Name That Flavor

Every time I drink a Darjeeling the strength of the fruit notes startles me, but lately it’s been getting even weirder. I’m drinking a strong cup of Margaret’s Hope Second Flush right now, and I swear I recognize the fruit note from somewhere else. In fact, I think I recognize it from candy. I think it’s Japanese muscat grape flavored candy.

Everyone always says Darjeelings have a muscatel note, so maybe I’m making the connection because I think that’s what it’s supposed to taste like, but maybe not. I definitely recognize this flavor from somewhere else, and I can’t think of another option. Can anyone back me up, or is this me spending too long with a cup of tea and a computer and going slightly mad?

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Lu An Gua Pian Tea (aka Little Melon Seed)

Lu An Gua Pian

Classy teas are all made of the delicate, downy, newly budded tips of the tea branches, right? Apparently not, because Lu An Gua Pian has a giant reputation, and part of the processing, um, process is that they go through and pick out all the buds. The leaves are then rolled into rough cylinders, so that they look kind of like seeds, or at least they did to someone after they’d spent enough hours lazing around a teahouse, eating sunflower seeds and having cups of this tea.

What’s going on with that name? It keeps changing.

That’s how it was supposedly named. I know, I know, shocking, the tea is named after the shapes of the leaves, and when I tell you that Lu An is the county where most of it is grown then you’ll just be picking you jaw up off the floor, no one ever named a tea that way before! This name has a cool little story behind it, though. The English name is Little Melon Seed, which is supposedly a pretty direct translation, and that’s not right, didn’t I say it was named for sunflower seeds? Yes. I’m given to understand that the word for sunflower seed in Chinese is “gua zi pian,” melon seed is “gua pian,” so that the current name is a shortening of the original. None of the people who speak Chinese are in the shop right now, though, so I can’t corroborate this. Anyone out there on the net have enough Chinese to give me an informed opinion?

How long has it been around?

Next point of contention, how old this type of tea is. And it is, of course, a point of contention. Opinions are split on whether it was mentioned in the Cha Jing, written in the eighth century, or not invented until a millenium later, during the Qing Dynasty. Now the first one is difficult, because it is named for the shape of the leaves, and tea was not drunk in whole-leaf form at the time. But the second date is also problematic, because it is supposed to be a Ming tribute tea, which it could hardly have been if it hadn’t been invented yet. Its reputation certainly seems like it should have more than three centuries behind it; Lu An Gua Pian is regularly mentioned in the ever authoritative and ever protean list of China’s Ten Famous Teas.

The more I learn, the less I think I know.

I hate to just say that I have a lot of information, but it’s all uncertain. It seems so un-blog-like. I need more information than I have, though! Help me out, Gentle Readers, do any of you have solid information supporting one of the sides? Anyone read the Cha Jing? Seen a decent English translation of it that they could direct me towards? I can’t go around putting my name to uncertain information on the internet!

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

How to Store Tea

Tea seems pretty inert, when you look at it. Dry leaves, they’ve clearly gone through a fair amount of processing, surely you can just shove it in the pantry and forget about it, right?

Well, that depends on how you want your tea to taste. You’ll probably still get some sort of flavor and some sort of caffeine kick out of the ancient Lipton bags in that box shoved to the back of the shelf that’s a little to high to reach easily, but tea can be a lot better than that. I find that the more tea I drink, the more I know about the flavor, and the more I’m aware of little shifts in quality. So, drink that box of tea now, because if you’re interested enough in tea to be reading blog posts about it, you’re only going to get better at realizing how stale that box is from here on out. Go on, go make yourself a cup of it now, I’ll wait.

OK, got your cup of tea? Mmm, delicious hot beverage. Why are you reading posts by picky people on the internet who complain about it? Because tea gets even better than this stuff, that’s why. Tea can be strongly astringent or startlingly sweet, or both at once. It can taste like forests smell or like flowers do, or like you’ve picked a blade of grass and started nibbling on it. But it isn’t going to keep those qualities in a paper box in the back of a pantry. The best thing to do is, of course, drink it quickly, but there are plenty of ways to store it so it keeps those flavors longer.

Air

First of all, keep it away from air! At Teahouse Kuan Yin we sell our tea in heavy plastic pouches with resealable tops, except for our oolongs, which we pack in bags that have all the air sucked out of them, because oolongs are delicate and expensive and someone put a lot of work into them, so there’s no point in doing these things halfway. Air does all kinds of dreadful things to tea. It has oxygen, for one, which is definitely the most toxic, abrasive substance that life ever came to rely on. Your tea, and indeed everything else in your pantry, goes stale because air full of oxygen touches it.

Speaking of the other things in your pantry? They’re the next reason you shouldn’t let too much air touch your tea. Tea absorbs scents with incredible ease, which is good when you’re trying to make jasmine scented tea, but bad when you want it to taste the same way it did before it spent a few months on a shelf near the cinnamon. The only exception to the “keep air away from tea” rule is Pu’er tea, which is fermented and needs more oxygen so it can continue to age and develop, but you have to carefully store your Pu’er away from any strong smells, or else all you’ll taste is the glue that held the particle board of your new shelves together. Moisture is the next part of this equation. If there’s any humidity in the air, it will damage your tea. They’re dried leaves for a reason! The reason being to prevent any chemical reaction that might (say it with me now) change the flavor.

Light

Light isn’t as damaging as air, but it will degrade your tea. Think of the way rugs fade where the sun always hits them, or posters on the wall. By the way, you may want to put UV blocking glass in your frames if you’re really attached to those posters.

It’s very tempting to put your pretty tea in big glass jars and perch them on the counter, isn’t it? Your kitchen would look kind of rustic and organic, with a subtle touch of “why yes, I’m sophisticated enough to own this attractively rolled oolong.” Don’t give in. If you really love that pretty oolong, keep it in an opaque container. You can casually pull it out of the pantry and offer a cup to the friends you want to impress, and it will taste as pretty as it looks.

Temperature

Part of the reason you want to keep your tea out of the light is that it will heat up when the sun is on it, and warmth makes chemical reactions happen faster. And we’re all about retarding chemical reactions in this post! By the same token, you want to make sure the place you keep it is cool as well as dark. Not in the drawer next to the oven or the cupboard over the toaster, is what I’m saying. You do not need to refrigerate tea, except for one special case: japanese teas.

Japan is all about freshness, when it comes to food. This is fairly obvious when you think about, say, sushi, but rather more surprising when you learn that some people recommend sake be drunk within a month of production. This extends to tea. Japanese teas do tend to have more moisture in the dry leaf than other kinds, so it makes a certain amount of sense. That said, here’s how to protect your poor, delicate Japanese greens:

First, leave some of it at room temperature in the pantry, about what you’ll drink in a month, because you don’t want to take your tea out of the fridge every time you make a cup. If you open up the package while the leaf is still cold, any moisture in the air will condense on the leaf, like it does on the outside of a glass of iced water. Obviously not good for your tea! Second, wrap your tea up tight before you put it in the fridge. The pantry may be full of spices that threaten the integrity of your tea, but the perishables in the fridge are actually more dangerous, even at the low temperature. The humidity in there is very high, and there are a lot of smells for your tea to absorb. When your pantry supply runs out, take the package out of the refrigerator, let it warm to room temperature, take out another month’s supply, then wrap it back up and pop it back in the fridge.

But Really, Relax

That’s a hell of a wall of text I just wrote. Don’t freak out, though. The take home message is just put your tea in airtight canisters and don’t buy too much at once. The really central problem is time. All of the methods above are ways to slow down the chemical reactions that make your tea stale. The most effective way of making sure you drink it all in a reasonable amount of tea. The faster you go through it, the less you have to worry about staleness. Buy in small amounts, often, rather than large ones occasionally. And buy from stores that specialize in tea, and thus have a quick turnover and are always getting new, fresh tea in.

Tea should be drunk within a year. Except for those flighty Japanese ones, they’re going stale as we speak! Have you finished your teabag tea yet? You should be drinking your Japanese tea now, the clock is ticking! If you don’t have any, buy some, then drink it real quick! I kid, I kid. I think I’m going to go drink some of my Japanese tea now, though.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin

 

In Which I Try to Cover Everything Yunnan Does with Tea

Gold Yunnan

Yunnan is a large and fertile province in the south of China that produces an impressive amount of tea. Tea cultivation and even the plant itself are said to come from Yunnan originally, and there’s good reason to believe that; Yunnan has an incredible amount of biodiversity.

Climate

It’s a very mountainous area, to the point that only 5% of the land is cultivated, and a lot of that is terraces carved into mountainsides. It also has a nice climate, with lots of rain and moderate temperatures, lovely for both the evolution of new plants and the cultivation of old ones, once you find a piece of land flat enough to grow them on. The oldest cultivated tea plant is in Yunnan, and it’s at least 800 years old. The oldest wild one is there, too, and it’s 1700 years old (!).

Yunnan Black Tea

The tea that is most likely to spring to mind when you hear the name Yunnan is the black tea that floods out of the province these days, full of pretty gold tips. Tips, in this case, refers to the leaves and bud on the tip of each branch, which are the best for making tea out of. In Chinese this tea is called Tian Hong, which literally means Yunnan Red. But interestingly enough, this kind of tea wasn’t developed until the 20th century. Before then Yunnan made green tea, like most places. They also, of course, made Pu’er.

Pu’er

Pu’er is actually the name of a county in Yunnan,  which became a major center of the tea trade during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), when tea was just starting to be infused instead of mixed up from powdered leaves. No one’s really sure how Pu’er tea, which is cakes of fermented tea, was developed, but that tea trade I mentioned probably had something to do with it. The trade was sprawling, and took place by horse caravan, so it took a long time to get the tea to some distant places. Compressed bricks are the most logical way to do that, and unless your caravan involves a horse-drawn refrigerated truck, fermentation can be hard to avoid. Especially when you’re starting from Yunnan, which is soaked by monsoon rains from May to October, which is coincidentally also tea harvesting season.

I Think That’s Everything

Wow, that’s a lot of different kinds of tea. I didn’t even realize how many different kinds of tea came out of Yunnan when I started writing this article, or that they were such a hotbed of tea-innovation. One the one hand, maybe it’s to be expected from the birthplace of tea, but on the other hand, not bad for a place where you can’t put your basket of tea leaves down without it rolling off the side of the mountain.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Dragonwell Tea (Long Jing)

Dragonwell

Dragonwell tea (Long Jing or Lung Ching in Chinese) is as famous as a tea can get. It’s sometimes called the national tea of China, that’s how famous it is. People pay ludicrous amounts of money for the finest examples, and there are hundreds of years of poetry and stories attached. Quite the burden for one drink!

Stories

The stories are fabulous, honestly, a large collection of tea fairy tales and historical events that I cannot possibly cover here, so I’ll try to pick my favorites. The name comes from the place where it was first grown, and the finest examples still are grown, in the Westlake (Xi Hu) area of Hangzhou in the coastal province of Zhejiang. Here the wells are spring fed, so when the mineral-heavy spring water mixes with rain that’s fallen into the wells, the light refracts oddly through the water, as if something were coiling up in it. This is, of course, the dragon, which is said to have rescued local crops from drought when prayed to. The region is cited in the eighth century book “Cha Jing,” which means, roughly, “The Classic of Tea.”

The tea itself got its biggest boost around the eighteenth century, when it was declared “Gong Cha,” imperial or tribute tea, by the emperor. It is said that the Qianlong emperor tasted a cup of it on a visit to the region, while he was in the Hu Gong temple, and was so impressed he granted the eighteen tea bushes in front of the temple imperial status. These tea bushes are still alive, and still being harvested from. Without an imperial family, their tea now goes to the highest bidder, which means it can end up costing more than its weight in gold. The Qianlong Emperor is also said to have tried picking some himself, but was called away in the middle of it with news that his mother was ill. He rushed back home to her with the leaves still in his sleeves, and when she asked about the lovely aroma he made her a cup of tea from them. She was, of course, immediately restored to health! Ever since, Dragonwell tea leaves have been flattened, to mimic the leaves crushed in the emperor’s sleeves.

Tea

Competition Grade Dragonwell

I could go on all day with these stories, that’s two paragraphs even without the one that says the tribute tea was picked by virgins using only their teeth, and at some point I should mention the tea. The tea itself! Quite nice, very much the epitome of Chinese greens, with a mellow sweetness that reviewers are required to describe as like chestnuts, or else the tea review ninjas break through the window of your office and drag you off for re-education. The sweetness is definitely there, without being overwhelming, and there’s a lower tone, particularly in the aftertaste, that I could understand being described as nutty. You get a nice yellow color from the liquor, and the leaves themselves are also a pretty yellow-green. This is traditionally described as “jade green,” which tells you more about how expensive Dragonwell is than what it looks like, considering the range of colors jade comes in. The tea review ninjas are now telling me that I had better mention the sweet fragrance and that distinctive flat shape. One variety of Dragonwell is called Bird’s Tongue (Que She), because some cheery person thought that’s what the flat, tapered leaves looked like. Yum. I promise, they don’t taste like birds’ tongues, they taste like a lovely mellow tea, that probably, in the end, deserves all the hype.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

Snow Bud

Snow Bud (Xue Ya)

Snow Bud (Xue Ya in Chinese) is a mysterious tea. Partially this is because it’s a newcomer–it was only invented in the 1980s–so it doesn’t have the centuries of traditional ideas around it that most teas have. It’s also just an odd duck, though, described as a white tea more often than not, but with distinct green notes, and I haven’t even mentioned yet that we have a Green Snow Bud variety (Lu Xue Ya).

Green Snow Bud doesn’t have the white down that marks white tea on its leaves, but it’s a collection of neatly furled first leaves that open up during steeping to show the buds folded inside of them. The Green Snow Bud frankly impresses me more than the Snow Bud variety, although it’s closer to the green end of the flavor spectrum than Snow Bud is.

The preference for calling Snow Bud a white tea may be because it’s from Fujian province, a coastal region near Taiwan that was the first to make white tea, although it now makes all varieties in substantial amounts. In fact, it has a strong history of tea invention, which is probably why they are making brand new varieties even today, when an aura of ancientness is one of tea producer’s favorite selling points.

Green Snow Bud (Lu Xue Ya)

I won’t pretend that I don’t swoon a bit at the teas that have been picked from ancient tea bushes grown up into trees on long-abandoned tea farms deep in Yunnan, but the Snow Buds make an excellent argument for innovation in tea. They are interesting enough to make anyone stop and think about them while drinking a cup, because everyone has to make their own judgment on the green/white debate, and good enough that you’ll come back for another cup once you’ve solved the mystery to your own satisfaction. Personally I’d say the Snow Bud is pretty much a white, but people who like whites more than I do have said it’s surprisingly green-like. The Green Snow Bud is more solidly a green, but I’m always more interested in a second cup of it than of its whiter cousin. But is that because it’s objectively better or because I’m such a green tea fan? You see the difficulty here. Clear out an empty ten minutes the first time you try either of these teas, so you can debate it properly, then come leave me a comment with your opinion.

Elizabeth, Teahouse Kuan Yin Staff

 

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