Too many teas

I am starting to realize there are far to many teas to try, when I first started drinking tea, I thought this far into my journey I would have at least explored several types of most of the main categories of tea. Tea in general presents a challenge, juggling your stock and placing orders based on various considerations such as old favorites, new things to try, and desire to use a certain piece of teaware.

One thing I have come to realize is I have now found so many favorite teas, that I could almost be content ordering them over and over again, and simply drink them in a bit of a rotation. Though I like to explore a little bit so while I will enjoy drinking those teas, I always want to try new teas, one blaring gap in my tea journey is a lack of exploration of Taiwan Oolongs. While I have tried a few, I have yet to drink much more than a sample of any Taiwan oolong, and no where near enough to get a good understanding of what they can be.

What I find most interesting though is due to some of my favorite pieces of teaware, are only being used for a few specific teas, and while I may not care if those teas run dry, I tend to get a bit on edge if I do not use a piece of teaware in quite some time. For example I usually do not keep matcha on hand, but typically after going 2 or 3 months without it, I feel the urge to order a can.

Japanese Tea

This post is going to be some of my favorite photos involving Japanese tea, while I bring up the idea that I would like a lot of tea drinkers to get behind. Due to the devastated Japanese economy, if you are not skiddish about the possibility of radiation, of which until I see otherwise it is highly unlikely that any tea will hold severely elevated levels of radiation. And those radiation levels bar any horrible disaster yet to take place will be quite unlikely to even get close to levels that are unsafe for consumption.

So I would like to call this the Year of Japanese Tea and Ceramics, i.e. if you wanted to give Japanese teas a try, do it. If you are running low on two different teas, and one of them is Japanese, place the order for the Japanese teas first. In short any tea related purchase of which you are deciding between two or more, and not partial to one over the other then err on the side of Japanese.

Tea in the morning

For someone addicted to caffeine like me I find it rather funny that I rarely get around to having any caffeine shortly after waking up in the morning. Above is a picture of a set up I had for breakfast today which was quite nice, and one of the few times I have gotten around to making tea within an hour of waking up.

Perhaps it is because I wish to put my full effort into the tea, and keep relatively little amounts of tea on hand that I would like to risk horribly brewing in my waking hours. I hate to admit it but I am one of those people that getting up is a bit of a chore, and my head is usually in a bit of a cloud for quite some time after it leaves the pillow.

But I have a fair amount of hong cha on hand now, and I am thinking of making an effort to spend an hour or so drinking tea each morning to help me try and wake up. Part of me wants to try and become familiar with the habits of other tea drinkers, and while I know those of you that read this blog love tea, and look forward to drinking it at just about any time, I am wondering how many of you brew tea within the first hour or so of waking up?

Tea always surprises

I am sure nearly all of us tea drinkers have these teas, teas that we always go back to and enjoy. Not only do we enjoy these teas, we keep finding new things about them, that surprise us and let us enjoy them even more. It is often times when I get surprised from a tea I thought I was already rather well acquainted with that I wonder if I should become a bit more scientific in my tea drinking.

By scientific, I mean keep track of temperature, humidity levels, both inside and outside, also including the weather outside that day. Things people talk about most notably is whether or not is it raining that day, when considering how certain tea tastes, and the consensus is most teas taste best on rainy days, especially roasted and aged teas.

Though the idea of keeping a tea notebook, in which those things were kept track of, comes from me witnessing it first hand when I visited the Tea Gallery a few years back. When we did a bit of a tea experiment between two identical Nannou Cakes stored in two different locations one graciously provided from the collection of The Mandarin, while the other I believe was stored in Vancouver. When they started the experiment they took out a notebook and read the temp, and humidity and I believe they even took notes regarding the weather.

While I feel I face too much "rigor" in my mathematical studies, I rather like tea because it gives me a chance to sort of wing it and deal exactly with how I feel in terms of my mood. I mean I do own a scale for measuring tea, and I used to have a thermometer to measure water temp. When I used those while I could get consistent results, I was rarely surprised. I learned that while being somewhat spontaneous with the tea we can learn new things about it that we did not quite expect.

I love it when I get completely surprised by a tea, so I am torn between trying to keep track of why the tea tastes different that day, or just taking it in step and rolling with the surprise to possibly try and recreate it later.