Fun and FlirTea

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…)

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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