A Tea Addict's Journal

The reality of tea…

November 20, 2007 · 6 Comments

Even though at times it does sound a bit like Taiwan has lots of good tea, good tea culture, etc etc…. the reality is that most people still don’t give much of a damn about tea here.

Today I went to a place called Cafe Lumiere, a little shop in a lovely old building that houses a theatre and is named after a famous Taiwanese movie. It’s your typical Western style coffeeshop kind of thing… cakes, etc. They served tea, mostly of the Earl Grey variety. What passed for tea was basically big teapots with round teabags — Republic of Tea, perhaps? The thing I had was a “Yorkshire tea”, which tasted like a weak version of English Breakfast. However, it had the typical problem of “drinking the last guy’s tea”. What I mean is… the teapots they used weren’t cleaned sufficiently thoroughly so that all the herbal teas that have been made in it has left a mark. So I ended up drinking Butterscotch Hibiscus Vanilla Cherry Black Chamomile…. a potpurri of flavours and smells that have been left behind by many a drinkers before me. At one point the lid of the pot smelled like detergent. Yum….

For dinner we went to Ding Tai Fung, a famous restaurant in Taiwan (best know for their xiaolongbaos). The generic tea they served was a really watered down stale green jasmine. Mind you, that’s just for the purpose of washing down your food as quickly as possible so that you will move out of the place for the next person (the waitresses had femmebot like efficiency) but you’d think watered down, low grade oolong is at least achievable instead of nasty stale green jasmine….

Tea is still very much just a beverage to be consumed in the course of the day while doing other things. Even here, where tea culture is perhaps more alive than any other place in Greater China, most people are quite happy with just a cup made simply, or even badly. Sometimes I think it is easy to forget that when reading about the latest thing, the strangest preparation methods, or arguments over the tiniest details.

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6 responses so far ↓

  • MANDARINstea // November 20, 2007 at 7:21 pm | Reply

    I still remember the staring, when mentioning to an editor today: “the tea I was serving is still at recovery over jet lag…..” -T

  • MarshalN // November 21, 2007 at 9:58 am | Reply

    Hehehe….

  • iwii // November 21, 2007 at 5:21 pm | Reply

    Hi Toki, I saw your red mark tasting but the second picture (which is wonderful by the way) made me wonder: are these cups holding the successive different brews? If so, I am really surprised it started to decline after the seventh one, especially for 10 grams. I can remember this stuff to last forever.

  • MarshalN // November 21, 2007 at 10:11 pm | Reply

    From what I remember, the colour of the Red Label will start to decline after 5 or 6, but the taste will remain….

  • iwii // November 22, 2007 at 2:49 am | Reply

    Oh maybe, it’s true that I don’t remember how the color was, but indeed this tea never really gives up. Very interesting though the difference is striking.
    in fact I am never taking pictures of the brew, nor keeping any cup of the previous ones. Maybe I should sometimes, as it is possible to notice a given brew is lighter than the previous one, it is somehow difficult to know if it was lighter than the first one or not.
    Though this picture tends to confirm that color is not really a great indicator then…

  • MarshalN // November 22, 2007 at 7:03 am | Reply

    Yeah, I think colour is a poor indicator and almost never judge a tea by its colour.

    I mean, it does tell you something, but not everything

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