So, so tired this morning! I haven’t gotten a good night of sleep even once this week, mainly because Liam has been wired at night and screams his head off outside our door at 3am. If you are ever thinking of adopting a Burmese just know that they are extremely needy and grow very attached to their human companions. I swear they’re like puppies.

No dainty bowl of fruit and yogurt for me this morning. Only bread and cheese would do.

Maybe you read Janetha‘s post about what she would eat if health were not a concern. My comment was that I would eat an everything bagel with cream cheese for breakfast every day of my life if it wouldn’t eventually kill me. Seriously, I could live on those

Washed it down with a hot cup of tea…

It makes me so happy that Jeff makes me a cup of tea every morning without even being asked. He’s a good husband, that one.

It is gloomy and rainy out today, and yet will still manage to get up to 92 degrees. I am terrified of how hot it’s likely going to get here in August. And when I’m too hot at night, I can’t sleep….

What are your weekend plans?

 

Please don’t be put off by the title of this post!

Tea, like wine, is one of those subjects that can seem really complicated because there’s just so much to know about it if you want to take the time to learn. Also like wine, tea is a subject that some drinkers (but certainly not all) can tend to get snobbish about and use as a means to try to impress and/or belittle others. I’m not into that.

So, I wanna tell you a couple things about tea, but I’m not gonna beat you over the head with it. I realize that just as I don’t give a single crap about wine, tea may just not be your thing either.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a “tea person” though, just as I will never be a “wine person,” it can be fun to hear about something totally new and different sometimes. That’s what I hope to do with my tea posts, show you a little bit of something that brings me joy in hopes that you’ll find it interesting too.

So here’s what you need to know before we get started on the tasting.

You may have heard of the concept of “terroir” as it relates to wine. Basically, terroir refers to all of the environmental influences on the grape that help to shape it’s unique flavor. Tea is exactly the same. Where it comes from, how much sun it got that year, the exact temperatures, the flowers blooming in the area, the mineral content of the soil, and so on and so on, develop the leaf into something thoroughly unique that can’t be exactly reproduced ever again.

The vast majority of Chinese tea comes from the Yunnan province, and mostly from 6 mountains in the Xishuangbanna prefecture (kind of like a county.) One of the major tea factories in this region is the Menghai Tea Factory, where our pu-erh bing is from. You can see in the picture below that all of that is clearly printed on the wrapper so you know where your tea comes from.

The next thing you want to know is what those numbers on the wrapper represent. the one on top, 7542, is the recipe number. The first two digits, 75, are the year the recipe was first developed, so this recipe was introduced in 1975. The next digit, 4, is the grade of the leaves used, so these are not top quality leaves as they are fourth-grade, but still pretty good. The last number, 2, is the number assigned to Menghai Tea Factory, so all of their recipes will end in a 2.

The middle number is the quantity of the product, this one is 357 grams.

And 902 tells you when this particular bing was made, 9 stands for 2009 and 02 means that it’s the second release of it.

Only slightly confusing, right?

Now onto how to brew it…

I’m not going to go into too much detail about this because we’re currently not doing it exactly right anyway. We just don’t have all the right drinking cups and sharing pitchers and tea tables to show you all the ceremony of it. We also don’t have a way of knowing if our hot water is at the right temperature and that really makes a difference. Some day we’ll get a programmable hot water boiler for that.

Basically you just fill the pot with leaf, warm up the cups with plain hot water, and then “rinse” the leaf. There’s always some sediment and tiny pieces of broken leaf to wash out, and rinsing helps to remove some of the initial bitterness in the tea. You pretty much just fill the pot with hot water and immediately pour it out once or twice.

Then you can begin your infusions. We did seven where we gradually increased the length of time that the tea brewed. Can you spot the subtle color differences as we went along?

The really cool thing here is that the tea tastes and smells very different after each infusion. So without further ado, here are my tasting notes…

1. Infused 25 seconds. Subtle peppermint and cinnamon aromas. Tastes of blond straw and still bitter and green tasting.
2. Infused 25 seconds. I can smell only the clay of the pot, very minerally. Bitterness is mellowing out, tastes like a thin green tea.
3. Infused 30 seconds. Starting to smell some honey, not just sweetness but the kind of tingling enzyme-laden honey scent. Tastes lightly grassy but with some very faint sugar flavor in the background.
4. Infused 40 seconds. Smelling darker and more damp and woody, still honey enzyme aromas. Starting to taste dried mushroom and bark.
5. Infused 50 seconds. All of a sudden aromas of sweet pear juice come forward. The tea has very little flavor though, just mellow.
6. Infused 60 seconds. Fruity pear smell intensifies, almost lychee-like. Tastes of pear juice with a hint of pine.
7. Infused 75 seconds. Smells now of pear and mushroom. Tastes like a high quality olive oil!

Infusion #6 was definitely my favorite! A very surprising flavor to come from a tea that smells like wood and mushrooms when dry.

And here’s what the leaf looks like after all that…

It feels oily and fragile, and smells so interesting! It’s kind of like a combination of all the smells throughout the tasting.

Lucas liked to sniff at it too…

Sorry bud, not food, at least not anything you would wanna eat.

So that’s it. I don’t really need to know anything about tea to know that I enjoy it, but having a few extra bits of knowledge is helping me to be able to choose teas that I’m likely to enjoy and to prepare them well.

It is so relaxing to spend an hour or so brewing and sipping and pondering the smells and flavors of tea with Jeff on a rainy day, or any day really. The whole process really serves to calm me down and to appreciate the beauty of the things around me.

What is your favorite tea? (And don’t think you have to drink Chinese pu-erhs to have an opinion about tea, I love me some Yogi brand Green tea with goji berry!)

Now that our new little lady is safely home with us after her long journey here from China, she must be successfully seasoned before she can be used to brew pu-erh tea. New teapots are often coated in a thin layer of wax, but even the ones that aren’t can have some rough spots and loose sediment that needs to be removed so that you don’t end up drinking it.

Seasoning is about more than just making sure your new pot is clean though. Yixing clay is a porous material that over time will absorb oils from the tea leaves brewed within it. This is a good thing. It is said that after using your pot regularly for 15 years, you should be able to brew tea in it with just the residual oils and flavors imbued in the pot itself, without adding any leaf at all!

So, in a way, seasoning a new teapot is much like seasoning a cast iron skillet. You want it to soak up the flavors from what you put in it, gradually building up more flavor and character within the vessel that over time can contribute to a more roundly flavored tea.

You start by lightly scrubbing the pot with something soft but still mildly abrasive. I’ve even read of using toothpaste and a toothbrush to do this, but Jeff and I were afraid that the toothpaste might somehow flavor the pot so we went with just this textured tea towel instead.

When she’s nice and scrubbed, it’s time for the spa treatment!

The pot needs to be boiled for about 30 minutes with a teacloth to keep it from rattling around. Rinse the teapot in warm then hot tap water for a minute or two before plunging it into the boiling water to avoid causing cracks from the sudden temperature change. I like to make separate compartments for the pot and lid so that they don’t rub up against each other.

Cover up with the teacloth and let it do it’s thing for 30 minutes. Then turn off the heat and let it cool down for another 30 minutes before taking it out, again this is so that you don’t subject the pot to sudden changes in temperature.

Just let it dry completely on a rack so that it gets good air circulation all around it. When it’s completely dry you can move on to phase two.

The next step is basically the same as the first, but this time you’re gonna boil the pot in the type of tea you intend to use it for.

Here I am unwrapping my new bing for the first time!

It’s dry and tightly packed, so we used a knife to carefully break the tea apart.

You need about 2 tbsp. worth. We let Lucas “test it for quality.” He quickly realized that this was not food and therefore of no interest to him.

Waiting for the water to come up to a boil and then pouring the tea straight in.

It takes less than a minute for the leaves to unfurl and start releasing their clouds of sweet and smoke-smelling liquid.

Just tuck away your pot and lid within the folds of the tea towel as before, and cover.

I’ve heard so many different theories as to how long you should boil the pot on the second pass. All from 20 minutes, an hour, 3 hours, and even letting it sit for a week! Jeff and I decided that a half hour was sufficient for opening the pores and allowing them to be refilled with the warm tea oils.

Lucas finds this whole process thrilling, can’t you tell?

Well here she is after her bath, not ready to let go of the memory of it. See, she took a souvenir!

Can you see the difference in smoothness? It’s a bit hard to tell in pictures. Holding it in your hand though it should feel almost like skin, smooth and lightly oily.

That’s pretty much it. This teapot is ready for service now.

Like I said, this one will only be used for brewing pu-erh teas. Jeff already has a slightly larger Yixing pot that we only use for Chinese black teas. You don’t want to mix teas between pots because the oils in the leaves will add to the flavor of the pot over time and can ever-so-slightly alter the flavor of the tea you are drinking.

It is important that your teapots stay in monogamous relationships with the type of tea they were “married” to during seasoning so that the flavor of the pot and the tea can compliment and enhance each other. A pot and its tea are like soul-mates; they can never be separated, they bring out the best in each other, and the relationship gets even better with age!