I hope you get a chance to pick up this book, it truly a joy to read.

The Problems with Tea

If you read this blog, you probably enjoy tea for tea, and for that I am thankful, and feel free to read the rest of this post for a laugh. As this post is 100% serious, but rather laughable when viewed from the perspective of those of us that love tea. So here is a numbered list of the biggest problems with tea that I have found.

1. Tea is Healthy, I'd much rather have tea be somewhere on the over all level of health as somewhere between coffee and cigarettes, maybe settle for on par with soda (though most bottled teas basically are soda). I mean if tea was as healthy as cigarettes I might have reasons to restrain myself from drinking it as often as I do. But the thing I can not stand is tea being billed as some sort of wonder beverage. It drives me nuts, as the tea loving public that are the backbones of tea forums, and beacons of tea knowledge in the west, often have to answer mundane questions like "Will I get more of compound X if I brew my tea in fashion Y." While I actually have no problem with a person trying to be healthy, it is the fact that many people are saying they don't care about taste, while some of the methods of preparation would produce some nasty concoction I wouldn't want to call tea.
   
2. Boston Tea Party, I have no problem with the actual Boston tea party. It is the fact that it had to be tea that was thrown off the ships. While it might have been a waste of tea, and it made tea borderline Taboo in the United States for many many years after that, those actually are not my problems. It is the fact that modern political activists have taken the moniker "Tea Party" as their group thinking that somehow they are fighting a similar war against Taxation that happened in Boston all those years ago. As this is a tea blog, I will have no comment on anything political. But the fact that I can't even have a general google reader news search for "Tea" without coming back with articles mostly on the political organization with maybe 5% of them actually on tea. And Social networking sites such as twitter, have many people flooding the site with the tag #tea instead of tea party.
3. Tea is Asian! This one is really a joke, but the point behind it is the fact that the languages in Asian countries are completely different than most Western Languages. Do not get me wrong, I feel like getting exposure to languages is great, and that people should be fluent in as many languages as possible. But the fact that the differences between Eastern and Western languages are so great, it is hard to get proper translations of information from websites without being fluent in both languages yourself. Also with the Roman based alphabet being so prevalent across many languages I can begin to sound out most words in most European based languages without fully knowing the language, but I can not look at a Kanji character and be able to guess its pronunciation without already knowing the character which probably means I already know its translation. And not knowing how to pronounce the character makes it virtually impossible to look up a translation to a kanji character.
   

I hope you enjoyed this post, I felt I should infuse a bit of humor for us tea lovers.

Collection of My Articles on Tea and Teaware

This post is going to be linked on the side bar of the page, for quick access to all written articles I have about tea.

On This blog:

Gaiwan got you down?

How to Fly

Making vs. Experimenting Tea

Musings on Yixing 1

Puerh Whiskey of the Tea World

Tea Musings

Tea and its Embodiment of Nature


Hub Pages Articles

Puerh Taste the Age


My T-ching Profile

Attempts at aging Oolong tea.

I'll say right away that this post does not contain any tasting notes, but instead it is what I am doing in the way of aging oolong tea. I have close to 1Kg of oolong that I am storing to see what will happen over time, and they are in a sense testing different storage methods.

First is I have a little Chinese jar that I enclosed some wuyi that I felt the roast was just to much on, as it tasted quite like ash. In all honesty I have little hope for this, and I'm probably going to give it a taste sometime in the next 2 months or so. But this I did not aquire to age, this I aquired then thought it could use age.

Next is rather ambitious, and possibly going to be a huge failure. At a Chinese market I picked up 300g of Dong ding, which I got cause it was in expensive. Made some in a gaiwan, and said "Way to green!" So the easiest way to ungreen an oolong in taste is in my mind to age it, maybe not the quickest but the easiest. This is the tea that actually inspired me to write this post, as while I have not tired it since I first got it about 6 months ago, I did today realize that it was rather dry today, so I decided to do some up keep on the tea. So I "roasted it" quotations as when a tea is roasted in its traditional preparation it involves being roasted over wood or charcoal, something which imparts flavor as well as giving the effect of removing moisture. This I simply had it in a clean fry pan, over my electric hot plate on low, for nearly two hours, and of course stirring often. I stopped when picking up tea with my fingers it no longer felt slightly moist. I feel this is a necessary step when aging oolong especially green oolong in a poorly sealed container as otherwise moisture can get in an essentially ruin the tea, by making it excessively sour.

Another tea I have is rather a vain attempt to try and produce something of the quality of the Shui Xian bricks that the Tea Gallery had dating from 1997. I managed to pick up some 2007 DHP bricks, and I've been keeping them, and I can only hope it works out well.

I also am aging some already aged teas to see if they improve, these are sealed in individual foil packets, and it should be interesting to see how they handle being stored in those over time.

So I will try and keep you informed on these teas as I get around to tasting them when I think they are ready. At least two of them I will probably get around to trying in the next month or so, while at least one of them I probably will not write about for another year as I just placed those into storage.