Matcha

Matcha is, to many, Japan’s signature tea. It’s tea ceremony tea and green tea ice cream tea, cooked into food in huge amounts or the center or placed at the

Matcha Kaze

center of elaborate ceremony. The tea house sells five different kinds of matcha! We’re enthusiastic about breadth of selection, but this is a subtype of a subtype of green tea, and we don’t even have that many different Ah Li Shan oolongs. Matcha’s special stuff.

A Brief History of Matcha

At first all teas were powdered. It wasn’t until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that steeping whole tea leaves became popular. Tea first showed up in Japan as early as the sixth century, and its popularity surged when it was promoted by the monk Eisai, who brought Zen Buddhism, some tea seeds, and a serious respect for tea to Japan in 1191. The Zen Buddhism isn’t a side note; steeped tea totally replaced powdered in China, and might have done so in Japan as well, except that Zen Buddhism had by that time solidly taken root, and powdered tea had become something of a ritual for the monks. So matcha stayed, a throwback to an ancient evolutionary stage of tea, like a coelacanth or something. Except tastier. I  bet coelacanths are pretty fishy tasting.

The Tea Ceremony

Matcha Miyabi

The tea ceremony was developed during the Warring States period (somewhere in the 14th or 15th century – 1600), when Japan had dissolved into many little states that were constantly at war. The peaceful, elegant tea ceremony is a poignant contrast to the political situation, especially since political negotiations were often done during tea ceremonies. The tea ceremony is a complicated procedure, centered around tea and pastries, and formalized with many rituals of cleansing and polite respect. The idea is to develop an artistic, meditative atmosphere, like the parts of Kurosawa films without people bleeding all over the scenery. This requires very good tea.

The Tea Itself

Matcha starts with the tea plants, which are shaded for a few weeks before harvest, like gyokuro. Unlike gyokuro, the leaves are dried in a way that allows them to crumble a little. The veins and stems are then picked out, and the remaining leaf is ground up even more finely, resulting in the vivid green powder which is matcha. This powder is placed in a bowl called a chawan, and water is mixed in with a whisk called a chasen, so that it’s sort of frothy. Then you drink up your matcha before too much powder settles out. It’s delicious, and very good for you! Try not to slurp, though, that’s not meditative.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

New Tea! Decaf Nilgiri Green

We have an interesting new tea at the teahouse, a decaffeinated, organic, green Nilgiri. It’s very hard to find seriously upscale tea that’s decaf; our other decafs are both blends, English Breakfast and Earl Grey. They’re both quite tasty, but they’re blends of teas from all over the tea making world, generic and solid and not really that interesting. Great for first thing in the morning, or while you’re working on something else, but what if you want interesting tea that you can think about a bit but don’t want any caffeine? Hard to find, until we tracked down this nice Nilgiri. It’s also organic, like our other decafs, so there’s no need to worry about creepy chemical residues (check my article on decaffeination if you want to know more about that). And aside from the whole to-caffeinate-or-not-to-caffeinate issue, it’s special because it’s a green Indian tea. India got into the tea cultivation business to make black teas to ship to Britain, and to this day makes very little green, so this is a really uncommon tea. Surprisingly enough, it’s tasty, too. We try a lot of samples of weird tea that turn out to just be weird and not good, but this one is as tasty as it is interesting. Well worth a try.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Bi Lo Chun

People often refer to China’s ten most famous teas as if there were some ancient and revered list, gone unchanged since the days when they made those expensive Ming vases or something. In reality, there are a lot of lists of China’s top ten teas, and they vary a fair amount. Two teas are always on them, though: Long Jing (Dragonwell), and Bi Lo Chun.

Bi Lo Chun is an old and valued style of tea, with attestations as early as the Sui Dynasty, in the fifth century! It didn’t get the name “Bi Lo Chun” (also spelled Pi Lo Chun and Bi Luo Chun) until 1699, though. The original name was Xia Sha Ren Xiang, which means Scary or Deadly Fragrance. The story goes that a young woman picking the tea ran out of space in her basket, and started putting the leaves down the front of her shirt. Warmed by her body heat, the leaves gave off such a striking aroma that they were named for it. Then, in the seventeenth century the Emperor Kangxi, visiting the area where it was grown, decided it needed a more civilized name and called it Bi Lo Chun, which means Green Snail Spring, because the leaves are curled into little spirals that resemble snails, and are picked in early spring.

The early picking is an important feature of this tea. The Chinese Qing Ming festival, in early April, is the traditional start of spring, and Bi Lo Chun is picked around then, and sometimes even earlier. The bud and first leaf are picked when they’re still very small (there can be 7,000 in a single pound of Bi Lo Chun!), and the tea is renowned for the delicacy of its leaves. A good Bi Lo Chun is very downy, the buds still covered in their tiny white hairs, as though it were half white tea. I always want to pour out the leaves and pet them because they look so fuzzy, an impulse I usually only get with Silver Needle (I try to suppress it. They are sort of soft, but they’re too small to pet properly, so it’s an excercise in frustration). The tea itself is remarkably sweet and floral, like you get with some oolongs. This comes through strongly in the fragrance of the dry leaves, which I suppose led to the original name. There’s also a rich, sometimes nutty support for that floral note, so you end up with a really complex well-rounded tea.

Originally Bi Lo Chun was grown only on a pair of mountains (collectively called Dong Ting Mountain) by Tai Hu lake in Jiangsu Province. They still grow it there, the tea plants mixed in with fruit trees to enhance the sweetness of the tea. Since it’s so popular, actual Dong Ting Bi Lo Chun is fabulously expensive, and the finest stuff can’t even be bought commercially. Tea in the same style is grown all up and down the Chinese coast now, though, so those of us who don’t live on the shores of Tai Hu can have some, and we have a really nice example from Fujian Province, quite rich and satisfying. It’s really worth sitting down and savoring, and maybe at the same time you can pet the pretty downy leaves, just a little.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Organic Certification

Organic labels look very pretty, and give a vague sense of safety and doing good for the planet, but it’s tough to figure out what they actually mean. I’ll take a shot at decoding them here.

Organic standards are usually set by governments these days. For the last decade governments around the world have gotten serious about coming up with legal definitions for the word “organic,” and developed countries now all have their own set of standards. Some people are working on getting major international standards set up, so we aren’t looking at an alphabet soup of different certifiers, but that’s still a ways off.

The different governments and agencies have all set up very similar standards, though. The basic outline:

• no GMOs (genetically modified organisms, frankenfoods), irradiation, or sewage sludge can be used
• synthetic chemical inputs must be avoided, and when they’re necessary, the farmers must use one of a list approved by the government
• composting, interplanting, crop rotation, physically going out there and weeding, and similar methods are encouraged
• the farm must use these techniques for a transitional period (usually three years) before being considered truly organic, so that any chemicals previously used have time to get worked out of the system
• seeds and cuttings used in the farm must be from organic plants
• the crop may only come in contact with permitted chemicals during harvesting and processing, and must not commingle with non-organic crops at the time

The acronyms you’ll most often see  on tea packages, and the governments they’re associated with, are:

• USDA: this is the United States’ Department of Agriculture, and you’ll also see people mention the NOP, the National Organic Program that is managing organic foods. Here’s an informative outline of their rules.
• EEC or EU: the European Union. You’ll see EEC because it was the acronym of the previous European association that developed a set of organic standards, and the current legislation is closely modeled on the EEC’s standards. Here’s a central document in their organic legislation.
• CNCA: this is China’s administrative body that’s in charge of all accreditation, including organics. China’s organic standards program is called GAP, Good Agriculture Practice. No, I don’t know why a country with a character system of writing goes to the trouble of translating their goverment agencies’ names into English just so they can have confusing acronyms, too. Japan does it, too, maybe they felt left out. This is about CNCA organic certification.
• HKORC: the Hong Kong Organic Resource Center. Hong Kong maintains a lot of autonomy, and its government has its own bit of bureaucracy that sets organic standards.
• TAF: the Taiwan Accreditation Foundation, Taiwan’s accreditation board. Here’s their website, but since the TAF accredits organizations for many kinds of certification, not just organic, so it doesn’t talk specifically about organics.
• JAS: Japanese Agricultural Standards, the organic standards set by the Japanese government. Here’s a helpful website with information about it.

But wait! There’s more! Governments are big and busy, and farms are small and busy, so someone has to help the farms comply with the standards the governments have set, as well as doing the regular audits that are usually required by the standards, to check that the farms are still complying. These companies have their own acronyms, and you’ll often see their seals on tea. There are a great many of these, but looking around our shop I saw IMO and OCIA labels on our tea. Since they’re businesses, they have snazzy websites of their own that are excellent places to look for information on organic certification, since a lot of people like to understand what they’re paying for before they hand over tons of money so people will come around all the time and ask them probing questions about synthetic chemical inputs. Definitely check out their websites if you’re curious about the whole organic certification process.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Decaffeinating Tea

Up for more technical discussion of the chemical composition of tea? Of course you are! You aren’t going to find out how they get the caffeine out of tea leaves without vocabulary that I, at least, thought I had escaped when I fled my high school chemistry class. The story has a happy ending, though, at least for people who get their decaf tea from our tea shop, so you can read on with the same confidence that you go to a mainstream scary movie with, the pretty heroine will make it out alive, and without even drinking something called dichloromethane.

How Tea is Decaffeinated

Here’s the basic outline for how things are decaffeinated: first, the leaves are soaked in a little water if it’s been dried, so that the chemicals can move around properly. The point of drying them out in the first place is to stop chemical reactions from happening until you combine them with hot water to get them to react into a nice cup of tea, so this has to be undone first. Second, the leaves are exposed to a solvent that dissolves out the caffeine, hopefully leaving the rest of the chemicals in the leaves mostly alone. Then they re-dry the leaves, and voila! The decaf version.

Wait, solvents? Do I want to drink those?

That second step is dodgy, though. First, there is a selection of solvents. Once the solvent touches the leaves it never all comes off, so this is important to you, the decaf drinker, because you’re drinking your solvent, too. One, the dichloromethane from the first paragraph, also called methylene chloride, is such an effective solvent that it’s also used in paint stripper, degreaser, and dry cleaning solution. As you can imagine, it isn’t the safest thing ever ingested, and the US isn’t wild about letting producers put it in our tea. It’s still used in some countries, though, so there is a chance it could end up on your cheap decaf.

A second solvent, ethyl acetate, is found naturally in tea leaves, and so is often called “natural decaffeination.” There’s a lot more ethyl acetate left on a decaf tea leaf than there would naturally be, and it is derived artificially so they can have enough of it to be useful in industrial processes, so it isn’t really that natural. The third solvent is carbon dioxide, put under enough pressure that it’s almost a liquid. While carbon dioxide is bad for the atmosphere, it’s fine for people, so it’s the solvent you want.

Is the tea still healthy like all the articles say it is?

The other problem with the solvent step is that it’s hard to take out just the caffeine and not anything else. Ethylene acetate takes out a lot of the flavonoids, those anti-cancer chemicals, at least a third and usually more like 70%. There are some processes that can be used to filter the caffeine out of the stuff the solvent takes out and then the producers can try to get the rest of the chemicals to dry back onto the tea leaves, but they don’t work that well for tea. Luckily, carbon dioxide is much better about leaving the other chemicals alone, stripping away only about 5% of the flavonoids.

Here’s how that works: Caffeine molecules are smaller than most of the other molecules that make up a tea leaf, so they’re easier for a solvent to move, and since the carbon dioxide is a gas under a carefully calculated amount of pressure rather than a liquid, it can be calibrated to be just dense enough to be able to carry off the caffeine and not enough to take the bigger molecules. Decaffeination with caffeine is technically called “supercritical fluid extraction,” because the carbon dioxide under pressure is called a supercritical fluid, ie a gas put under so much pressure it passes a critical point and starts to behave kind of like a liquid, doing things like dissolving caffeine. Does anyone else want to burst into “She Blinded Me with Science“?

That was a lot of words, and most of them were really long. What should I actually drink?

So carbon dioxide is definitely your best bet, right? Not poisonous, doesn’t take out all the really healthy chemicals, involves awesome and unlikely states of matter. But how can you tell? No one would put any of these words on packaging. There’s a code, though: in the US, and probably most other countries with strict health laws, you shouldn’t run into methylene chloride. As I said above, naturally decaffeinated usually means they used ethyl acetate, and since it’s cheap, it’s generally the default approach. And finally, if your tea is organic, the only way it can be decaffeinated is with carbon dioxide. So! For maximum healthyness of decaf tea, buy it organic. Makes sense anyway, right? All the decaf tea at Teahouse Kuan Yin is certified organic, and we never even thought about it until this afternoon. I love happy endings!

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Genmaicha

Traditional teas are almost always tea and nothing but tea, so the exceptions to the rule are always interesting. Other plants are also usually less demanding than tea, which is seriously delicious when you make it right, but will turn bitter and astringent on the unwary like an otherwise friendly cat clawing you up for petting its fuzzy, fuzzy belly. Genmaicha, which is Japanese tea with roasted brown rice in it that really softens that astringent edge, is interesting and gentle, something you can drink every day and not have to worry about.

The (Somewhat Murky) History of Genmaicha

Genmaicha literally means “dark rice tea,” dark in this case being applied to rice that hasn’t been milled and polished–brown rice. It was invented when tea was gaining broad popularity in Japan, but the price hadn’t come down enough for poor farmers to cheerfully toss a tablespoon of leaf in a cup whenever they were thirsty. They cut the tea to stretch out their supplies. This turned out to be really delicious, so now everyone drinks it. An alternate story says it was invented because of general shortages during World War II, but that story’s less common and I can’t find solid sources for it, so I’m sticking with the first story for now. It’s a distinctly Japanese drink; while Koreans drank it occasionally, it was otherwise quite unique to Japan until the modern era. Now, of course, it’s exported all over the world, so those of us who don’t live in Japan can have it, too.

What Exactly Genmaicha Is Made of

It’s made of half Japanese green tea and half roasted brown rice. Sometimes it’s made with bancha, low grade tea picked in summer and fall rather than the high quality spring leaves, perhaps because the gentling effects of the rice can cover up for flaws in the tea, but good genmaicha is made with the springtime leaves, sencha. Sometimes a bit of matcha is mixed in as well, which is called matcha-iri genmaicha (which basically means “genmaicha with added matcha” in Japanese). This makes the flavor a little stronger, and the resulting drink is a pretty green color. The rice is roasted, which gives it a nutty, toasty scent and a bit of those in the flavor as well. It also makes some of the rice grains pop, and since they look just like popcorn, you’ll sometimes hear genmaicha called “popcorn tea.” Sometimes actual popcorn is mixed in with it! Usually it just looks like it, though. Popcorn is, of course, not a traditional ingredient, since corn is native to the Americas, and doesn’t have the ubiquity in Japan that tea and rice do.  At the shop this afternoon we had to pick a few bits out of our genmaicha and taste them to assure ourselves that those really were popped rice grains and not bits of popcorn, but I can now personally attest that our genmaicha is definitely tea and rice.

Genmaicha is a great choice for people who want a low-caffeine tea, since replacing half the tea with rice (a plant that does not produce caffeine) cuts the caffeine content in, well, half. It’s often served in restaurants, both in Japan and in American places serving Japanese food, because it’s good for the digestion, which I’ve seen people notice without being told, so it’s a noticable effect! I’ve always suspected that restaurants also serve it because it’s very easy to brew, not turning sharply astringent like other Japanese teas will if you overbrew them. It’s just a really friendly tea. Even if you pet its metaphorical fuzzy belly.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Caffeine in Tea

The mythology about caffeine in tea rivals the Greek pantheon. A lot of people have gone into chemistry labs with a supply of tea to attempt to figure out what’s going on in these leaves and they’ve come out with a lot of information, and everyone siezes their favorite piece and flings themselves into the argument with zeal. After careful research, I have determined that most of the information floating around out there is actually perfectly consistent, it just sounds like it isn’t when you’re having a good time arguing. So! I’m going to write down how it seems to line up to me, and see if it makes any more sense written down together like that.

How much caffeine is in tea?

The basic answer to “how much caffeine is in tea?” is that black tea has half the caffeine of coffee, and oolong has less than black, green less than that, and white less than that. This seems logical, and you drink a cup of black tea and you do feel less stimulated than after a cup of coffee and more than after a cup of green tea, so either it’s right or the placebo effect is in full force. Except there are a lot of people who insist that all types of tea have the same amount of caffeine, and some people will tell you that there’s less caffeine in coffee than in tea, and there’s more caffeine in tea buds than in full grown leaves so white tea ought to have the most caffeine, right? Right!?!

Leaves and Water

First, it’s important to be precise here. There is more caffeine in tea leaves than in coffee grounds, but there’s more caffeine in a cup of coffee than in a cup of tea. More coffee grounds are used for each cup of coffee than tea leaves for each cup of tea, and because coffee is more finely ground, more of the caffeine is extracted in the brewing process. Roughly the same problem plagues us when we ask how much caffeine is in each kind of tea. Not only are black teas more likely to be cut up into small pieces than other kinds, but they’re also brewed with hotter water. That means more caffeine in your drink! The hotter the water is, the more caffeine is in the final drink. So tea buds can have all the caffeine they like, but unless someone pours boiling water all over defenseless delicate white tea leaves, the final white tea drink is not going to have as much caffeine as black tea does. So if you want tea with less caffeine in it, brew it with cooler water.

What’s in a leaf?

Another imporant thing to remember is that absolute amounts are not as relevant as percentages. I know, that’s not a very informative sentence, but bear with me, I’ll explain. When a tea leaf is picked, it has a certain amount of caffeine molecules in it, and those molecules are pretty much going to sit around playing poker and chatting until you plunge the leaves into hot water. I mean they aren’t going anywhere, not breaking down or anything. But during oxidation other parts of the tea leaf break down and condense until that caffeine makes up a much larger part of the resulting black tea leaf. So it’s not so much that green tea has less caffeine, it’s that it has more other compounds. I think. I’m going to admit that I’m not entirely sure of this stuff, because I can’t find a study that addresses this exact question, so this is just what I conjecture from what information I can find. Anyone else out there know more about this?

Other factors

Now, there are a lot of other things that have some effect on caffeine content, including, but not limited to: particle size (how finely the leaves are cut up), varietal (assamica has more than the basic variety), position on the plant (buds and new leaves have more than old leaves), the soil the plant grew in, the altitude, whether the plant was grown from a cutting or a seedling, how the plant was fertilized, and what time of year the leaf was picked. These have smaller effects, though, so unless you feel moved to hire private investigators and send them over to Asia with detailed spreadsheets to fill out, it isn’t worth your time to worry about them.

In the end, the black>oolong>green>white hierarchy does hold up. Water temperature is a major reason for this, and I’m pretty sure there’s something going on with the chemical composition of the leaf, but I need my own lab to make sure, and I’ve got a small teahouse and a laptop. Brew your teas at the recommended temperature, and you’re set.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin staff

A few links with more detailed information:

Oxidation and Fermentation in Tea Manufacture is an excellent explanation of oxidation.

Caffeine and Tea focuses primarily on debunking the myth that a brief initial steeping gets rid of most of the caffeine, but it’s full of data that’s both carefully collected and can tell you a lot of different things about caffeine and tea.

The Wikipedia article on caffeine and the Britannica one both help you understand caffeine enough that the explanations of what it does in tea make more sense.

 

Tea and Health

Tea is really good for you, everyone knows that, right? When you try to think why you know that, though, a cloud of acronyms and contradictory facts floats up, and pretty quickly you try to stop thinking about it and just drink your tea, which you are sure is healthy for you. Somehow.

At least, that’s how it goes for me, and judging by all the people who ask me “which tea is healthiest?” and similar, it goes that way for a lot of other people out there. It isn’t just us, either! People have been looking into their tea cups and saying “I’m sure this is good for me, somehow” for thousands of years, and modern cancer researchers read through the results of all the studies and find they have to drink their tea and hope for the best. I’m just a blogger, so I’m not going to solve the problem, but I’ll lay out the information as clearly as possible. Once you look at all the information out there and take a shot at synthesizing it, you feel really extremely sure that tea is healthy, even if it’s still a cloud of acronyms and contradictions at the end of the day. It’s an encouraging cloud!

Tea has been considered healthy, even medicinal, since the very beginning. The mythical Chinese inventor of the tea drink is the emperor Shennong, a culture hero who is said to have reigned from 2737 to 2698 BC, and brought us agriculture and traditional Chinese medicine as well as tea. A book about the ingredients used in Chinese medicine (written a couple thousand years after those scary dates back there) is attributed to him, and it contains a list of benefits from tea as as long as your arm. In Japan the monk Eisai wrote the first Japanese book on tea, back in the twelfth century, and it’s called How to Stay Healthy by Drinking Tea.

Traditional medicine and the modern scientific type don’t always agree, but when researchers started applying the scientific method to tea, they found plenty of evidence that tea is, in fact, really good for you. The lists of benefits modern medicine thinks tea has are as long and varied as the ones in the old books of traditional medicine. Indeed, they’re more so, for you and me, because there are only a few dusty old books of ancient medicine hanging around, and another study on tea and how it totally cures cancer of the left pinky in rats comes out every day.

Cancer makes everything difficult. The data is never clear, outside of the question of whether or not you should smoke two packs a day. But scientists try their hardest! So what have they found about tea? Well, tea contains polyphenols, which are a kind of chemical that plants produce, and which are great cancer fighters. Have you heard of EGCG? It’s a polyphenol. It’s broken down by the oxidation process, so it’s only found in white and green tea, but there are a lot of other polyphenols in tea, and you’ll find them in any drink based on the Camellia sinensis plant. Exactly how they work and how to get them in the right part of you is harder. Putting some EGCG in a test tube with some cancer cells and shaking it is definitely bad news for the cancer cells, and the Japanese have low rates of lung cancer even though they smoke like chimneys, but it’s hard to get more clarity than that. There’s even indications that one kind of polyphenol, tannins, and also hot drinks (!!!) can promote cancer! At this point, just tell yourself the Japanese have low rates of lung cancer and make another cup of tea. Maybe not too hot.

The other major interest is cardiovascular health, and thankfully, hearts and veins and such are much easier to deal with than cancer cells. Drinking tea is definitely awesome for your heart. Unless you put milk in it, in which case the casein (a protein in milk) gets in the way of the polyphenols (from the last paragraph, the nice plant chemicals), and it’s just a tasty drink. (Good news on the lemon front, though, lemon helps your body absorb the good chemicals.) There are studies suggesting that tea will do practically anything you want to have done to your cardiovascular system, lowering blood pressure, reducing cholesterol, improving the elasticity of veins, performing a charming little tapdance number. And there are other studies that didn’t get those results when they tried it. Of course. So the bottom line is that the FDA won’t let tea marketers call their product blood pressure pills in a cup, doctors generally agree that drinking tea is a good idea for your heart. Even the FDA is expected to relent on that point eventually, once they see enough studies come out well.

There is way more to tea and your health than just the big two killers, though. The range of possible benefits from tea are so varied that they almost sound like they’re being produced by a random generator somewhere. The caffeine in tea speeds up your metabolism and boosts weight loss, but some of the other chemicals in tea may enhance the effect, so you’re better off drinking tea than popping NoDoz pills. The tea plant takes up fluoride from the ground it grows in, some of which ends up on your teeth when you drink it. Tea also inhibits bacterial growth, which cuts down on plaque, improving your teeth and your breath, and suggesting broader antibiotic uses for tea, but that’s the medical researchers’ problem. White tea is probably best for freshening your breath, stick to that. Tea improves your alertness, again beyond what just the caffeine content can explain. An amino acid in tea called theanine is improving your alertness, too, and it gives a calm energy instead of the jittery one from caffeine. One study even showed that habitual tea drinkers recovered from stress more quickly than average! Gyokuro is best for theanine.

There are a million more. Poke around the internet, someone’s probably run a study on whatever ails you personally and what tea does for it. They probably got some positive results, and are out trying to replicate them right now. I’m not going to think about it more, though. I’m going to have another cup of tea, instead, because it’s tasty. Also, I’m really pretty sure it’s good for me.
Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

Come to our class on the health benefits of tea for more in-depth discussion, this Wednesday, November 11th, at 7pm, for just ten dollars each. E-mail us at teahousekuanyin@gmail.com, call at (206)632-2055, or sign up at the teahouse in person!

http://www.teahousekuanyin.com/gyokuro-suimei.html

 

Jasmine Tea

Jasmine tea is extremely popular, not only in our own teahouse but also around the world. While most mixtures of tea and other plants are modern and not quite perfected, jasmine tea has a history that will impress the most stiff-necked tea snob. It was invented in China during the Song dynasty, which ruled from 960 to 1279AD, and was the first scented tea.

In the modern age of industrial production and widespread wealth some corners do get cut. A lot of jasmine tea is now made simply by taking some mid-grade tea leaves, spritzing them with jasmine oils, tossing the result in teabags and calling it a day. But for good jasmine tea, like we sell, the traditional method is still used, and it is quite the process. First the tea is picked and processed as usual. For high-grade jasmine tea, obviously some good tea is made. It can be any kind you like, but is most often green. We also carry a really spiffy silver needle jasmine, though, which I sometimes get out and stare at because it is just so pretty. That doesn’t actually have anything to do with the jasmine, though. They just started with some really nice tea.

The next step is the jasmine flowers, and here we get fancy. Jasmine flowers bloom at night, opening around sunset and closing again by the morning. To make tea, the flowers are picked during the day and tossed in with the tea leaves from the last paragraph, and sometimes stirred around a great deal. Then they are allowed to sit together overnight. The flowers, even though they’ve been picked, still open up as the air cools, and the tea soaks all the fragrance up. Tea is very hygroscopic, which is your awesome word for the day so go use it in a sentence, it means that it is very good at soaking up moisture, including the fragrance. This is why it’s so important to store your tea in airtight containers, because usually you don’t want it picking up every scent in the room! But in making jasmine tea it’s a good trait. The tea soaks up the scent so well that the flowers are totally spent afterwards. The light flowers are blown out of the mixture with huge fans, and then often fed to pigs because there’s nothing left; all the scent is now in the tea.

This process is repeated at least twice, and often many more times. Usually a 4:1 ratio of flowers:tea leaves by weight ends up being used! Once the tea producers feel their tea is scented enough the tea has to be dried again, because it’s absorbed so much water from the flowers. For our most popular jasmine, Jasmine Pearl, they roll them up into the little pearls by hand before the last drying. In high-grade versions, all the flowers are removed, but sometimes a few flowers will be left in for decoration.

Fujian province, the source of our jasmine tea, is considered the best at making it. Jasmine plants grow well there, producing large and fragrant blossoms. The tea plants do well, too, which is critical. The jasmine has a gentling effect on the tea, making the result smoother, sweeter, and a bit gentler on the stomach, but to get a really top quality jasmine tea all the ingredients have to be the best.

While a lot of teas that are mixed with some other plant are flavored teas, jasmine tea is actually scented. When you lean over your cup and take a deep breath it smells like a jasmine plant, perhaps with the bright flower scent gentled and rounded a little by the tea. Plug your nose and take a sip, and it is a slightly sweet cup of tea. But unless you’re drinking your tea with a nasty cold, the scent and flavor of the tea mix while you drink it, combining elegantly into a fun but still refined cup of tea.

Elizabeth Deacon, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Darjeeling Tasting Coming Up!

Darjeelings! Called the “beauty teas of India” and the “champagne of teas,” these delicate and elegant teas have a mystique peculiar to them. They are technically classed as black teas, but are so light they seem almost like a green. Their flavor is fruity and astringent, with a delightful floral aroma.

As the names suggests, Darjeeling teas are all grown in the tiny Darjeeling region in India, but despite their Indian origin they are from the Chinese variety of the tea plant, rather than the Assam varietal more common in India. This contributes to their unique style.

Since we recently acquired several different Darjeelings, we will be having a tasting entirely of Darjeelings this Sunday at 5PM, so come along and experience these remarkable teas with us! Please e-mail teahousekuanyin@gmail.com or sign up at the store in person, as we have a limited number of spaces.