Do You Have Time For Tea?

This worldwide pandemic has extorted a high price for many people.   For most of us , we are staying at home, working from home and simply riding out the pandemic.

There is a silver lining in that we get to spend quality (quantity) time with our family.   If you had been wishing you had more free time to pursue a hobby or interest, you would suddenly found yourself granted this wish.  Many of my friends are learning to cook and bake (they cheated by buying a bread making machine).  Like it or not, I hope you are making use of this lockdown fruitfully.  

If you enjoy your Chinese tea like me, this lockdown period would allow us to explore and appreciate our tea and tea ware.  I find myself more deliberate in my tea brewing.  I try different tea and tea ware, infusion styles and get to drink more tea on a daily basis.  There may be certain teapots that pour slowly...so I reduced the tea leaves.  There are certain pu erh that does better, in taste and aroma, with longer infusion times.  

A few readers had asked me whether I will be buying more tea.  Yes.  I hope to travel nearer the end of the year,  Moreover, with many countries attempting to restart their economies,  many post offices worldwide will be resuming International deliveries by June.  I will update my readers in due course on the reopening of my mini tea store.  

I had just opened a 2007 Lan Tie.  Produced by Jing Mei Tang, this 13 year old cake stored in my part of the world, has a very traditional old style taste and aroma.  It is strong, herbal and medicinal.  Very faint sweet aftertaste and slightly intoxicating.  A fun tea session.  

On second thought, maybe I should get a bread making machine.  Time for my 2nd tea session for the day,    

Working From Home WFH

Help!  I have to move out my tea corner.    Singapore has initiated a lockdown in the country for a month (the government called the lockdown a circuit breaker) and as a result, my whole family are working from home.  I personally support a lockdown as it will help break the spread of the virus within the community and lessen the stress on our medical providers.

Video conferencing is one of the work that is performed daily.  My family members have such daily  'meetings' online and video conferencing 'areas' had been set up at home.  My tea corner had to be given up for this noble cause.  It now appears my tea brewing will be done in the kitchen till I can find another corner for my tea toys. Mornings and afternoons have to be pretty quiet to accommodate these 'meetings'. 

I would like to recommend a few tips on your video chats sessions
- raise your laptop about 5 inches from the table.  You would 'look' better as viewers will not see up your nostrils during the conversation.
-  position yourself from the camera that your shoulders and face can be seen. Not too near in that your entire face occupy the whole screen.
- some lighting on yourself and not depend on the laptop screen to light you up,  You will look like a walking dead character if you do that.

Meanwhile, stay safe and drink lots of tea.  

Internet And Chinese Tea

As we hunker down to sit out the pandemic, the term 'social distancing' should not be misinterpreted during this time.  We should keep a physical distance but socially we should continue to 'socialise' in many ways with each other.  We should keep in communication with family and friends through the internet or the old fashion telephone.  This is especially important when we have older friends, family, neighbours or people with disabilities.  We must check on them frequently and help out whenever we can.  It is the right thing to do.  

Back to the internet.  We do many things on the internet - for work or for play.  We communicate, work, buy and sell things, send money, invest and even learn and unlearn while we are online.  I myself find myself watching movies (Netflix) and listen to music (Spotify) while I stay home during this time.  I am sad that many small businesses; those physical shops run by sole proprietors, are struggling to stay afloat and many would 'go under' during these difficult times.

When it comes to Chinese tea, many of us buy them online.  It is understandable that the internet give us more choices in terms of brands, storage and prices.  There may be a Chinese tea shop downtown but there is so much that a teashop can offer.  Many of these physical tea shops may fold up during this pandemic.  In the tea wholesale centre of Fangchun in Guangzhou China, a number of teashops and small wholesalers have closed their business permanently.  Many such businesses do not (as you can understand) put aside cash to 'tide over'  3-6 months of almost zero sales, while at the same time facing fixed expenses like rent and upkeep of a shop.  There may be rebates given to such business but they would not be enough.  This dire situation applies to other types of business as well.

The outlook for Chinese tea for the next 12 months would be challenging for the tea business.  A looming recession might make tea buying not high on the 'to do or to buy' list. There is a strong possibility that the majority of Chinese tea prices would be cheaper.  Tea businesses require cash flow while tea collectors might have to lower prices to sell their tea if they need the cash.  

For me, I would not be able to travel, for some time, to continue my tea adventures.  I would think the earliest I can travel would be nearer the end of the year.    Meanwhile, time to stay at home after work and drink from our stash of tea.  To all my readers, please stay safe.    

Using Teaware To Amplify A Tea Session

How do I brew my tea?

I use a kettle to boil my water, a teapot or gaiwan (rarely) to brew the tea leaves and a few porcelain teacups to drink my tea.

There is no secret ingredient. I do not sing to my tea. I do not brew my tea in the middle of a rice field or against a backdrop of a waterfall. I am just like you. We mainly brew and drink our tea at home.

In the course of my tea drinking adventures, I want to think I found that there are a few ways to improve or make a tea session more fun and more tasty in terms or taste and aroma when you are at home. I can tweak the 3 main utensils in the tea brewing setup - the kettle, the teapot and the teacup.

Caveat - you must be a serious tea drinker to be able to distinguish the differences in your tea after using such utensils. I would consider a serious tea drinker if you brew and drink Chinese tea at least 3 times a week.

1. Teacup. I found that older Chinese porcelain teacups make the tea taste better. Yes, even my whisky taste better in them. They are still relatively inexpensive. An unused 90s Chinese porcelain teacup can still be purchased for below $5.

2. Teapot. Using a clay teapot can affect the taste and aroma of your Chinese tea. A good seasoned yixing teapot is the preferred brewing vessel used by many serious Chinese tea drinkers. I do recommend you take a look at the Taiwanese Lin Ceramics purion teapot. I found old pu erh tea seems more amplified using the purion teapot. Teapots are overall more expensive than teacups. You will be looking at about $60-$120 for a decent teapot.

3. Kettle. Use a clay kettle or the famous Japanese iron kettle (aka tetsubin) to boil your water. Many tea drinkers claimed the water tasted sweeter or tasty.  Japanese tetsubins are expensive. My last Japanese tetsubin purchase last year was about $200 and it was a small sized one as well.

Such tweaks are not necessary in a tea setup. With just $10, I can have a fantastic tea session as well. A plain white porcelain and 2 porcelain teacups would be more than sufficient to have a wonderful tea session.

The improvements in a tea session using such tweaks can only be distinguished by a hardcore tea drinker.  These improvements are quite small but whether to splash out a little money for these small improvements is a fun discussion among friends during a tea session.   

In the midst of the virus situation, I wish all my readers well and to stay safe.  If you are a essential service provider, I would like to say a big thank you.  

Xiaguan Iron Cake

I have been drinking about 2 sessions of tea per day.  At about 7g per tea session, that meant 14g per day.....and if its pu erh...and at this rate would imply more than 1 whole cake a month.  That is a lot of tea and I would like to advise my readers again not to have a tea session on an empty stomach as it may cause the stomach to produce more acid in your empty tummy.

Readers would know I use a plier to break up my iron cake. I found that I could easily get small chunks of tea and have less tea dust from using a plier. 

I thought iron cakes would take a long time to age compared to regular pu erh cakes due to their high compression.  I was however surprised when I open up this cake in my collection.  This 2007 cake when brewed, has a very dark amber colour and there is very good hints of aged taste in the tea.  This tea is fabulously complex in the taste.  There are hay and a honey notes.  I  felt there were nice herbal and Chinese medicinal herbs in the tea as well.  This tea is a strong workhorse.... I use lesser tea about 6g with a 120 ml teapot.  I allow longer infusions but I could get 15 strong infusions easily. 

Older Xiaguan iron cakes are still inexpensive but are now slightly harder to find in tea shops.  I recommend. 

A Better Cup Of Pu erh Tea

If you had been browsing the internet tea forums and videos on pu erh tea, you would had discovered (recently), that there are many recent articles on pu erh storage.  This is very useful to readers who are residing in temperate countries, where the humidity and temperature are much lower in winter, and these articles had suggested ways to mitigate and store your precious pu erh tea properly for the long term.

As I had mentioned many times, such efforts to age puerh tea, would be rewarding to the tea drinker or collector as aged pu erh tea would have a complexity in taste and aroma after time in storage.  

You would have also noticed that when there are reviews on puerh tea by tea experts, they would normally use a porcelain gaiwan than a Yixing teapot to assess the tea.  Using a porcelain gaiwan is considered a neutral tea ware to brew tea while using a Yixing teapot may affect the assessment of a tea. 

Is a Yixing teapot so magical that it affects the taste of a tea?  Maybe the teapot holds temperature better, the clay could have affected the tea or the tea patina of a seasoned teapot changed the taste of a tea.  

I had posed a question to a tea expert that reviews tea on the internet - if many of your followers (say more than 50%) had over time, transited from using a gaiwan to using a Yixing teapot, should you use a Yixing teapot (on more occasions) to review a tea?...or use a Yixing teapot when you are not reviewing a tea.  

Anyway, the pix above shows a pair of Yixing teapots.  I had bought (about 7 years ago) 4 similar teapots from a Yixing teapot enthusiast in China who had made these teapots from one batch of clay.  The teapot on the right is one of my frequently used teapot for the past 7 years.  I would use it for raw pu erh about 2-3 times a week.  This would suggest that I had more than 500 tea sessions (raw pu erh) using this teapot for these past few years.   I did a few raw pu erh tea comparisons with these teapots last month.  Tea from the seasoned teapot felt more mellow.  I had used newer and older raw pu erh in this test.  Maybe 'mellow' is the wrong word to use.  The pu erh tea, especially the newer ones tasted less astringent while the older pu erh tea has a slightly better mouthfeel in the taste.  These taste comparisons are actually quite subtle and it could be my imagination running wild. 

Does a Yixing teapot brew up a better cup of pu erh  tea?  Yes.    

Happy Chinese New Year

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year.  To all my readers, I wish you every happiness for the year of the rat.

Prices of tea was much higher last year.  The slight older ones and old ones was even more expensive.  I did noticed that the old teas from Malaysia are 'disappearing' as many dealers had brought these older teas and selling them in Mainland China for a handsome profit.  I foresee such older teas will be even more expensive due to this trend. 

I would only resume my tea adventures in China only in the 2nd half of the year due to the recent Wuhan virus.  However, I may plan a trip to Chicago in late June/ early July this year.  If you are staying in Chicago, I would love to have tea with you.  Let me know.

Happy New Year.