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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Last weekend, I was finally able to breathe through my nose again and, thus, was able to TASTE things again. What a relief it was (and is)! As a special treat to myself, I had my first side-by-side(-by-side) tasting of the same kind of tea from multiple vendors/sources.

(I’m about to go on a bit of a tangent, so if you want to skip ahead to my actual comparisons, click here!)

You know what… somehow I think I’ve managed to write this blog so far without really discussing what types of teas are my personal favorites. I’ve always enjoyed a nice black tea blend (especially the British blends so common in the UK) and oolong has worked its way up my charts in more recent months. Sometimes pu-erh is my favorite, but at the moment my tea life is dominated by oolong – more specifically, it’s dominated by Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe) oolongs.

My first experience with Da Hong Pao was within the last few months. I received a glorious box of tea in the mail from my brother (currently living in Wuhan, China). I knew he was sending a package, but thought it was going to be quite small with a few samples for me to try. Boy am I glad I was wrong! It was a larger box than I expected and every last inch of it was PACKED with tea and teaware! It’s true… my brother is amazing.

In any case, one of the teas was listed on his helpful notecard as “Da Hong Pao: An oolong from Fujian across the strait from Taiwan – Spicy red flavor.” The idea of a “spicy red flavor” in tea was extremely intriguing to me and I ended up loving it. Since then, I picked up an oolong sampler set from Verdant Tea which included the Wuyi Mountain Big Red Robe and enjoyed some tea at Vital Tea Leaf where I ended up bringing home a good amount of their Aroma Red Robe.

I had read a bit about how one of the great ways to really develop your palate with tea is to have side-by-side tastings of the same tea type from different sources to get a solid feel for how the flavors can vary. I had wanted to do this ever since and was super excited when I realized I had 3 different Da Hong Pao teas in my cupboard!

And now… onto the actual comparisons! (more…)

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…)

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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Introduction to Tea In Review

Each Saturday, I will be posting a list of links to each tea, tea vendor, and any teaware I may have reviewed in the past week. Some of these links will be internal to previous posts, but others will be to other sites, like Steepster (for those of you unfamiliar, Steepster is like the Twitter of tea reviews… with more than 140 characters per note).

I will also make an effort to feature at least one of the teas I enjoyed in the course of the week. This will likely result in at least one image that is less amazing than what normally appears on the site, as it will have been taken by myself with the only camera I’ve got… a lowly point-and-shoot Canon!

The Reviews!

First, allow me to share with you the list of links so I hope you enjoy the tea reviews from this week!

• White Peony from Two Leaves and a Bud – Thank you so much to Naomi at Two Leaves and a Bud for sending along the free sample of this and the other TLaaB teas from this week!
• Tropical Goji Green Tea from Two Leaves and a Bud
• Organic Jade Oolong from Two Leaves and a Bud
• Dragonwell from The Tea Spot
• Green Tea Tropical from Mighty Leaf
• Organic Earl Grey from Two Leaves and a Bud
• White Peony (Bai Mu Dan) from Tea Vivre – Thank you to Angel at Tea Vivre for this and other TV samples!
• Zealong Black from Ya-Ya’s House of Excellent Teas
• Iron Goddess King from Vital Tea Leaf
• Ripened Aged Pu-erh Mini Tuocha from Tea Vivre

Featured Review

To get things rolling, I would like to feature the Zealong Black tea I was able to sample as an early release tea from Ya-Ya’s House of Excellent Teas. This tea is from a plantation that is somewhat renowned for its oolong teas, and this is their first real black tea produced, as far as I understand (please correct me if I’m wrong, Jo!). Zealong, by the way, is a New Zealand tea plantation (since they’re known for their oolong teas, now you can see where the name comes from, right?)

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