Isn't it Ironic?

I've long stopped wondering about what people google to find this blog, but the past month has caught me chuckling to myself a few times due to the name I happened to choose for this blog and my current field of work.   I'm not sure I've ever explained the reason for the name of this blog, but as it initially was intended to be a tea review blog, I thought well its going to be a blog giving people tips on what tea's they should sip.  Hence "The Sip Tip."

Well within a few years of me creating this blog, several technologies started to emerge to the forefront in Telephony, especially those involving SIP servers using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and its interactions with TCP/IP  (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol).  There was for at least a year in there maybe two or three, any search for something similar to 'sip tip' would produce this blog, and every single other link would involve telephony software's, technologies, and protocols.  I jokingly said to myself I'll have to learn what that is some day to actually figure out what it is.

Flash forward several years, and due to a change of projects with my current employer, I am now immersed in a land of telephony, including dealing with SIP servers, protocols, and communications between massive numbers of servers along internal networks.  So many years after creating a blog called "The Sip Tip"  I am oddly employed in an industry that was possibly the number one cause of accidental clicks on my blog for several years.

In the mean while I will keep on sipping tea, and really try and focus on producing more content, and especially more photographs for this blog!  I apologize it has been a crazy 2014 so far, and I am not sure it is going to get any more sane, as my Marathon training starts to really ramp up, into a fall full of races. 

Priori-teas

Sorry for the horrible word play in the title.   However I've been thinking a lot about where tea ranks on my list of priorities lately, and I am not exactly sure.  I view it as an incredibly relaxing and enjoyable diversion, and still enjoy it immensely.  However I've struggled to find the time for it lately, and that is what worries me.  There seems to be an endless battle between working out/ running, drinking tea, and sleep, sadly all three can not happen in the same evening due to tea's effect on my ability to sleep.  Combine this with the fact that for some reason, and I am not 100% sure why, I have only had one somewhat lazy weekend in the past 3 months, which prior to that in this past year was when I could really sit down and focus on tea.

However I do still hope to learn about tea, and share tea with others.  In fact within the past month I have had a group of running friends over for some tea, and opened their eyes to what it can really be.  (For those interested in the line up, we started with Matcha, Sencha, Balhyocha, followed by a 1967 Baozhong.)   That afternoon was quite possibly the most enjoyable tea moment I have had for many years, as it feels good to try and share your passions with others, and I highly encourage any of my readers who have not done so to try and gather a group of friends that don't quite know about tea the way you do and have them over for tea.

I'll keep trying to sip on some tea while I look at my priority list and see if I can bump the lovely leaf up a step or two somewhere in there.

The Spirit of Tea

Through over 5 years on my blog, many things have changed personally, some at least in part inspired by tea.  As tea drinkers we get a lot of questions on what tea is to us, or why we drink tea.  Honestly though through those 5 years and actually back further I realize tea has pretty much been a constant in my life.  Why does this simple set of leaves thrown into hot water help people relax, wake up, recover, etc...?

Tea was there for me after my first traffic accident.  Tea was used to celebrate numerous happy occasions in my or my friends lives.  Tea has broken down barriers with friends.  It has also granted me comfort and time to meditate when I thought there was no such thing as free time.  There seems to be something about these tea leaves that has caused tea to be enjoyed so much throughout history.  This effect of being a near panacea for everything live can throw at us certainly has been known for quite a while in east Asian religions.  Tea and Zen have been said to be one and the same, especially as their fate/history in certain counties are incredibly intertwined.

The most amazing thing though is how unassuming tea can actually be.  It will be exactly what you want or need it to be, even if that item is some dry withered leaves tossed in water with no celebration or fanfare. Tea however I have learned does demand at least two things, and they are incredibly important.

Tea must be enjoyed, and tea must be shared.  All else is up to us.

Cold Brewed [Steeped] Tea

In passing with another tea person I know I had a brief although provocative conversation.  I mentioned that I was drinking some Cold Brewed Keemun I made for a party I hosted, and his initial reaction was that it was a waste of good tea.  I a bit shocked at the somewhat up front condemnation of how I was drinking this tea, decided to ask him more about what he meant, and the conversation that followed had some rather illuminating points on how do deal with bad tea, and as sort of the other side of the coin, how not to treat good tea.

Before I go to far let me say, when I defended myself by telling him this particular tea I actually had a hard time drinking warm, due to its incredible potency and general astringency, he conceded that cold brewing may be the way to go with that tea.  Though it is a bit amazing, Iced tea is not a foreign concept in the United States, I do not know to what levels it has caught on in other countries, but at the same time brewing tea cold, and drinking tea cold is sort of a bait and switch with pretty much any tea.  There is one somewhat clear guideline that makes perfect sense and no sense at the same time depending on how you think about it:

Bad tea often make good iced tea, while good tea seldom makes good iced tea.

Its a bait and switch/ role reversal with tea when you switch from hot water to cold water.  Now there are ways to make incredible cold tea with good tea leaves, but they often require so much leaf, or give so little liquid that they don't seem worth while.  For some reason for tea to taste like tea we need that slight astringent and bitter aspect to the brew, which bad teas often have too much of, and good teas often have just enough or a little less than enough allowing us to add more leaf and get that much more in terms of extra flavors from the leaves.   

Queue the heat,  tea brewing 101 quickly establishes a correlation between both steep time and temperature with overall astringency of the brew.  Temperature is the biggest factor though, as a lot more time is needed once the temperature starts to drop. I am sure all my chemically and biologically oriented friends could offer richer more scientific explanations of the processes involved, but the general idea is the hotter the water the quicker and more readily compounds get from the leaf into the liquid.  Now these items diffuse at different rates depending on the temperature, and  the ones that diffuses very slowly at low temperatures are mostly the same compounds that cause the astringent/ bitter tastes to develop in the brew. As such cold temperatures and long steeping times get the most out of the wide variety of flavors in the tea, with the least amount of bitter components.

Why not good tea on ice? This one is probably harder to explain, as in a certain sense if we think of astringency solely as a bad item, it should not make sense. But I maintain that a bit of astringency is what makes tea what it is, and helps highlight its overall taste.  As such if you take a tea already low in those compounds and brew it in a way that further reduces the amount of those in the brew, you can often be left with a liquid that may smell nice, but taste very simple and bland.  (It is almost like astringency is the spices of the tea world, while the base ingredients may be great, typically they perform their best with a little extra spices to bring them to life). 

Other years I may have thought this is a very timely post, but I am living in an area stuck in perpetual winter, and I can only dream of eventually seeing warmer days ahead in which I'd love to reach for a glass of iced tea.