hineni- here i am / Teaneni- here i tea

17 kislev 5781

 welcome to our continued segment of getting to know the tea drinker behind the screen. scratch that. IN the screen…

i am avoiding writing a tea review because the tea i am most excited to try is some aged sheng puer i need to re-humidify. they are samples that came in a plastic bag that i want to make sure are in decent shape before i try them. 

 

i am still new to puer and have ruined some i bought by not knowing how to store it and wondering why something that tasted good when i first got it now tastes flavorless and has no aroma. the main reason was that i was not storing my tea properly. valuable life lessons. 

 

i lived on a converted school bus until a month ago when i upgraded to a travel trailer. believe it or not, but a school bus in the pacific northwest is a terrrribbblllle place to store tea.

 

right now, i have the samples in an airtight tupperware with a boveda humidity pack for 69% RH. before putting them in there, i also added a little bit of steam to the ziplocs to help give them a little boost. most of this i learned from the seasoned tea bloggers TeaDB and MattCha. 

 

i am going to use a hygrometer to check on the humidity in the individual bags and monitor them over the next couple of weeks. i also smelled the samples when i got them and they all had a similar one note basic puer smell. they even smelled like shou puer… i will pay attention to how they smell as i contiue to check on their humidity. as of now, the hygrometer reads between 50 and 55% RH with a temperature of 64 degrees fahrenheit. 

 

so until then, i will continue the getting to know you part of this blog (a segment that will be ongoing and frequent).

 

i will start with the quintessential question. how did i get into tea? great question. thank you for asking.

 

it was because of my mom. thanks mom. 

 

my mom loves English breakfast tea. she drinks it with 2% milk. not half and half. not cream. 2% milk and sugar. this is how i first started drinking tea and i really liked it. my mom is discerning in her tastes for tea. she is not snobbish in the least but she knows what she likes. she gets mad at places that charge more for a larger size of tea because it’s the same amount of tea but with more hot water. why should that cost more? agreed, mom. 

 

like lots of tea enthusiasts out there, she despises Lipton (and not just because of the colonialist history). she drinks bagged tea and her favorite is Bigelow (my favorites were Stash and Red Roses even though i only had Red Roses once and it was at my grandmas). she had Salada and Tetley in big boxes for an everyday drinker and the Bigelow was for a fancy day. this was how i began drinking tea.

 

i don’t remember how i first transitioned into drinking other teas and refusing to drink them with sugar. at ten i read the Tao of Pooh, a phenomenal book, and because of that, i read the Tao Te Ching, an even more phenomenal book. i read the David Hinton translation and thought he did a great job (i see you ecofeminist critical theory). i also read Hinton’s translation of the Chuang Tze which was equally incredible to me. i still have both those copies to this day. they both had a big impact on me and i related to their philosophy a lot back then and i still do. Taoism is what started to get me interested in Chinese culture. the city i grew up in, Albany, NY, has a lot of great Chinese restaurants and Chinese grocery stores. food was a big way i related to cultures. as a teen, i wanted to be a chef and i worked as a cook most of my jobs up until recently (my body cant hang with that anymore). 

 

some of my favorite food to eat was Chinese food. i would go to the Chiense restaurants in Albany, bring a friend or two, and try a whole bunch of stuff i’ve never tried before and drink a lot of restaurant green tea. i also took Chinese for two years in high school. i had a great teacher and we had a big ol’ poster of Mao Ze Dong in the classroom. legit.

 

as a teenager, i started to get into environmentalism and politics. my undeveloped hormonal teenage brain stewing with the combination of white guilt mixed with ancestral jewish guilt was a perfect cocktail for my years of ascetic tendencies. all of this to say why i insisted ‘sugar shouldn’t be in tea. blah blah blah.’

 

somewhere along the line in my late teens when i got chefy-er and pretencious-y-er i started drinking loose leaf tea. 

 

when i went to college (blech, gross, didn’t like it, blech. i came close to dropping out to be a cook multiple times. i did the nerd version of dropping out and graduated in 3 years to be done with it), i brought some loose leaf tea from Albany that was called ‘Shalimar Oolong.’ it was some kind of flavored Oolong done in the wuyi style that tasted fruity. and… i loved it. i would drink this oolong and work on my weird long thesis about robots and how they will supplant us in the succession of evolution and how the singularity is approaching and how this all relates to apocalypticism and reactionary environmentalism etc etc. what an adorable dumpling i was.

 

it wasn’t until just over a year ago that i learned about gong fu cha. my roommate, who i moved in with after learning she was down to not have wifi (yes!) and wanted to make her home into a tea house, had high quality tea she bought from her friend Steve Odell in Portland who turns out to be big in the tea scene out here. she would brew her good tea in a small kyusu one of her friends made her. this was all new to me. 

 

not long after this, i went to a radical mycology gathering where there happened to be someone pouring tea for people and talking about puer and silver needle and all these things i didt know about.

 

so, like a diligent nerd, i started researching and came across So Han Fan’s Gong Fu TeaCha videos on youtube under the username Teahouseghost. i cant recommend these enough. they are amazing! they are beautifully orchestrated, the information is shared in an engaging and entertaining manner, and So Han is extremely knowledgeable and a great teacher. i still haven’t bought tea from the West China Tea Company because, as stated before, i am a cheap bitch and their tea is pricey. but i assume it is great tea.

 

when did i start brewing gong fu style? when did i get my own fancy tea? when did i buy first schlamazal tea that i thought was fancy and felt embarrassed when i realized i was wrong?

 

stay tuned for next time when i talk about my first time trying high quality tea and going to a real tea shop. oooooooh.

 

xoxo,

borei atzei besamim