Here's an admission: I'm a tea guy.
Not exactly like coming out of the closet to Bible-thumping parents, or professing a love of Marx to HUAC, but, in the cuppajoe world of American men, it's a meaningful confession nonetheless. Coffee is strong, manly, practical and American. It comes in chunky mugs decorated with the names of construction companies, or suitably pithy declarations of love from small children.
Tea is effete, foreign, weak, and you have to stick out your pinkie to drink it. It's served in delicate, flower-decorated porcelain cups with ludicrously tiny handles. Tea is the primary source of nutrition for the teddy bears and imaginary friends of lonely 5-year-old girls.
But I like tea, have always liked tea, and will almost always take tea over coffee, no matter what kind of lemur the coffee beans came out the back end of. From the ages of, say, 5, to 18, I grew up on a steady diet of mediocre tea (Lipton orange pekoe) and loved it. The best tea I ever had was in Peshawar, on the street where ever-hospitable chai-wallahs add judicious pinches of the green stuff to dusty, cracked teacups that hapless British colonials probably brought over decades before. It was like liquid lapis lazuli.
But having a lifelong love of tea doesn't mean I necessarily know anything about it.
During a short trip this winter, I visited the home of a tea expert/Japanese classical musician who works out of Holsome Teas and Herbs, in Princeton, N.J., Glen Swann. Glen was nice enough to give my brother and me a quick overview of some teas from East Asia.
We started off in Taiwan:
The art of tea preparation, or gongfucha, involves an intricate process of getting the water to the right temperature, rinsing the special teaware, readying the tea, and steeping. The kind we tried (directly above) was a Formosa High Mountain Oolong, which had bold, earthy flavors and scents.
Second (above and before the jump) was a Japanese tea from Kyushu called Yama-cha, a type of sencha or "early" tea, tea that isn't ground up. More delicate and floral but still a bit bitter and maybe a bit seaweed-y. But maybe that was because the tea leaves sort of resembled hot bits of kelp when they were steeped.
Finally, there was pu-erh tea from the Yunnan province of China, which can come as green tea or aged as what is in essence a form of black tea. We tried the ripened black-tea variant, which varies widely depending on the microflora of the particular area it was cultivated, processed, etc. Our pu-erh was strong and richly earthy, reminding me of roasted peanuts and wet leaves. (Note the cool teapot lid in the background, by the way: The dragon's head was designed to slide forward and back as you poured from the pot.)
via http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2009/01/asian-tea-for-t.html
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