Tag Archives: travel

Water temperature

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I was just in the US for a few days for a quick conference trip, and had to endure a few days of subpar tea. I did bring my own – some tuo that I found recently that’s rather decent. These days, nice hotels generally have better coffee makers than they did of old. Whereas the old drip coffee machines mean that your water will have to pass through not only the area where the coffee goes, but also into the glass pot where anything going in will start tasting/smelling like coffee, the new ones tend to be done with a construction such that, if you were to remove the coffee element, water will directly pour into your cup. This means, among other things, that there’s no more need to really try to eliminate the coffee smell before you can use them for tea. So thankfully, tea in my room was mercifully ok.

The same, surprisingly, cannot be said for the airport lounge. The coffee machine they have is a fully automatic thing that has a hot water dispensing tap that spits out water with the push of a button. This tap, however, is problematic – the water is too cool. I suspect it comes out at something like 80-85 degrees, and the tea simply doesn’t brew properly in those temperatures. Whereas my tea at the hotel was decent tasting – more or less like the real thing when I brew it at home – the same tea brewed at the lounge in a pre-warmed coffee mug tastes like coloured water. Worse, the tea never really expanded/broke apart. The two chunks of tea stayed quite chunky for a very long time. It was only after maybe the 5th or 6th time I added water to the cup when it finally started to come apart, and it was only then when the tea started tasting a bit stronger. In other words, the water was not hot enough.

This is why when you have a vendor telling you to brew younger puerh at anything under 100 degrees, especially if they tell you to use water much cooler, what you’re getting is a very different experience from what you would get if you go at it with hot water. The effect of cooler water is a lower extraction rate from the tea, and it also opens up the leaves slower. It means that for teas like puerh, you’re not getting everything out of it at once. This does decrease the amount of bitterness and roughness that you might get from the leaves, but it also means you’re not really tasting everything you can.

For teas that you’re trying to evaluate whether or not is age-worthy, this approach can be problematic. If you brew your tea purely for currently enjoyment, then by all means, do whatever you like. If you want it with olive oil and cinnamon, do that. However, I do find that if the roughness or the bitterness is too much, a better way of avoiding/managing them is shorten the infusion time or lower the amount of tea leaves used. Lowering temperatures often diminishes the overall experience – most importantly in the mouthfeel of the tea, making it thinner and lighter. The tea at the airport was definitely a sub-par experience – one that I think makes the tuo come off as weak and boring. I rarely use warm, rather than hot, water to brew tea, so it is good, sometimes, to be reminded of what is possible, and what others may do to a tea. This can also explain the range of experiences that you often see when talking about the same tea – the variables are too many and so comparisons are, oftentimes, at best suggestive.

Notes from Kyoto

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I’ve been to Japan quite a few times by now, but there are always things that you notice on trips that you didn’t before.

1) Restaurants, at least here in Kyoto, almost all seem to serve hojicha or genmaicha as the tea of choice. Of the ones that I’ve gone to so far, that has always been the case. Some of these places are not exactly crap restaurants either, and the hojicha, as far as I can tell, are pretty decent. In one case, it was the most interesting hojicha I’ve ever had. I think sencha perhaps doesn’t go as well in many ways with a lot of cuisine, and I can sort of see why. Hojicha is a bit more neutral, and probably does a better job of making food go down easier than sencha could.

2) There really are a lot of teaware stores here. Last time I was here I ran into a teaware store near Daitoku-ji that sold me a few coasters that I think are really quite nice. This time, walking around the main shopping districts here in Kyoto, there are many more teaware shops that sell quality stuff. The prices range from reasonable to very expensive, and it all depends on what you’re going for. If you want a run of the mill kyusu, a few thousand yen will do. If you want a nice chawan from someone who’s probably a bit more than unknown, you’re going to have to shell out a few hundred thousand yen. Chawan styles that are most commonly sold here seem to be kyo-yaki that are very colourful and full of makie decorations with vibrant colours. There are your rakuyaki, of course, and there’s even a whole store devoted to just selling rakuyaki in Gion, and other styles are also sold here, but kyo-yaki is definitely the most common one. To just give you an idea:

PhotobucketThis is just another teaware store. For those who like browsing, if not buying for stuff, there’s no better place than Kyoto. You don’t find the same concentration of such stores elsewhere in Japan – you have to have a better idea of where to look.

3) I don’t drink much of Japanese tea at all, especially the green stuff, so I don’t usually shop for them. Prices, however, are expensive, and I think most of the high end stuff you’ll never see in the US. Prices on the high end seem to be somewhere in the 3000yen/100g range. Granted, this is retail in a touristy city in Kyoto, but like teas in Taiwan, China, and elsewhere, I think the outcome is the same – the best stuff stays at home.

Kitano Tenmangu and Shōkōken

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We are spending a quick few days in Kyoto, and one of the nice things about Kyoto is that there’s tea pretty much literally everywhere you go. Today we spent a little time at Kitano Tenmangu, an important Shinto shrine for the god Tenjin, the deification of the person Shigawara no Michizane, but more importantly, the shrine was also the site of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s famous Grand Tea Ceremony, held in 1587 and was supposed to run for 10 days, even though it ended up only being about two days. It was, for the most part, a grand show of power and patronage by Hideyoshi, but there was some tea involved as well.

Among the collections of Kitano Tenmangu are a number of artifacts related to the tea ceremony, as well as some good looking raku ware chawans. More interestingly, there’s a painting of the scene of the Grand Tea Ceremony, which also lists the famous teaware of the time that was used during this ceremony and who was present at which particular seating. Alas, no pictures allowed in the museum.

There’s also a nice teahouse that wasn’t very obvious given the hubbub surrounding the shrine, as it was the flea market/fair day. The teahouse is called Shōkōken.

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The sign suggests that this is the original building used by Hosokawa Tadaoki, a daimyo and a student of Sen no Rikyu, during the Great Tea Ceremony. But looking around, at least on the web, it seems as though the original building was moved to Kotoin in Daitoku-ji, and the one here might then be a re-creation. Either way though, the well is the original one they used.

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The house is quite big for a teahouse – and has a nice garden.

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As with a lot of other interesting sites, however, this teahouse is not open for viewing, so all you can do is to climb over the wall – at least climb high enough to see inside. It’s bitterly cold right now, so I don’t imagine it being a very pleasant experience to drink tea in such an environment, but in warmer days, I’m sure a tea session here would be exceedingly enjoyable.

Anonymous teas

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In the Western hemisphere people who reads blogs like this one and drink mostly Asian teas in loose-leaf form are a distinct minority, and shops that serve our kind of needs are, by and large, niche players who get relatively little business from those who are not so serious about tea. I suspect that the largest source of loose leaf tea consumption in retail format comes from places that serve loose leaf tea as part of a cafe style operation – with cakes, scones, snacks, and the like.

There are different ways in which such teas are served. On a national scale, the large chains almost all serve teabags, and for good reason – teabags are easy, they’re cheap, the margins are high, and they’re consistent. Anybody can stick a Tazo teabag in a cup and throw hot water in it, and out comes a breakfast style tasting tea that is going to be the same everywhere you go. Smaller shops, on the other hand, especially higher end shops, tend to serve loose leaf teas these days to distinguish themselves from the big chains. If the teas are taken in store, they’ll come in big pots and cups. If you order to go, you’re going to get a paper cup with a t-sac of tea. That’s much harder to do for the average shop – you have to make sure your employees have some idea of what they’re doing, otherwise the teas can be quite nasty. When done well, the teas can be quite decent, and for a traveling tea addict like myself, it can be a welcomed caffeine fix, and it can also be a good introduction to loose leaf tea, or a great place to experiment with teas that one’s unfamiliar with, for people who are otherwise not so tea inclined. Two days ago, I found myself going to a tea and macaron place called Soirette in Vancouver while I was visiting the city for a quick trip before heading to Portland OR. I had a “Wuyi Rock Oolong” which turned out to be quite ok, even though it was made a bit too weak for my taste. But then, any tea in a paper cup is going to be too weak if it were a yancha, so I’m not complaining.

The thing though is that teas are anonymous. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the difficult things are tea purchasing is that two shops can sell the same tea under different names, and you could be none-the-wiser even if you tried them one after another. Unless you do a strict comparison tasting side by side, it’s not always obvious that they’re from the same source. Places like Soirette must source their teas from somewhere – I have a hard time imagining them purchasing teas in bulk from a number of different sources, for that would require a level of work beyond what is necessary (unless, of course, the owner is a tea addict). So, the question is, where?

I tried looking through the web to see if it is possible to find out who they source their teas from, and it turns out to be quite difficult. There are really two possibilities – some big, national stores, or local shops that supply teas for them. Alas, after searching, there’s no real way of knowing with any certainty. I think the only time when you can tell for sure is if some more or less branded teas are used wholesale, without any type of name change. On Soirette’s tea menu, for example, there’s a “Harbour Morning”, which is some type of breakfast tea and named in reference of Coal Harbour, where they’re located. Pretty obviously they named it for their store’s location, and very likely it used to be called “English breakfast” or some other generic name. Then there are things like Jade Oolong, Organic Iron Goddess of Mercy, Marsala Chai, etc etc…. at first I thought it might be Mightyleaf, which has a lot of similarly named organic teas, but then, they also didn’t offer a lot of what Soirette had either. Some look suspiciously similar, but…. the point is, barring some amazing discovery of identical names, etc, and a tea I recognize by taste, there’s just no way to tell.

Perhaps in some ways, that doesn’t matter. However, I do think it speaks volumes about the kind of difficulty faced by newcomers to the hobby – having to deal with the byzantine naming conventions of the trade, and the idiosyncracies of individual shops. If you really love that Harbour Morning blend, you could certainly ask the shop where they get their teas from. In this case, they might tell you, since I don’t believe Soirette sells tea in bulk (although I could be wrong). Try asking a retail tea store, however, and they’ll probably spin some story about sourcing the best teas from the best places, etc. You can go on a quest trying dozens of breakfast blends and not finding the same tea, and even if you end up with the same tea, you might miss it because you feel it’s somehow different. It’s tough when you try to hunt specific teas down, and it all comes down to the problem of teas not bearing names when they’re in loose form. Which is why it’s probably always a good idea to not get too hung up on “the XXX tea I tried at Y shop” too much, because chances are you won’t find it anywhere else.

Tea in Korea

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Generally speaking, I don’t drink much green teas because I find them to be relatively one dimensional. Although it was the type of tea that got me started drinking seriously, I now consume less than 100g of green tea every year. That’s one big reason why I rarely drink Korean teas – they are, by and large, green teas. While the ones I’ve had are generally pretty decent, I just don’t have the room or the inclination to drink them with any regularity, so much so that a can of tea I bought two years ago from a Korean farmer still sits in my tea cupboard, unopened. It’s a shame, really, but I have too much tea to drink, so my experience with Korean teas is limited.

Since I was going to Korea though, there was no reason not to drink some local tea. My previous experiences in Korea is that, for the most part, there’s no tea in the country. Even at restaurants, the most you’re ever going to see are some bad teabags. This time I was pleasantly surprised that the quality of teabags in the country has improved – they are no longer the scum of the earth type of tea that I experienced ten years ago. It also helped that I brought my own tea, so I wasn’t very desperate for caffeine. It is rather telling though that at a place like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, they only had three types of non-flavoured, non-tisane teas, versus maybe a dozen or more that you’d expect when you’re in California. The local taste is really for coffee, and flavoured teas.

Since this was a family oriented trip, I didn’t have much time to spend trolling teashops. I did find enough time to go visit Insadong, which is a touristy area that sells a lot of cultural goods – paper, ceramics, arts and craft things, and among them, some teashops. The last time I was in this area was over 10 years ago, but not much has changed – I still recognize a lot of the shops that I went by last time, which, in and of itself, is pretty incredible. Some, such as one that sold puerh back in the day, is still selling puerh now. The prices, however, are extravagant.

In fact, tea in general seems pretty expensive in Korea, for reasons I don’t understand. Perhaps it is the tariffs that kills it (if I’m reading correct, tariff for green tea is 500%). Either way, we’re talking about some pretty expensive teas here, with a relatively limited selection of greens that are differentiated primarily, for the untrained eyes anyway, by the youthfulness of the buds. I didn’t hold out much hope for anything too fascinating.

While walking around Insadong, however, MadameN and I ran into a rather large shop that I don’t remember from my last visit. The store is called O’sulloc, which, upon googling it after returning, seems like a big tea producer in Korea. Mattcha, who has been writing about Korean teas for years now, says they used to sell to the Western market, but no more. We went to the third story of the teahouse, avoiding the large crowds at the second floor who were voraciously devouring shaved ice. It was rather quiet up there, and dark, with prices to match the surroundings. Looking at the menu in the dimly lit environment, I tried to pick out what looked the most interesting – we had two teas in the end, the Unhyang and the Samdayŏn.

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After a “cleaning” cup of green tea, we each got served our own tray of tea.

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Lighting is bad in there, so bear with the bad pictures. This is a picture of the Samdayŏn, although I couldn’t quite tell the true colour of the tea itself, because the interior of both the pot and the cup are reddish in nature, which obscures the colour. The taste of the tea though is very interesting – it is a taste that I don’t think I’ve ever had before. The “post-fermentation”, whatever it is, did something to the tea, and there is also a scent that is probably from the cedar that they stored the tea in. The leaves used for this tea is some kind of sejak base – very small, fine buds. The colour of the leaves is a reddish one – looks a little like a good Oriental Beauty. This is an odd one.

In comparison, the Unhyang is less exciting, tasting more or less like a highly oxidized roasted oolong. The problem common to both teas, really, was the relatively low amounts of tea they used in the pot. I think we each got maybe 3g of tea in the pot, which really was nothing, and was not sufficient to get a good sense of the tea itself. The water used was also lower in temperature to start off with. I think both of these teas, because of their processing, can stand higher temperature and probably would be much more interesting brewed stronger, but alas, that wasn’t the case. At the prices they want for a mere 30g of tea, I find it hard to fork out that much for something that was only decent. A nice curiosity tea, perhaps, but not one I’d go for with any regularity.

There were some other shops that looked promising, at least, but we neither had the time, nor the energy to go through them. I didn’t really get a chance to shop again either, so this trip’s tea activities were relatively limited This is inherently the problem of trying to tea shop in a place you’re not too familiar. The shops that you end up at tend to be in the more touristy areas. You have very little time, and very little information on which shop is good and which one isn’t. You have a limited amount of energy and stomach to try a lot of teas. You are, sometimes, constrained by language barriers. If I had a few months in Seoul, I’m sure I could do better and find more local shops that might have interesting things for less money, but I don’t. At least I’ve spent a fair amount of time shopping for tea in other places, but even then I had trouble getting good tea within half a day.

Now imagine if you ask a friend of yours, going to China for the very first time, to buy you some nice tea while you’re there, preferably some yancha or puerh…. you can imagine what will happen then. Which is why I always tell people don’t ask your friend to buy tea for you unless they know the area really well and they also know tea really well. Otherwise, you’re quite likely to end up with duds that disappoint.

Loot from Kyoto

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Kyoto is really a lovely town, and is one of my favourite places on the planet. They are filled with tourists, yes, and they live, more or less, off the tourists, but it is because of their charm that cities like Kyoto or Venice really are able to preserve at least some of their flavour that most other places have thoroughly lost – even the old districts of Beijing are slowly dying, because of the lack of preservation and the encroachment of new economic developments, which have spawned massive, unlivable blocks of monumental buildings instead of the very human-scaled neighbourhoods that used to characterize the city. Kyoto, thankfully, has mostly maintained that.

As you can probably guess, I just made a trip to Japan for the past few days, and tried, at least a little bit, to work some tea related activities in there among all the sightseeing. It started, in a certain sense, right after I got off the plane and onto the train from the Chubu airport – Tokoname (yes, that Tokoname) is, unbeknownst to me, right across the water from the airport and was the first stop of the train.

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I must admit to having neither interest nor time in getting off the train to see the kilns, but next time, I guess I’ll know where to go.

It was cherry blossom season, although after an unusually cold winter and a freak windstorm the day before I arrived, most of the trees weren’t blooming yet, although some were. There are actually more cherry blossom trees in places like Vancouver, where they pretty much line every street and the city turns into a sea of pink during spring, but it doesn’t have temples like these.

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I did stop by a few tea places, one of which is Ippodo, which I understand lots of folks like to buy tea from online.

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They have a shop, and a cafe on the side of the shop (enter through main door). Here’s the menu:
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I was traveling with companions, and so I got to try more than one thing. There was a spring special (not seen here) menu as well. I had the Nodoka matcha from that menu, and someone else had the organic sencha. They seem to have an A and B version, but since A is sold out, I presume I tried the B. The organic sencha is very good, with a deep, robust taste and solid mouthfeel. Anyone who’s read this blog with any regularity knows I’m not exactly a sencha fan, so for me to like a sencha is indeed a pretty rare thing. I didn’t buy any though, since I know if I bought any I wouldn’t finish most of it in time for them to be fresh – stale sencha is really not my cup of tea.

Kyoto also has a lot of antique shops scattered around, and Teramachi, where Ippodo is located, has a number of them. I ended up taking home a Republican era pot for a reasonable sum of money. Later in the day, I also found the perfect coaster for pots, made of rattan, in a random teaware shop that has been around since 1870 that I ran into near Daitokuji, which itself is, in my opinion anyway, a must-see site of Kyoto, although one could say that about many of the sites in the city.

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The rattan coaster, in particular, is something I’ve been seeking for a while now. Those things are hard to find. It’s probably only in places like Kyoto where you can run into a 140 years old shop selling high quality teaware while randomly strolling along an otherwise nondescript street. There was, alas, no time for more extensive tea or teaware shopping this trip, as I was on a pretty tight schedule. It would’ve been nice, for example, to see Uji again, but that will have to wait till another day.

I also stopped by Osaka, which offers no such luck in finding items. Metropolis though it is, the antique shops located in the Oimatsu area are extremely disappointing – only two offers any kind of collection of teaware. One was mostly junk, the other being extremely overpriced. Kyoto, it seems, is hard to beat, and I’ll have to go back there for some more sooner rather than later.

Dongguan tea shopping

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Upon the recommendation of Nicolas, I decided to venture up north to the heart of world manufacturing and to see the Dongguan tea markets for myself. Alas, I underestimated the difficulties of traveling in this part of the world, and by the time I arrived it was too late to go shopping. One meal and some food poisoning later, by the time I arrived there the next morning, I was really pretty sick, and I’m surprised I didn’t collapse while there.

From my research, Dongguan has two major tea markets, and a whole host of smaller collections of tea shops here and there. I decided to hit up the older, and larger market in Wanjiang district. It’s about 15-20 minutes from town center, depending on where you are and the traffic, which, at times, can be quite bad. The day was rainy, and cold, and generally rather unpleasant. I only took one overexposed picture while there, since I was basically in no mood to do so, and the scenery was depressing.

As is rather common today in China, many of these places have extremely wide roads, with shops on both sides. Here, the teashops are generally one story, and are basically uninterrupted for a few blocks in each direction. The first rule of shopping in places like this, especially if you’re low on time, is not to walk into stores that look uninteresting, which basically means don’t walk into almost all of them. They all have the same features – puerh cakes lined up on one side, big bags (5kg bags, or some variation of it) of tieguanyin or other Fujian oolong on the other side, vacuum sealed. In the middle area between the two walls, there are usually shelves full of either teaware, pots, tables, or more tea. Or there might be boxes or jians of puerh, or other types of loose tea (although you can imagine what it does to the tea’s quality in this super-damp environment). The back wall usually has a tea table set up, with a very, very bored looking young person, often a female, but sometimes male, staring blankly out onto the street, backed by a wall of puerh cakes encased in either glass or, more likely, yellowed plexiglass and set in these yellow artificial silk lined boxes. Even though these cakes are supposedly the more “exotic” or higher valued cakes, often times they’re just more run of the mill puerh cakes of no discernable value.

It is not impossible to find value in these shops. But if you’re pressed for time, that’s not the best way to spend time in a tea market. Instead, look for shops that seems specialized in one particular type of tea, whatever it is that you’re looking for. For tieguanyin, stores that only sell tieguanyin is likely to have more interesting stuff.  Likewise, for puerh, if you want old tea, go to a store that seems to only sell that. For younger tea, you can always spot the top end young tea stores pretty easily, especially if they press their own cakes.

So after having spent about 20 minutes just wandering around, I finally did end up in one store that seems to do their own pressing of young puerh, focusing on Yiwu and Jingmai, two of the most interesting tea mountains. The boss wasn’t there, and only a young male shopkeeper who said he’s from Yunnan was there. They had a number of cakes, although most of them they only had a handful left – the rest were all sold out. What remains are the lower end stuff, which, although not cheap (180-200 RMB a cake) are really not very interesting. Because of my health limitations that day, I only tried one tea, which I eventually bought a cake of – a Jingmai old tree tea, which is very potent, good, and interesting. I need to try it again, but I think this year once their spring tea arrives, I may head back up to Dongguan and buy some more of this. Although it’s not cheap at over 400 RMB a cake, it is, I think, worth the price of admission.

By the time I had a few cups of this tea, I was starting to really feel the effects this had on me, and the general situation was so that I had to go back to the hotel to lie down. It’s too bad I couldn’t spend more time at the tea market there, as I’m sure there are other stores that will present items of interest. Oh well, it’s only about two hours away, and there’s always next time.

New year in Portland

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A belated Chinese new year to everyone, and sincere wishes that the year of the dragon be a year of good tea for all of you!

I spent my new year in Portland, OR, which is more or less a caricature of what one might think of as a hippie northwest city. It’s a wonderful place, if you don’t mind the six months of rain in the winter, and the scenery is truly beautiful, as is true of pretty much the entire northwest coast.

It also is the home to some famous, mainstream tea companies, most notably Tazo, Stash, and the Tao of Tea.  The city’s offering in better, higher end teas, however, is a bit disappointing, at least from what I have found previously and given the context. I’ve visited a few teahouses in the city, all pretty mediocre, and nothing too interesting beyond what you might find in any run of the mill teahouse in the US. Given the concentration of tea companies in Portland, you’d think there will be more, better tea in this city, of all places.

Running a tea blog, however, has its perks, and one of them is that you get in touch with all sorts of people who lurk and who will let you know they’re in a certain place once you’ve gotten to know them. So while I was in Portland I met up with Abx, whose blog is defunct but who is still drinking tea, at a place called Serenity Arts. The shop is not much – it is located in the same building as an Asian market, and the decor is what you’d expect in a place like that. However, it has that all-important ingredient to the making of a good teahouse – an owner who cares about what she’s drinking.

I met up with Abx at the store, where he clearly knows the owner fairly well.  They were already drinking, but since I hadn’t eaten yet, we had a quick meal at the pretty decent Korean restaurant next door (Portland is full of good Korean places) before going back for some tea. The store can’t really be said to specialize in any particular type of tea, and given its location and clientele, it’s probably difficult to do so, but the owner does seem to take some care in sourcing her stuff, and some of the teas that they sell are things that are harder to find in the US normally – loose, aged puerh (raw and cooked), some pretty decent dancong, etc. Despite its location, or perhaps because of it, it offers up goods that you might not be able to find in one of the more famous places in the city, at prices more reasonable than others.

We must’ve had at least half a dozen tea, while chatting with the owner who was brewing the whole time and some of the other clients who dropped in and out. It is clear, having sat there for a few hours, that the store has good tea from time to time. However, they are not offered generally, but rather sold to familiar clients who are willing (and able) to pay the higher prices that such teas demand. What I liked about it though is that she generally refrained from any overt sales pitch, or overly flowery language in describing a tea. I appreciate the no-nonsense approach to drinking tea, and if I were living in Portland, I can see myself going to this store often.

As I was starting to think about leaving, the owner picked up a ziploc bag with some dark leaves in it, and said she’d brew this one – a 1960s liu’an, she claims, that was given to her by some relative or other. I was initially skeptical, since these claims of old tea are often questionable, but once she brewed it, it was pretty clear that this is a spectacular tea – fragrant, lively, still retaining the freshness of the liu’an base of green tea, while having added on a heavy dose of the aged tea taste that is typical of this genre. Oftentimes liu’an can be quite plain and boring, but this one is anything but. We probably drank 15 rounds of it, and the tea was not at all giving up yet. I had to go, but didn’t really want to.

 

PhotobucketLiu’an in action

So if you ever go to Portland and want to fish for some tea, stop by here. Abx also told me that there’s a new place that opened recently, but I thought Serenity Arts might have more interesting things. I think I was probably right.

A good tea trip

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Being close to Taiwan is probably one of the biggest perks of being in Hong Kong, at least from the perspective of a tea lover. I count aged oolongs as the tea that I can drink day in, day out, and Taiwan is probably the best place to find such things. Even though MadameN and I only went there for three days this time, it did not disappoint.

The Candy Store is of course my first stop, and I returned to find that the laobanniang still remembers me and that I was a seeker of aged oolongs. I spent a few hours sitting there, drinking tea and digging through big metal cans with her, and among the teas I tasted there were two or three that seemed quite decent. One, the last one I tried that day, was very similar to The One That Got Away, and I dare not make the same mistake twice. So I ended up taking home the whole bag of tea that she had, all 2kg of it.

There were smaller successes too, as I went from shop to shop in Taipei looking for things. I replenished my supply of aged oolong, which, while not exactly running low, is low enough for me to have withheld consumption of aged oolongs for a while, opting instead to drink teas that are more readily available. Now, I am sitting in my office sipping an inexpensive aged tieguanyin that I bought on this trip that has the right mix of aged taste, sweetness, and throatiness. Yum.

Having then punctuated the trip with a visit to the magnificent Taroko park, we returned to Taipei and picked up the tea I wanted. On the last day, before our departure, I met up with a dear tea friend from Japan who is both knowledgeable and incredibly generous, and together we visited a tea lover/maker/seller who brewed a series of quite interesting, younger puerhs, some of which are the best young puerh I have had in a while. That’s the other thing about Taiwan – in addition to lots of shops, it has a high number of people who are very keen on tea and who spend a lot of time thinking about it, drinking it, and in some cases, making it. Others are then attracted to Taiwan and visit, therefore further exchanging ideas and teas. It’s a very fertile environment in which to advance one’s own tea appreciation, and I can’t think of a better place for tea than that.

With our bellies full of good tea, our tea companion took us to the airport and sent us off. Four days is far too short for a trip, but it was an invigorating one. I’ll be back for more, and soon.

The tea shop island

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Taiwan was called the Ilha Formosa, or the beautiful island, because the Portuguese sailors who first saw Taiwan thought it beautiful. That it still is, but for those of us who are avid tea drinkers, this is more like the Teashop island.

I just got here yesterday for a very quick trip, and stayinag in the heart of Taipei last night, we went out for dinner around our hotel. Just on the pre and post dinner walk alone, in the space of about a few blocks, I think I saw a dozen teashops. Not all of them are necessarily worth visiting, especially when there are many fine shops to go to, but I think it is safe to say that nobody will die of caffeine deprivation here. In fact, I wonder if Taiwan might not have the highest concentration of teashop per capita in the world.

Now I am sitting here in the middle of Taroko national park. It is stunning, and more than validates Taiwan’s former name. More on that later.