Fun and FlirTea

I had the greatest time ever “researching” for this post. I’ll just be upfront about that. I not only got to drink a lot of beer, but went on a tour of a brewery. I don’t know about my readers, but I seriously love beer. It’s delicious and cold and flavorful. In fact, my family loves beer so much that my cousins host an annual Wine and Brewfest at their home the Saturday prior to Easter. (Did I mention I love to drink wine as well?)

The best part about my love of drinking beer is the fact that I happen to live in the same place as one of my favorite breweries, Sierra Nevada Brewery. My US readers may be familiar with some of their beers (Pale Ale, Bigfoot, Ovila). If you are in the US and haven’t had Sierra Nevada, you should probably find a local distributor…. seriously. For those who are further off or not quite as familiar, just a brief heads up… Sierra Nevada cultivates a reputation for producing a deliciously hoppy brew.

In any case, Sierra Nevada offers a free brewery tour that lasts around an hour or just over, at the end of which they ply you with their wares (by which I mean, they feed you free 2 oz.+ samples of 8 of their beers, including at least one from their “Willy Wonka Factory” of an experimental section in the brewery used to create exciting new concoctions).

For those of you who have blended your own teas, I think you’re beginning to see one of the connections I’m about to discuss, aren’t you?

So why don’t I get down to it now, then?

Making the Deliciousness

First, let’s talk about how each of these tasty drinks is made. While the actual production of tea and production of beer are very different processes, each of them utilize a key similarity: attention to ingredients. We’ve already discussed how tea is made, but not really gotten into how tea blends are made. Making beer is like making a tea blend. You have a certain array of ingredients that go into the blend/beer. As with anything, there are different levels of quality coming from different producers, but each one will take a look at the ingredients and find exactly the right ingredient to achieve the end result they’re looking for.

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One thing I love about tea is the fact that you can make it so many ways! I touched on a few typical ideas that are pretty simple to enact in my earlier post about tea in the office, but I didn’t get into much detail. I’m not going to get into all of the possible ways to brew tea, but the ones I’ll cover today are Western style, gong fu style, and Moroccan style.

Western Style
The most common style for those of us in the Western world to brew our tea is Western style (I’m a fount of knowledge!). The Western style brewing method is pretty basic. You use a standard teapot, brew the leaves to their full potential, and drink.

Technically, it doesn’t have to be a teapot. You can use a tea bag or even one of those single cup infusers. This is really the only brewing method where people add milk to the tea with any regularity, though that’s more a reflection on Western style tea drinking than brewing. Western style brewing is generally done by steeping the tea a single time. It wasn’t until Westerners began brewing tea in single steepings that the large teapots really came to the fore.

With a large teapot and a single infusion, it’s made easier to enjoy one heck of a tea party with all your friends! (more…)

I’m not going to lie here… I’ve been struggling with writing this post for over a week now. I think part of it is due to the fact that I’ve never cared much for rooibos or honeybush in the past.

To be fair, I’ve had very little experience with either of them and, until quite recently, thought they were the same thing. SPOILER ALERT! They aren’t. Rooibos and honeybush are quite similar and come from similar areas, but they are indeed different plants and have slightly different flavors (honeybush being a bit sweeter and more “honey-like” than rooibos). Now I think on it, I may not have ever tried a honeybush tisane until recently. I have had a couple rooibos options and never was impressed. (more…)

One of the main tricks when trying to experience the glory of tea when you aren’t at home is how to brew it properly! Last week, I talked a bit about general guidelines to follow when brewing your tea. So how do you take that information and apply it to making tea when you’re at work?

I’ve taken the liberty of narrowing down this topic into the top options that I’ve found useful myself.

1. Consider using a small teapot when in the office. I’ve found this to not only be an effective way of brewing tea, but it also acts as a nice conversation starter with co-workers with even a vague interest in tea as well. To be honest, it isn’t always convenient to have an actual teapot, though. It can take up more space than you’ve got available, or even cause a little mess with drips and the like.

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More than anything else, the number one reason most people I know aren’t “tea fans” is because they haven’t been brewing it correctly. Most notably is my friend who now is writing her own blog about her tea adventures as she makes her way through 175 different teas in 365 days. This time last year, if I offered tea to her, she would have wrinkled her nose in disgust and turned it down solidly.

Around 6 months ago, she decided to try tea again, but this time she paid more attention to how it was made. Instead of putting a tea bag in a cup of scalding hot water and leaving it for, oh… 10 minutes… she used water that was hot, but not boiling, and she removed the tea from the water after the recommended time frame. And lo and behold… it tasted good!

Shocking, I know.

Now, before I really get into this, I just want to note that there are a number of different methods for brewing tea. Today, we’ll keep it simple and about as basic as possible – with a typical Western-style brewing in a teapot (or infuser in mug) that most of you are likely to use.

The main thing to remember when brewing tea is that the temperature of the water and the time the leaf is left in the water can be extremely important. In fact, let’s start there… with the water. (more…)

There is something of an ongoing debate in the tea world over Loose Tea vs. Bagged Tea (see what I did there with the title?). While a good portion of tea aficionados will rage against the concept of the tea bag (I’ve even seen tea bags burned in a video on “how to make tea”), I think it’s important to note that not all tea bags are bad!

Before I proceed, I’ll state something that I will probably repeat frequently on this blog – the only way to tell if a tea is “good” or not is to taste it. If you like it, then it must be good!

This holds true for any tea you may drink! Needless to say, just because a tea tastes good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s of high quality. I find the same to be true of beer and wine. For example, I know people who legitimately enjoy the taste of Coors Light (eugh!). Just because they like the taste of it does not suddenly make it a quality craft beer. Also, I have a penchant for cheap wines from Trader Joe’s. While their cheap wine is better than other cheap wine, well… it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a cheap wine! So keep that in mind when you are enjoying that cup of tea brewed from a teabag. (more…)

Pu-erh (pronounced poo-arrrrrrrrrrrrr) tea is probably the least known type of tea to the everyday person. Not all that long ago (just a couple years now), my brother living in China sent me an email asking about the kinds of tea I liked and what he had available to him. He mentioned pu-erh tea in this email and I had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about.

My first stop, naturally, was Wikipedia. They do have a pretty decent page on this tea type, but it didn’t really answer most of my questions. For one thing, I still mentally pronounced it more like the word “pure” than “poo” and “arrrrrrrrrrr”. It mentioned that pu-erh tea is pretty frequently pressed, but I didn’t really understand what that meant without ever having seen a pressed tea before. The only thing I really retained from the Wikipedia page was that it was fermented in some way, shape, or form.

I guess that since I wasn’t familiar with how tea was made up to this point, this didn’t make much impact on me. In fact, at the time I still sort of assumed that each tea type came from a different plant. Now that I know more, I just enjoy understanding what these differences really mean for the tea.

To begin with, instead of the oxidation that the other tea types undergo, pu-erh tea really is actually fermented. The real difference is that oxidation is a chemical process and fermentation involves microbes (like you’ll find in cheese or yogurt). I remember one day at work, I was preparing some pu-erh tea from a compressed brick. A coworker asked what it was and I explained that it’s a type of tea, but it’s fermented. His immediate response was, “Oh. So how much alcohol is in it?”

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Let me just say one thing… I honestly tried to figure out a better “White Tea” pun for this post title. My brother wanted me to make a reference to “Whitey”, like the character from 8 Crazy Nights or some other movies. But I wasn’t quite familiar enough to make the reference count. In the end, all I could think of was The Offspring. Ha!

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not as well-versed in white tea as I am in other types. Of all the tea types, I think I’ve had the fewest white teas of the options. As much as I haven’t cared as much for green teas, they’re more readily available, so I’ve had more opportunities to try them. All I really knew about white tea in advance of my studying tea was what I learned from that one commercial that I think Lipton created years ago. It was related to their bottled white tea. They talked about how white tea is so special because it is only the fresh young leaf bud that is used to achieve such a mild flavor.

Seriously, does anyone else remember that commercial, or am I crazy?

In any case, I have to admit I was a little surprised to discover that this vague memory of a brief commercial really did help me on the road to understanding white tea more clearly. While not all white tea today is made with purely the unopened leaf bud, that is how it was first created and only in more recent years (okay, the 1920’s… but that’s recent for tea!) were slightly open-leafed varieties created.

White tea has been primarily made in China (Fujian Province most particularly), but is now also being produced in some areas of India and Sri Lanka. Of all the tea types, it probably has the least variety within the category. The production is quite simple for white tea, so the options are more limited. (Don’t get the idea that there is no variance among white teas when tasting options from different places. The individual bush, the location of it, when it’s plucked, etc. all still have an impact on the tea, just as they do with any tea.)

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Before I get into the discussion on oolong tea, let’s take a step back and crack up a wee bit about that title. If you don’t get it, say it out loud with a really bad, stereotypical asian accent. (I swear I’m not racist. I just appreciate a bad pun… emphasis on bad.) Got it now? You can thank FyreTyde of A Koala Tea Blog (get it!?) for this gem.

In any case, back to the story of tea and – more specifically – oolong tea.

One day, my brother and I were wandering the streets of Kunming talking about tea. I mentioned how much I enjoy oolong teas and he started laughing and told me, “The Chinese make jokes about how foreigners love oolong because it’s a naturally sweeter tea and foreigners like sweet things more than they do” (not necessarily an exact quote).

This conversation remained in the back of my mind every time I read about, found, or tasted an oolong tea. Since I was on a bit of a ginseng oolong kick at the time, this seemed especially on point. I remember one day on Tea Chat, I was asking for some advice on what teas to order and from where. I said I was partial to oolong teas and it was suggested to select a sampler pack from Life In Teacup.

It was upon receiving a few Dong Ding oolongs and a nice Tie Guan Yin sample that I experienced my first truly natural oolong tea. It was exciting and leafy. The flavor was herbaceous and complex. It tasted somewhat roasted and delicious to me. It did not carry the same kind of sweetness that I had come to expect of oolongs, so it was both shocking and exciting.

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Next to black tea, green tea is a more recognizable tea in Western society. A lot of this derives from the health benefits that are touted of green teas. In fact, most scientific studies into the health benefits of tea utilize green tea as the focus. As a result, green tea drinking in the Western world has really been on the rise in recent years.

Of course, green tea is one of the most commonly consumed teas in China and Japan. From my own observations in China, nearly everyone walking around town would be touting a bottle of some sort filled with green tea (with the leaves visible in the bottle, no less). And if I went to a restaurant or cafe and requested tea, it would almost exclusively be green tea unless I requested something else in particular.

I’m not going to lie, I haven’t been much of a fan of green tea over the years. I always had a hard time getting past the distinctive grassy, oceany, vegetal flavor that is so common in green teas. Recently, I’ve come to appreciate this kind of flavor more, but I’m still in the beginning stages of coming to terms with it, if you will. It’s the other flavor profiles found in various green teas that have begun to hook me – an occasional nuttiness, bright crispness, and fresh sweet flavors.

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