October 2011
31 posts
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Unforgettable
At what point in one’s tea drinking life, when one says, enough, this tea is far too ridiculously good and I can not live this down ever again? For today, I grew afraid that after drinking the 2nd place Taiwan Beauty winner, I might have to quit drinking tea, for fear that nothing will ever compare again. Once ridiculed as ‘pong fong cha’, or bullshit tea, this oolong invented in...
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A time capsule
Here in Wenshan, Mr. Lee, our Baochong farmer, keeps bees and collects the tea seeds to crush for oil. The bees will harvest the pollen from the tea flowers and they will be particularly sweet this year. The tea flowers were plentiful and one can suck on the pollen, like honeysuckle. Mr. Chen makes his Jia Long Oolong, and his wife deep fries some super delicious tea leaf tempura and makes a wild...
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Jia Long, the good dragon tea
Mr. Chen calls his invention ‘Jia Long’, or the good dragon tea. It was made GABA tea style, oxidized without oxygen. Exactly how it’s made is unknown, as he is hoping to obtain a patent some day. In any case, after knowing him for 3 years, he has finally decided to let us visit his farm.
It’s about quality, he said, not quantity. He barely fertilizes his bushes ,...
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Who cares about real tea?
Each year, as we concerned ourselves about the fact that artisan teas are rapidly disappearing, we are overlooking the fact that tea in America is comprised mostly of commodity teas. Who really cares about real artisan made teas hailing from century old traditions? Who really cares if harvesting the Baochong leaves one by one means that the leaf texture and size and shape will fit a certain...
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No monkeys at work here
The hills are very, very steep. One with vertigo would not do well in this excursion of ours deep in the mountains of Siping, home of Tieguanyin. The elevation ranges from 800 meters to 1200 meters, some maybe more, and many newly planted hillsides feature clippings from 50 year old bushes from the area. Available wind from all directions, red clay soil full of iron, and severe trims down to...
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Old tea, new tea
For me, Tieguanyin is a good representative of the transitional times in the history of our tea world. It is one of the oldest and most beloved of tea traditions, that Iron Bodhisattva tea, always elegant and refined, with that characteristic ‘yun’ note of long lingering fragrance in the palate. It was also, for hundreds of years, a generally darker and more highly oxidized style of...
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Worth its price in Yellow Gold
Yellow Gold oolong was one of the common varieties of oolong that is not Tieguanyin but grown in this region. It is not currently in fashion, and prices are not through the roof. A great Yellow Gold was often compared to being ‘reminiscient of Tieguanyin’, and hardly ever appreciated on its own. But we discovered that in fact, there were three different sub-varietals of Yellow Gold...
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Tea of the Bodhisattva
Experiencing tea in a farm is quite different from sitting with some overly branded tea booth in a trade fair. Fortunately for me, most of my tea experiences have been at farms, in a mountain, sitting on a rickety stool with some farmers, drinking through sometimes hundreds of slightly varying batches of the same tea. In this case, it’s Tieguanyin all the way, as we finally ended up in...
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Xiamen
The tea exhibitors at the Xiamen expo were nothing like the old: the booths were fancy constructions, the staff were friendly and eager to sit you down for some tea, and many items were for sale right on the spot. In the past, I remembered the tea exhibitors had always seemed bored and had the plainest booths. There was hardly enough interest to eat through the bags of peanuts while reading the...
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Finding resonance
My dad the life long artist has often said, finding the relation and balance between light and dark, empty and full, space and beyond space, is about finding resonance. But what is hardest is achieving that in real life- finding others to understand your universe and partake with you spiritually; that is resonance.
Today, the exhibit at the Foshan Art Museum drew hundreds, and good questions...
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The last of the literati
The final, educated, trained and knowledgeable few, in in-depth Chinese culture and art, are all from my parents’ generation. Those born and educated before the Cultural Revolution, that is, who have suffered tremendously for their education, and who have decided to bravely carry on the mantel of the arts on behalf the 1.4 billion Chinese in the mainland. My dad counts as one, though from...
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Mr. Cheng Goes to China
The one and only, renowned Fu-Tung Cheng is the creator of what many of you experience as Teance before you even get to the tea: the environment and context, the proper esthetic for tea. That soothing, beautiful timelessness, that alertness to detail that heightened senses. When you walk into Teance in Fourth St, you experience Mr. Cheng’s creation.
I accompanied him for a different purpose...
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My life as teabuyer
Aside from buying tea for myself out of necessity, as the kind of tea I will drink were hard to find in the U.S., when the business began in 2002, I began to buy tea on a professional basis. No problem, as that was just an extension of what I was already doing. However, the selection had to extend to include teas that perhaps the public had heard of. Back in 2002, 40 year old Pu-Erh was plentiful...
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My adventures in Tea
Each year I brave the elements to explore those great tea areas found only in those unknown little nooks in Asia. What elements? Typhoons, monsoons, hurricanes. Mosquitoes, geckos, centipedes, and giant spiders. Leeches or so. Sometimes the roosters crow at 3am and I had been up until 3am with the tea processing. Farm life is wonderful especially in a remote tea mountain.
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