Alex Zorach's Tea Blog

Trader Joe's Tea - And Commentary On The Chain As A Whole

2012-01-30T08:53:00.002-05:00

Some time ago I wrote a long post about Tea at Wegmans Supermarket, which I followed up on by reviewing nine of Wemgans' Teas and herbal teas on RateTea. This post is about another supermarket chain: Trader Joe's. The following picture shows a Trader Joe's that I have visited before, in Media, PA, although this is not the store I regularly shop at. If you've seen me with my hat, the flower (a poppy) in my hat was a gift from a veteran outside this store, after I donated some money. This store was built inside the old Media armory, which also houses the Pennsylvania Veteran's Museum:

Trader Joe's and Wegmans share a few things in common: they are both perceived as relatively high-end supermarket chains, catering to people who like food and want higher-quality products. But the similarities end there. Both the tea selection and the stores as a whole are vastly different.

Trader Joe's Tea:

Tea is not Trader Joe's strong suit. The company does sell its own brand of tea. However, the tea is only available in tea bags, and as tea bags go, I personally find them quite disappointing. If you read reviews of Trader Joe's Tea on RateTea, you'll see that, as of writing this, all of their tea ratings on the site are in the 40-50 range (out of 100). They're not terrible, but no one seems to love them either. There are no single-region teas, and no loose-leaf teas.

Trader Joe's also does not seem to put as much effort into tea as they do coffee. The company has a full four pages on their website about coffee, and not one page on tea. Their coffee offerings are also, in my opinion, clearly superior to their tea offerings: they sell single-origin coffee, including some shade-grown coffee.

I do believe that, with little effort, Trader Joe's could do better. Most of Trader Joe's products are consistently high quality for a relatively low price, and their tea seems to fall outside this pattern: it is average-priced, but strikes me as below-average in quality. Even if they just wanted to stock tea bags, they could stock higher-quality tea bags. Maybe they could throw in an offering or two from Ten Ren Tea, which, in my opinion, offers one of the best quality-to-price ratios among simple tea bags. Even offering just Foojoy tea bags would be a step up in quality (and a step down in price) from what they currently sell. And there are so many great companies out there selling simple tea bags that are better than what Trader Joe's offers, and lower in price. Why not throw some single-region teas in the mix?

If I were running Trader Joe's:

If I were running Trader Joe's, I'd make the following changes:

Sell finum basket infusers in the tea section, and sell some boxes of loose-leaf tea. I'd search long and hard to find a product offering superior quality at a low price, like the three teas I featured in my post cheap tea: loose-leaf teas offering outstanding value.

I'd put a big, and cute sign next to the loose-leaf tea for about 6 months after stocking it, saying something to the effect of: "Loose-leaf tea saves money, protects the environment, and is superior in flavor." These are three things that Trader Joe's customers seem to care about, and I think it would probably make the loose-leaf tea sell quickly, even among people who had not ever tried loose-leaf tea before.

I'd put an equal amount of pages on their website about tea as about coffee. I'd highlight the individual products they offer, and draw attention to the fact that the company was now selling loose-leaf tea, and explain the benefits of loose-leaf tea in terms of price, quality, and sustainability.

I'd find a new supplier for their private-label brand of tea bags. From what I've tried of them, I don't think their current tea bags compare well to what else is out there, even among low-end tea bags.

I'd add single-region tea bags, like Darjeeling, Assam, and I'd probably offer some of the most popular Japanese styles of green tea, like hojicha and genmaicha, and maybe some Chinese teas as well, like oolongs and green tea. I know these things exist because I've had decent tea in tea bags for a fair price from brands like Ten Ren Tea, Foojoy, Harney and Sons, and Jacksons of Piccadilly.

In short, all Trader Joe's needs to do is to start thinking more about what tea they offer. The offerings now seem to reflect a lack of consideration or focus on this product, like tea is merely an afterthought.

Trader Joe's as a Whole:

While I'm writing on the topic of Trader Joe's, I want to comment on the chain as a whole. I shop here semi-regularly (every couple of months) and there is a lot I like about the store. But there's also a lot that I dislike.

Strengths:

In my opinion, the biggest strength of Trader Joe's is that it has consistently fair prices on products that are consistently above average quality. I think the best products to buy at Trader Joe's are packaged products that you can buy in relatively large quantities. I buy such things at this store as raw nuts, dried fruit, kalamata olives in glass jars, canned smoked herring, and massive bars of 70% dark chocolate. I also buy a fair amount of cheese and chicken sausage at the store.

I also want to mention some strengths of this store, other than the quality of the products: the employees are very courteous, which, according to my friends who have worked at this store, follows naturally from the fact that Trader Joe's treats their employees very well and the store is a pleasant place to work. I also like the no-nonsense pricing -- there are no sales or complex deals, only consistently fair prices. Another benefit of shopping here is that the store keeps enough staff on hand so that lines stay short, even when the store is busy.

Weaknesses:

Trader Joe's produce section is close to what I would consider an epic fail. Nearly all the produce is shipped in from very far away; the chain lags behind even the most "ghetto" supermarkets in terms of its lack of locally-grown or even semi-locally-grown produce. Much of the produce is packaged, and a very large portion of it originates outside the country. Once in a rare while I've picked up a good batch of something or other here, but my experiences, by and large, with the produce have been pretty bad.

Trader Joe's also fails when it comes to the sustainability of their fish offerings (with the exception of the canned fish I mentioned above). There is no fresh fish in the store, only canned fish and frozen, packaged fish, which can be fine, except for the problem that much of what the company sells is among the worst choices available from the perspective of sustainability and health. I use Seafood Watch and EDF's Seafood Selector to guide my choices of what fish to buy, and a large portion of what Trader Joe's stocks is on the "Avoid" or "Eco-Worst" list of these organizations, not to mention that many are also marked as being high in mercury and/or PCB's.

In terms of the store itself, some other downsides of this chain are that the store interiors tend to be cramped and have traffic jams during busy times of day, and that many of the store's parking lots also tend to be cramped. I have also noticed that some of their stores in urban areas have a pedestrian-unfriendly design. For example, there is a Trader Joe's on market street in Philadelphia, but you can only enter from the rear of the building, where the parking lot is--friendly to drivers but unfriendly to walkers or people arriving from the trolley stop.

What do you think?

Do you shop at Trader Joe's? What do you think of their tea offerings? Do you think they could do better? How about the chain as a whole?

Top 5 Most-Viewed Region Pages on RateTea

2012-01-29T03:34:00.002-05:00

RateTea has pages with brief to long articles on individual tea-producing regions, including both countries and smaller divisions, such as states, provinces, prefectures, districts, counties, or whatever divisions exist in the countries that grow tea. This post highlights which of these articles or pages are viewed most often on RateTea.

This list was surprising to me.

Japan - Japan comes out a clear first, beating out China by a long-shot. Why? This result was not intuitive to me; although Japan certainly has a very well-developed specialty tea culture, the volume of tea and diversity of tea produced by China is much greater, and the number of Chinese teas listed on RateTea is much larger. However, when I looked at when this page started being more viewed, I realized exactly what was going on...this page received few views before march of 2011; people seem to be coming here to learn about their tea in response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

China - This one is to be expected.

The United States - Another surprise....the United States barely produces any tea commercially, but, given that the bulk of RateTea's audience is in the U.S., I think it makes sense that people would be interested or curious to check out this page. The page itself is fairly extensive, and talks both about the sparse tea production in the U.S., the climate of the U.S. as related to growing the tea plant, and herbs grown in the U.S. used in herbal teas.

India - Another expected one.

Sri Lanka - No surprise here either.

There you have it. Interesting, huh? Oh, and guess what one was number six on the list? Guatemala.

Link Permanence - The Importance Of Keeping The Same URL Scheme

2012-01-27T08:19:00.001-05:00

This post is the next in my series of posts on best practices for tea company websites. Recently, I wrote about the importance of having a product page for each tea. Many of the benefits of having product pages come from increased traffic to your site, often coming in through links from bloggers, forums, and social networking sites, when people comment on your teas and share a link to the page on your site.

These links will stop helping you if you change your URL scheme and the links become broken links. Furthermore, the broken links may also harm the people who linked to you, which can frustrate them and make it less likely for them to link to you in the future.

In this post I will make an argument for the benefits of maintaining a consistent URL scheme. The best practices, as I recommend, are:

Ideally, do not ever change the URL scheme on your website. Put great care into thinking about how your URL's will be organized, and then stick to it, even through a major site redesign.

If you do ever change your URL scheme, or move or rename the URL of a page, use an HTML redirect, such as a 301 redirect, from each old page to the most appropriate new page.

If you discontinue or retire any teas from your catalogue, do not merely delete the page, but either leave the page and mark the tea as discontinued, or recycle the URL and have the same page display a newer, similar tea. I discuss these alternatives below.

Never, under any circumstance, make any link that you shared anywhere lead to an error page or broken link. If you must take down a page, redirect the page to the most relevant page still existing on your site. As a worst-case scenario, at least redirect old pages to your homepage.

You can draw attention to the fact that your URL's will remain in existence permanently by using the word permalink to draw attention to them and show your commitment to URL permanence, especially if you have a box somewhere on your page that allows people to copy-and-paste the URL to your tea in order to facilitate sharing.

Below I explain why I believe these practices to be in your best interest.

Links often produce sustained traffic:

It has been my experience that most links provide sustained traffic to a website. In our society, with a culture that favors things new and current, it can be tempting to think that all that matters is recent or current coverage, but this could not be farther from the truth. When looking at the websites sending traffic to RateTea, or to any of my websites, I see a clear trend that most referral traffic from other websites comes from pages that continually send traffic over a long period of time. I provide a few examples, which I've anonymized to discourage people from spamming these sites; the graphs come from Google analytics, which is a free and easy way of tracking visits to a website.

The following link to RateTea, from a social bookmarking site, added by a user I have never had any contact with, produced a burst of traffic, with 53 visits in one day, slowing to almost zero. But over the long-run, it began sending more traffic; currently this one link has sent 491 visits to the site; the original burst was only about 11% of the total traffic through this link.

When someone links to your website, you often will see a burst of traffic coming through that link immediately after it is posted. The traffic then slows to a trickle, and may not even be measurable over a period of a few weeks. But in many cases, if you look on a larger time-scale, such as months or years, the total traffic arriving through the link in the long-run ends up being much larger than the initial burst. Why? Often, people rediscover old posts and pages on websites, and re-share them. As people re-share them and begin linking to them, traffic on those pages picks up, and the traffic tends to be more sustained, as it reflects deep interest in a hard-to-find resource, rather than subscribers to a blog, or people looking to glance quickly at something just because it is new.

In case you're not completely sold yet, check out this graph:

This link to RateTea was on a post from a blog that I suspect has very few subscribers. There was no initial spike in traffic when the link appeared. Yet the link appeared in an interesting and well-written post, one that people continued to share and link to over time, and the traffic through that link has grown and grown, and shows little sign of slowing down. To-date, over 89% of the traffic through this link arrived over six months after the link appeared.

Which of these graphs is typical for traffic to RateTea? You may be surprised, but the second graph is actually more typical. Most of the traffic to RateTea comes through links like the second; I had to really search hard to find the first example.

If you change your URL's carelessly, and leave broken links, you will lose most of your referral traffic. You will also lose search traffic, because links influence the prominence of your website's pages in search results.

What happens when links break:

When links break, and lead to error pages, such as "HTML 404 Not Found" errors, a bunch of things happen. First, you stop receiving traffic through that link. Search engines stop seeing that link, and stop using it to factor into returning your site's pages in search results, so, as links to your site become broken, your site's prominence in search results may fall, including on unrelated pages, such as your homepage.

But also, the person who linked to your site now has a broken outgoing link on their website or blog. This makes them look bad, and it can also penalize their site in search engine results. (Search engines perceive sites with a larger portion of broken links as being less well-maintained.) I will say that personally, when I link to a tea company's pages, and they repeatedly change their URL scheme or take down products, leaving broken links, it makes me highly reluctant to link to them in the future, as I learn that I will need to periodically check the links. This creates unnecessary work for me, if I am to maintain my own website as accurate and reputable. It is also annoying, because I add links as a favor to websites: I link to tea companies that I like, if I feel good about the company and want to promote them and their products.

So, by making your links break when you change your URL scheme, you risk annoying (and in extreme cases, alienating) bloggers and webmasters who have already linked to you. You are effectively harming them, in response to an action they did that helped you. Allowing your links to break is not good business, and is not a very courteous thing to do.

Dealing with web design companies:

Most tea companies do not run their own websites; they hire other companies to do them. But if you hire a company to do a site redesign, make sure to specify, before hiring them, that you want them to develop a sustainable, permanent URL scheme, and if you already have a permanent URL scheme that is good enough to keep, specify that they carry out the redesign within your old scheme, so that all links remain the same. And if you do end up changing schemes, specify that you will require permanent 301 HTML redirects from all old pages, so that all your old links will remain indefinitely.

Handling retired or discontinued teas:

Tea companies invariably retire or discontinue some of their teas from time to time. There are different ways of handling this without producing broken links. If you retire a tea that is unique, without adding a similar offering to your website, it is best to leave the tea's product page on your site, and simply mark it as retired or permanently out of stock, and remove it from search results on your site. You can remove all the links to this tea, without taking down the page for this tea. This prevents all the problems mentioned above. It is also a good idea to link to the most similar teas in your catalog, from a page on a retired tea. This increases the likelihood that you will actually make a sale when someone comes to your site looking to buy a tea that you no longer sell.

Some companies, such as Upton Tea Imports, recycle their item codes, and appropriately, replace the content on the page for an old, discontinued tea with the description and information of a new tea. This approach also prevents broken links. If the new tea is similar to the original, it also ensures that people following the link land on a page that is of interest to them. This can be a good way of solving the problem of retired teas and broken links, especially when you add similar teas to teas that had been removed from your catalog. This practice, however, can become a bit iffy when replacing a retired tea with a radically different tea.

Stay tuned for more:

How to design a good URL scheme for a tea company? I hope to address this in future posts.

What do you think?

Do you agree with my advice and think my reasoning here is sound? Am I perhaps overestimating the importance of URL permanence? Have you ever linked to a tea company website only to see them change their URL scheme and have the link become a broken link? And if you work for a tea company, have you considered these things when redesigning your site?

Why "Styles of Tea"? And Another Thank You

2012-01-25T08:42:00.001-05:00

Yesterday we published a new page on RateTea titled Why Style? What Exactly Is A Style Of Tea?. Lately I've published a ton of new articles on RateTea, and I think they are all quite good, but this one in particular I would like to encourage people to read it. I use the phrase styles of tea frequently on this blog as well as on RateTea. As the article explains, I have some very carefully thought out reasons for the use of this term, a term which is not a universally accepted standard within the tea industry (although a number of companies and bloggers do use it, sometimes in different ways).

The above picture illustrates what I think of as different "styles of tea"; p.s. exactly two of these are not tea...can you tell which two?

I also want to give yet another thank-you to Tony Gebely of World of Tea and Chicago Tea Garden for this one; although I had reasoned through my choice of the word style long before I began talking to Tony about the matter, it was a series of conversations I had with Tony that helped me to more clearly articulate exactly why I like using this term, and that made me decide it was worth writing about this choice.

What do you think?

Do you understand my rationale behind using the term style? Do you ever use this word to refer to tea? Do you use the word differently from, or similarly to how I use it or how we use it on RateTea? Do you have any interest in using this word more, after reading the RateTea article?

Why Does Glass Break Or Shatter When Pouring Boiling Water Into It? On Thermal Shock

2012-01-23T09:50:00.000-05:00

Occasionally I find interesting questions on Yahoo! answers about tea; today I saw one that was interesting enough that I wanted to write about it here. The question was:

How to prevent broken glass when pouring hot tea?

A number of people, at some point in their life, have the unfortunate experience of pouring a hot liquid, such as boiling water or hot tea, into a glass, to find the glass shatter or crack. Why does this happen? And how can we prevent it from happening?

Even the most heat-resistant glass, like this borosilicate glassware, is subject to shattering under thermal shock.

Why does some glass shatter when heated?

The phenomenon which causes glass to shatter when we pour boiling water into it is called thermal shock. Wikipedia has a very technical article on Thermal shock that is probably more than most of you would need to know about it.

Unfortunately, not all cups or vessels are suitable for handling hot liquids with ease. Typical glass, in general, is not able to handle such heat very well. The reason is that as the glass heats, its density changes; it expands. Pouring boiling water into a glass is highly likely to shatter it, because the hot water contacts part of the glass first, whereas other parts of the glass (such as the outside of the cup) remain cooler. The glass thus does not expand as a whole, but is pulled in different directions as part of it expands and part does not; this difference produces the shattering.

Glass is less likely to break or shatter if we warm it up gradually. Pouring boiling water into an ice-cold glass is much more likely to shatter it, as is putting a hot piece of glass into a cold bath of water.

This effect of thermal shock is strong enough that it even can cause special types of glass like Pyrex or borosilicate glass, used in a lot of commercial labware, to shatter. I remember this from a chemistry lab in high school: we produced a solid in a test tube and needed to extract it, and to do so easily, we heated the tube to a high temperature, and then put it in a bath of cold water. This procedure caused even the heat-resistant labware to shatter.

Preventing breaking:

We can prevent teaware, cups, and mugs from breaking by following two guidelines:

Avoid using generic glass for hot liquids; stick to ceramics or glass that we know to be heat-resistant.

Even when using ceramics or heat-resistant glass, avoid very large, sudden changes in temperature.

Properly fired ceramics can handle the shift from room temperature to boiling water just fine, but a big enough shock will shatter just about anything. Have you ever had any of your cups, mugs, glasses, or teaware shatter due to thermal shock?

Top 5 Most-Viewed Styles of Herbal Tea on RateTea

2012-01-22T03:59:00.002-05:00

Some of the readers of this blog are die-hard tea purists, and have little interest in herbal teas, but to me, herbal teas are actually as interesting as, if not more interesting than tea. Herbal teas, particularly those made from fresh herbs grown in my garden, are actually one of the main driving forces behind my interest in tea, as I explain in my post how I became interested in tea. Accordingly, RateTea has a tremendous amount of information on herbs, in addition to tea.

Note: for explanation of why I use the term "herbal tea" even though some people consider it to be technically incorrect, you can read my post: Is Herbal Tea Tea?

This post highlights the five most-viewed styles of herbal tea on the site:

Hibiscus Tea - A tangy herbal infusion with a deep purple-red color, demonstrated in controlled clinical trials to be an effective treatment to lower blood pressure and treat hypertension, hibiscus is a popular herbal drink on its own right, and a major ingredient in many herbal tea blends. This article explains all these things in depth.

Tulsi / Holy Basil - This herbal tea is one that I personally find most interesting, which is reflected in the extent of this article. Tulsi is important in Ayurveda and also holds spiritual significance in Hinduism. There is growing scientific evidence for it having a broad range of medicinal uses, including positive impacts on the mind, such as preventing or treating anxiety, Alzheimer's, and depression, as well as other medicinal uses, such as treating type 2 diabetes. And it tastes really good.

Rooibos / South African "Red Tea" - Rooibos is sometimes presented as the herbal tea that most closely resembles black tea; it is oxidized in a process much like the process used to create black tea. This article is also pretty extensive, and if you haven't yet read it, I'm pretty sure it contains some things about Rooibos that you are unlikely to know already.

Chamomile Tea - A widespread and popular relaxing herb in western tea culture, chamomile is one of those herbs that I also found had a lot to it, when I started researching it. This page includes discussion of different species of chamomile, medicinal uses, and even some potential cautions such as drug interactions and possible allergic reactions.

Mint Tea - I've been hoping to at some point break out this post into different pages on the individual types of mint, especially peppermint and spearmint, but possibly others, as they are quite different, but for now I have them lumped into this single article.

What do you think? Surprised? I'm not at all surprised...chamomile, mint, and rooibos are the three most popular pure herbal teas that would come to my mind. Hibiscus is very popular globally, and both hibiscus and tulsi are popular topics for people searching for information related to herbal medicine.

Flash-Only Websites and Insulting Your Customers: Shooting Yourself In The Foot

2012-01-20T08:18:00.005-05:00

This is the second post in a series of best practices for tea company websites. This post is about something that some businesses, including some tea companies do, which is to have flash-only websites, meaning a website that is only accessible or navigable by using Adobe flash player. In my opinion, the best practice for the use of flash in websites is as follows:

Make your entire website fully accessible, and attractive looking without the use of flash player. Use flash player only for supplemental interactive features that cannot be achieved without flash.

The screenshot above shows what a flash-only website looks like to a user who has flashblock installed. Does this look inviting? Professional? Do you think you're going to make a new customer or retain an old customer with this sort of greeting?

Why not flash?

A large number of people legitimately cannot install flash on their computers or browsers. Most users on mobile phones cannot use flash; Adobe discontinued flash for mobile devices some time ago. Some very old computers cannot handle flash, and some browsers, including text-based browsers, cannot handle it either. Flash can also provide problems for the blind and visually-impaired, who must often rely on text-based browsers. Yes, by relying on flash you are completely shutting out visually-impaired users.

Many users simply do not install flash player. Security concerns are a major reason. Security-sensitive workplaces can ban the use of flash for this reason. Annoyance and slow speed on older computers are another concern that leads people to not install flash.

Many users who have flash player installed use flashblock, because they find flash ads annoying. A certain portion of these users will choose not to load the flash elements of your website, instead just leaving your site in annoyance.

Search engine crawlers cannot navigate flash menus and flash websites. If your site is just one page with a giant flash program, you will only get one page indexed by search engine, and it will just index a blank page. Even if your website has normal URL's and some text content, if you rely on flash for navigation features, the search engines will not be able to navigate your website and will have a hard time determining its structure and returning your site in search results.

If your site is flash-only, you lose the benefit of people being able to include deep links to specific pages on your site, a benefit I describe in my post about the importance of having product pages for individual teas. This also causes you to lose potential traffic when people talk about your products on blogs or social networking sites.

Even people who have flash installed and not blocked may still find it annoying. Even before I installed flashblock, I disliked flash-only websites, and I had a very low tolerance level for them.

Think these are small amounts of users? The percentage of mobile users is on the increase; on my websites it tends to range in the 5-10% zone. I've seen estimates that roughly 25% of Firefox users use flashblock. My estimation is that if you have a flash-only website, you are shutting out a minimum of 15% of your users, and probably losing 25-50% of visitors between annoyance and inability to view your page.

In practice, however, when considering the loss of search engine navigability, since search contributes 50-80% of traffic to many websites, you can easily be losing 90% or more of your total traffic by having a flash-only website.

An example of a flash-only tea company website:

The most egregious examples of a flash-only websites are those where you cannot even view any aspect of the website without flash player:

Really? A user on a text-only browser would just get "Please click here to get the Flash 7 player and enter the world of Tazo.", and the full message, "Your patience with technology will be rewarded..." is worse. This message is a particularly self-destructive marketing move on the part of Tazo: it is worded so as to imply that if you do not use flash, you are not "patient with technology".

Never insult your customers!

Summary:

If you use Adobe flash on your website, use it only for supplemental features embedded as a small feature within specific pages on your site. Make your site fully functional and navigable without flash, or make a flash-only alternative for search engines and people who cannot use flash. Requiring flash can cause you to lose a majority of your potential web traffic. And, if you do make a flash-only website, at a very minimum, think carefully about the wording of your message. How about offering an apology for your own failure to make your site accessible without flash, instead of insulting users who do not use flash?

How Into Tea Are You? How Is Being Into Dance Like Being Into Tea?

2012-01-18T08:54:00.003-05:00

Lately I've been thinking a lot about my level of depth, interest, and focus, in various aspects of my life. A discussion on the Tea Trade Forums and an LA Times story on rare tea enthusiasts sparked some of this thought. When I first started working on RateTea, I was interested in tea, but was early on in the process of learning about it. Now, I know a fair amount about tea, having spent a few years researching it in a fairly intense manner, sampling different teas, and becoming tied into the tea industry in various ways. But I would not consider myself a tea expert, and I regularly encounter people who know far more about tea than I do, and perhaps more importantly, who are more into tea.

These people are more excited about tea than me. Tea is their passion. I will be the first to admit, tea is not my passion. Yes, that's right, I'm not that into tea. Just how much am I into tea? I'm into tea in much the same way I'm into dance. Here is a picture of one of the styles of dance that I like to do regularly, called lindy hop, a type of swing dance. This photo was taken at Rittenhop, an event run by the Lindy and Blues organization, whose tuesday night dances I nearly always attend:

There are some people who are really into dance: they dance many nights a week, and on weekends they frequently travel to various big dance weekends, which include weekends focusing on workshops and dance lessons, as well as those focused on social dancing. Some of the people with the highest level of enthusiasm for the dance scene will lose a lot of sleep at these events, and between their work and dance, they have little room for other hobbies and social activities.

When I dance too much:

There is such a thing as too much dance. I have gone to physical therapy twice for dance-related injuries, and they were both not acute injuries, but rather, injuries associated with chronic over-use. I've stayed up later than I normally would because of dance, and felt bad and off-kilter for the following day or two. And I've had moments when I realized that my whole social life revolved around the dance scene, and that I felt a strong need to diversify my social circles. And I cut back from dance and diversified my life in all of these circumstances.

I'm more interested in balance in my life. I like dance not for its own sake, but because I like the exercise and the social interaction, I like the sort of community of quirky, intelligent, creative people that the dance scene attracts, and I like the dance form as something that can be a source of creativity and inspiration in my life. I like dance because it produces good results in my life. But I am not interested in attending every big dance weekend, not even every one in my own city. I do not care about being the "best" dancer (if there is such a thing), and I do not feel like I'm missing out if I miss a major dance event. I value my sleep, I value having a broad range of hobbies, and I value having a diverse social life. I want to dance only to the degree that it enhances, rather than detracts from the other elements of my life.

My interest in tea:

My interest in tea is similar. I like tea not for its own sake, but I like tea because I like how it tastes, and how it makes me feel. I like the effect that drinking tea has on my life. And I like the effect that paying attention to how tea tastes, and learning about where my tea comes from, has on my life.

However, I am not interested in getting so focused on tea that it would detract from other elements of my life. For example, I'm not interested in drinking so much tea that I have trouble sleeping because of the caffeine, and I'm not interested in spending so much money on tea that it takes away in any substantial way from money that could be better put to use elsewhere. And I'm not interested in thinking or learning so much about tea and where my tea comes from, that I start thinking less about my food and where it comes from.

My interest in tea fits in a holistic way into my life. And at times, I find myself obsessing over tea, and I realize this is too much, and I need to hold back.

What I want to encourage in others:

I want to encourage this approach in others. I want people to become interested in tea, not to become interested in tea for its own sake, but so that they start paying more attention to food and drink in general. I want people to start listening to their bodies and raising awareness of their mind and bodies through paying attention to how tea makes them feel. I want people to drink tea with others and to take a break in their day to enjoy tea, and I want people to see the mental and emotional and spiritual benefits of taking these sorts of breaks.

And I think this is a good general rule to follow, when asking yourself how interested you want to be in something. Is your interest in this one thing making your life as a whole better? If so, then keep being that interested or more interested. If your interest is detracting from your life as a whole, by taking away from other aspects of your life, then scale back. This point will be different for different people. But I'm about at that point for tea. I'm not interested in being any more interested in tea, nor any less interested; I'm content where I am.

How about you?

Tea-Food Pairings: Kiwifruit And Pouchong

2012-01-16T09:33:00.001-05:00

I mostly discover tea-food pairings by accident. I recently I discovered an unlikely pairing that I thought went quite well together: kiwifruit and Pouchong / Bao Zhong tea.

Photo by André Karwath aka Aka, Wikimedia commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.

On Kiwifruit:

Kiwifruit are a rather strange fruit; they are quite delicious (and high in Vitamin C), but leave a lingering tangy quality on the palate, which I find can radically change the experience of anything I eat or drink after them. Sometimes, I find the effect on a cup of tea is negative, especially if the tea is a more mellow or subtle one. Usually, the teas that I find are best to drink after eating a kiwi are strong teas which overpower the lingering flavor and sensations left by the fruit, but teas that work well with having an additional tangy quality added to them.

Pouchong or Kiwifruit:

Pouchong is a type of tea that I would not expect to go well with Kiwifruit. Its flavor is mild and slightly sweet, and its aroma gentle, floral, and vegetal. But I found that, in the case of the pouchong I most recently tried, they went pretty well together.

This Pouchong:

I drank a cup of Upton Tea Import's TT92: Formosa Pouchong. When I first ordered from Upton, they had only two Pouchongs in their catalogue. Both were extremely high-end, among the highest-priced of Upton's offerings. One of the reasons I prefer Upton is their lower prices. This new offering is not cheap, but it is lower in price than either of the two other teas (both of which they still carry). You can read my review of this newer pouchong on RateTea.

What do you think?

Does kiwifruit spoil or interfere with your experience of tea? Can you see pouchong going well with kiwi?

The Importance of Having A Product Page For Each Tea

2012-01-13T08:42:00.002-05:00

This is the first post of a series I hope to write on best practices for tea company websites. These practices are based on my own understanding of web marketing, and are personal advice, not universal truth. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not an expert on web design; a lot of the best aspects of my websites are things that I have needed to figure out myself, by trial and error. One thing I have come to believe through my work on RateTea is the following principle:

It is beneficial to have a specific product page, with its own URL, for each individual tea that your company sells.

The screenshot above shows a product page for a tea from Upton Tea Imports; Upton has over 420 individual teas in its catalogue, and has a specific page for each one.

We all know the importance of having a webpage that is informative and looks nice. Why have a specific page for each individual tea? What if my company has hundreds of teas? Isn't that a lot of work? In this post I will not address the question of how to do this, but I will provide the reasons that I think this is important:

1. People can link to the page when talking about your tea:

If you have a page for each individual tea, and this page is easy to find on your site, people will be likely to link to it when talking about your tea. They may share the page on facebook or twitter, or link to it in their blog, or on a forum. Either way, you get more traffic to your site. You may get new people coming to your website who have not been there before. You may even make sales as a direct result of these links.

These links are especially beneficial when someone writes a detailed review on a blog, and links it to the product page for your tea. These sorts of links are very common: if you read review-centered tea blogs you will see that many of them include such links in almost every case, whenever a product page exists.

Personally, I am much more likely to link to a tea company's website if they have product pages. This is true both of links on this blog and on RateTea, which links the page for each tea to the product page, if this page exists.

2. Having a specific product page for each tea helps you to get search traffic:

If you have a product page for each tea, it makes it more likely that that page is returned in the results when people type the name of that tea into a search engine. The extra links generated because people are linking to the page will also make it more likely that your website is returned in search results, but sometimes, just having the specific page can go a long way, even if no one else links to it and the only links are from within your own website.

If you do not have a page for each tea, and another website does (as is common on sites like RateTea, Steepster, or various tea blogs), you make it unlikely that your own website is the first search result returned. Often, if you send out samples to bloggers, you will end up with quite a few pages on blogs specifically written solely about your tea. Not having a page on your own site is shooting yourself in the foot...you may actually lose search engine traffic by not having such a page...now there are dozens of pages dedicated to that one specific tea, and you still do not have such a page on your site.

A large portion of traffic to RateTea comes to individual product pages, and this traffic disproportionately comes from companies that do not have product pages. I also frequently see Steepster pages and pages on various tea blogs ranking higher in search results than tea company websites, and again, this is more likely for companies that do not have product pages for their teas.

3. Having a page for each tea creates a relevant place to land on your website:

If you have no individual product page for each tea, whenever someone types a tea into a search engine, even if the first result returned is your website, if they land at a generic page, such as your homepage, or a listing of multiple teas (such as if you put all green teas on the same page), they will take longer to find what they're looking for. Depending on how patient they are, and how easy to navigate your site is, they may give up. If you have a product page, and they land specifically on it, you make it that much easier that they find the information they wanted, about that specific tea.

Personally, if I follow a link looking for a specific tea and am redirected to the company's homepage or another generic page, if I'm not already focused on researching or buying that specific tea, I usually become annoyed and just close that browser tab.

In summary:

I find that, for tea companies, having a product page, with its own URL, for each individual tea in your catalogue, is a best practice. The benefits of having a product page are increased links and thus increased traffic to your website, including both referrals from other sites, and search traffic, and increased relevance of people when they land on your website, as they find exactly what they are looking for instead of having to navigate to find the information they want.

What do you think?

Do you agree with the advice and conclusions I draw here? Or do you think that sometimes, it is too cumbersome to create individual product pages, or that you do not have enough to say about each individual tea to warrant a whole page for each one? Do you think product pages are as beneficial as I am making them out to be on this page? If you are a tea blogger or just a casual tea drinker, do product pages make it more likely for you to link to a company's website? Do you prefer landing on a page about a specific tea, instead of having to navigate to find it? If you work for a tea company, do you have individual pages for each tea? Have you ever experienced anything to confirm or deny the claims I make on this page?

Letting Tea Settle, or the Psychology of Acquired Tastes? My Skepticism Shines Through

2012-01-11T08:53:00.002-05:00

I seem to be on a roll, giving people a hard time, and this post continues in this vein. I recently read a post on Bon Teavant, titled letting tea settle. I found this post interesting, but I also found that my reaction to it was one of skepticism. The post describes the phenomenon in which you get a new tea in the mail and are disappointed with it, but you find that after several weeks, it is yielding more enjoyable cups. Most people who have ever received tea in the mail have probably experienced this at some point.

So you can get in the mood for this post, here's a photo of some tea I recently received in the mail:

Bon Teavant offers the following explanation:

People whose passion is the study of tea will tell you that tea requires careful handling and rest when being moved from one storage space to another, even within the same town or village. Plants are extremely sensitive to change, and just as a person can suffer jet lag or mild disorientation when traveling or moving homes, tea can experience "shock" when being transported or changing venues, and is best left alone for a while to find its equilibrium.

Something about this explanation does not sit well with me; my skeptic-dar starts going off. For one, the claim "People whose passion is the study of tea..." strikes me as weasel words, like saying: "People who are really in the know will agree that X." instead of citing a specific expert or authority and quoting them saying something to the effect of X. And while I would not consider myself a tea expert, I am pretty passionate about tea, and, while I do think that there are important issues to consider in the handling, packaging, and storage of tea, I'm not inclined to agree with the explanation that follows, about tea being sensitive to moves. By making this statement, Bon Teavant is putting words in the mouth of all tea enthusiasts, which is something I try to avoid doing.

I've noticed this phenomenon, but I attributed it not to the tea itself but to my own psychology. My experience with tea is that it can be sensitive to handling which breaks the leaf, to excessive changes in temperature, and to exposure to air or sunlight, but that moving alone has no effect on it if it is packed properly.

My explanation of the same phenomenon:

Each batch of tea is different, and I think we need to get accustomed to new food and drink. The first time we encounter something it may taste a bit off...not because it is, but because we're not used to it. This is the essence of acquired tastes. To tea drinkers, the phenomenon of acquired tastes is usually most evident when we try a completely unfamiliar variety of tea, but it can happen to a lesser degree with familiar teas that change in more subtle ways. And because most tea generally loses flavor over time, if we have been drinking last year's batch, and we use it up and receive a fresh batch in the mail, even if the batch were identical (as it almost never is), it would taste different to us because it would taste fresher.

While we usually think of fresher as tasting better, fresher teas often contain more vegetal tones in the aroma, and these aromas are some of the ones that most strongly evoke the acquired taste process, in which we are a bit averse to them initially and then develop a liking to them over time. Tea does change with storage, but, with the exception of Pu-erh and other aged teas, it generally seems to lose flavor over time, not develop flavor, and moreover, it seems to lose flavor very slowly. If the tea is extraordinarily fresh, it is possible that it is still undergoing chemical changes that may result in a better-tasting cup if you allow it to sit, but in this case, it is time, and not the move, that is the explanation.

So, when I ask why teas often taste better to me a few weeks after receiving them, my inclination is to explain the phenomenon primarily in terms of my own psychology, and secondarily in terms of inevitable chemical changes in the leaf, in the (usually rare) case that the tea is so fresh that it is still undergoing changes that you'd notice on the time-scale of a few weeks. It is possible that the opening up of a package and exposing it to air may spark some of these changes as well.

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity:

What is the objective reality experienced in the situation described in the Bon Teavant post? The reality is simple: you get new tea in the mail, you brew it, and you are disappointed. You return and brew it later, and you find you enjoy it more. We'd all agree upon this, when it happens.

But any interpretation of why, is going to be speculative and subjective. Why? Because human tastes are so complex, and the chemistry of tea and associated flavors are also rather complex, and there are too many factors to establish a clear explanation with certainty. So I'm not going to claim that my interpretations are correct. I would not feel comfortable with this sort of claim unless I somehow devised a scientific way to test the hypothesis of the different causal explanations.

But I will share why I'm more inclined to go with my explanation, which is that it fits more with the things that I know about how the world works. The blog post I link to makes an analogy to "jet lag" and the disorientation and disruption humans experience after a move, but I think this analogy is not applicable. Living organisms experience disruption when placed in a new environment. For example, if you were to transplant a live tea plant, it would need time to be adjusted to the new environment, the new light levels, soil, air temperatures and humidity, etc. In the case of dry tea leaf, you're considering a processed product, not a living organism, and it's being transported from one (hopefully) fairly controlled environment to another. Unless it is carelessly handled so as to damage the leaf (and most whole-leaf tea arrives nearly completely intact when I order it), or packaged so as to not be airtight, or subjected to extremes of heat or cold, it changes little.

Whereas the phenomenon of acquired tastes, on the other hand, is one that I've directly experienced.

What do you think?

Do you think my explanations are more plausible? Do you think there's more truth in Bon Teavant's one than my intuition suggests? Can you think of other, more plausible explanations than the ones I came up with? And do you think I've been giving too many people a hard time lately?

What Happened to Admari Tea? And Some Subtle Points On Language In Tea Marketing

2012-01-09T08:59:00.002-05:00

I recently learned that Admari Tea has undergone a fairly radical transformation. Admari tea was a small tea company based in Midland Park, NJ. The company has moved to Miami, FL, but perhaps more importantly, it has shifted its focus dramatically, discontinuing its sales of all loose-leaf teas, and instead selling only tea bags.

Admari Tea's new website has two quotes that I want to highlight:

“A Buddhist monk once asked his master, ‘No matter what lies ahead, what is the Way?” The master quickly replied, “The Way is your daily life.’ This is the very essence of The Way of Tea. The principles of the Way of Tea are directed towards all of one’s existence, not just the part that takes place in the tearoom.” (Excerpt from Tea Life, Tea Mind by Soshitsu Sen XV)

And later on the page:

The way of tea is your daily life; your daily existence. The beautiful ritual of tea and respect for a simple ingredient, when done with reverence, can carry over, and bring meaning to every aspect of your life. At Admari Tea we recognize that in the modern world, the ritual must sometimes take a back seat to the hectic pace of life. So we are bringing the quality, the beauty and the reverence to you.

I totally understand that there is a large market for tea bags in this country, and globally, including a market for high-quality whole-leaf tea in pyramid sachets, and that companies are going to want to fill this business niche. However, there is something about the message being put forth by Admari tea that does not resonate well with me.

I want to go into depth about how I perceive this company's new message and marketing, because I think that the company's marketing has some negative elements to it that may alienate potential customers, and I think they can make a few simple modifications to the language in their new marketing that would help them to engage with potential customers in a more positive way. My remarks here may seem nitpicky, but I think they are important: sometimes tiny changes in wording can produce profound differences in how people react to language. I think the case below is one where a few very small changes could produce very large improvements in perception.

What are tea bags about?

Tea bags are about convenience. I have never heard any compelling argument in favor of tea bags, other than the convenience argument. Tea bags standardize the brewing process, save time, and allow people to brew tea with less equipment--all of these boil down to convenience. But tea bags require resources, which makes them inferior from a value and sustainability perspective. They also take away the control and flexibility of measuring out an exact amount of leaf, and they take away some of the possible benefits of using different brewing vessels or methods, such as mug brewing of loose-leaf tea. They are associated with a faster pace of life, which emphasizes quick and convenient consumption of food. On a spiritual level, they disconnect people from their tea and its origins; they move away from experiencing tea as a whole food and as slow food and move towards experiencing tea as an industrial product or consumer product.

It is certainly possible to experience tea more richly while using teabags, by being more mindful of the aromas, experiencing it as slow food, seeking out higher-quality tea, and putting care into brewing it, as I did in my post Multiple Infusions of a Tea Bag. But this type of experience is somewhat at odds with the experience of convenience and the fast pace of life.

A contradiction in marketing and message?

I think Admari tea is presenting a bit of a muddled message or apparent contradiction in their marketing. On the one hand, they're citing one of the quotes from the Sen Sōshitsu, referencing Buddhism, and talking about the "way of tea", the ritual of tea, respect for tea as an ingredient, and presenting a general approach of mindfulness about one's food. But on the other hand, they are caving into societal pressures. When they say: "...the ritual must sometimes take a back seat to the hectic pace of life." this seems like a cop-out to me.

And not only does this statement feel like a cop-out, it also feels like an intrusion or affront, like it is directly assaulting some core aspect of my beliefs or value system, and I imagine that many others may react similarly, even if they are not able to articulate it as thoroughly as I do here. Why?

A key issue is how they present "the hectic pace of life" as if it were a universal, immutable aspect of the world. Life is not inherently hectic or fast-paced. It can be fast-paced, or slow-paced, depending on who, where, and when you are talking about. A more honest way of wording this would be "...if your life is hectic or fast-paced..." or "...the hectic times in your life..." I also particularly object to the wording of their statement, using the word must. The hectic pace of our modern society is not inevitable, and, while some people are still caught up in it, it is not necessarily a good thing. And even when presented with hectic or fast-paced circumstances, people can respond in different ways, and often, the most productive and healthy way to react is to take a brief time for a meditative break, which, incidentally, one can sometimes do by taking the time to brew a cup of tea and drink it mindfully.

I think that statements that imply that the fast pace of life is somehow innate, universal, and unchangeable, actually cause harm by legitimizing the fast-pace of things even when it is harmful to people on a spiritual, physical, or emotional level, or harmful to society as a whole. And they cause harm by making people believe that life is always that way, and that one must cave into societal pressures to act and live that way, even when this way is destructive. A healthier viewpoint is one in which a person realizes that life will sometimes be fast-paced and other times slower, and that one can be empowered to influence the pace, speeding it up when it is too slow and slowing it down when it is too fast.

More, on the use of the term "reverence":

Another point which I object to occurs in the following sentence. After all the grandiose talk about the way of tea, their claim: "So we are bringing the quality, the beauty and the reverence to you" seems overstated, particularly in the use of the term reverence. Admari Tea is bringing a tea bag to the marketplace; it may have quality to back it up, and beauty, but reverence is something that you cannot package or sell as a product. Reverence is something that people must bring of their own accord to the way they experience tea. And I think that packaging a product in a tea bag actually places a barrier that makes it more difficult (although not impossible) to experience reverence for one's tea. To use this word, which typically is reserved for spiritual or religious topics, in the context of a consumer product, I think oversteps a boundary for me, and also elicits a negative reaction. Their use of the word reverence in this context seems to cheapen the word, and it strikes me as a bit irreverent.

Integrity in marketing:

I'm a big fan of honesty and integrity in marketing. Companies can and do market top-quality whole leaf tea in high-quality sachets. There is no guarantee that loose-leaf tea is better in quality than tea bags. Also, there is large existing market demand for tea bags, and I would not negatively judge a company just because they chose to sell tea bags (as I explain more in my recent post). But I do think that Admari Tea is trying to pull itself in two different directions here.

I think integrity in marketing is not just a question of simple factual matters, but also encompasses the spirit of the marketing. I object to some of their use of language in marketing, and as I am someone who tends not to be easily offended, I suspect that others may also react negatively as well, especially to their combination of referencing Buddhism and the Sen Sōshitsu, and using the word reverence, in the context of a move that most people would probably see as moving in the opposite direction, away from these concepts.

A recommendation for Admari Tea:

I think Admari Tea would benefit from softening their use of marketing in such a way that is more honest and avoids some of the apparent contradictions that I raised here, and I'd also suggest that they still offer some loose-leaf tea for sale, even if it is a slight inconvenience or results in a small financial loss. While it is understandable, given the constraints of market demand in our society, that some tea companies would choose to focus on tea bags, I think that it is important to always at least allow shoppers the option of the best possible choice, especially from the perspective of value and sustainability, which is loose-leaf tea. Both of these changes would make me think more favorable of them as a company. The indirect benefits to Admari Tea in terms of greater perception among serious tea drinkers and those with a more religious or spiritual inclination would more than offset any small financial loss associated with making these changes.

What do you think?

How do you react to the examples of Admari Tea's marketing that I gave here? How about other companies using similar language and rhetoric to market their products? Do you agree with my suggestions, or do you think you'd make different suggestions? Do you think that my suggestions would result in a tangible economic benefit to Admari Tea?

Top 5 Most-Viewed Press Releases of RateTea and This Blog

2012-01-08T03:35:00.001-05:00

I occasionally issue press releases related to RateTea and/or this tea blog, using prlog.org, a free service that is minimal but easy to use and rather powerful. Sometimes, I find it almost comical which of these releases get the most views. Here are the top 5 press releases of all time, by views:

Microwave Oven Not An Ideal Way To Heat Water For Tea - I issued this press release shortly after publishing the new article on this topic on RateTea. It seems so strange to me that this release got the largest number of views, as it seems the least significant of all of the press releases I've ever issued.

Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) Overwinters in Newark, Delaware - This post announces an unusual overwintering of a plant that is supposedly not hardy anywhere near the mid-Atlantic climate zone of the US.

New Website to Rate and Review Teas: RateTea.net - This is the original press release, issued when RateTea.net was first launched. It makes sense that this release got a lot of views, because it was breaking news and I put energy into sending the release out widely.

Percentile Rankings for the Best Teas: Loose-Leaf & Tea Bags - This press release announces a small but significant change to RateTea, when we added percentile ratings to the page for teas which had enough ratings to calculate one.

Recent Changes to RateTea.net: Logo, Header, Homepage, and Rating Descriptors - Another press release announcing major changes and the major redesigns to this site, carried out in the past year.

What's the lesson? Life is a bit random perhaps?

Flavored Teas, Tea Bags, Boycotts, and Bullshit

2012-01-06T14:50:00.005-05:00

I recently read a post on Tony Gebely's World of Tea, titled No Bullshit Tea Companies. I found this post very interesting on several levels. I like certain aspects of it but there are other aspects on which my perspective differs and I wish to respond to. I responded to the post in the comments, but I wanted to further respond, because I just had to write more about private prisons, Islamic terrorism, and the tea party movement, in a post that is really more about tea companies than anything else.

The gist of the post is that Tony has compiled a list of companies that (a) sell tea in loose-leaf form only, and (b) sell only unflavored teas. I am a huge proponent of loose-leaf tea; I drink almost exclusively loose-leaf tea myself, and I am constantly encouraging people to go over to it, as it is superior in terms of quality, value, flexibility, and sustainability. I also love pure teas and traditionally-processed teas, and tend to be less of a fan of teas flavored with extracts or flavorings. And I am saddened when companies discontinue their loose-leaf tea offerings to focus on tea bags, as happened recently with Admari Tea.

And I think it's useful to compile lists of companies that focus on pure teas. But I question the usefulness of identifying tea companies solely by whether or not they focus exclusively on pure, loose-leaf teas, and disqualifying or refraining from including ones just because they sell teas in tea bags, or sell some flavored teas.

I don't dismiss companies selling a high-quality product just because they sell other products that I am not interested in:

I want to highlight one of my favorite tea companies as an example: Upton Tea Imports. Upton is my favorite tea company. It sells only loose-leaf tea, and it has a clear focus on unflavored teas. As of writing this post, their catalogue includes 160 teas in their category of blends, flavored teas, decaf teas, and herbals. Yet they have 261 pure black teas, 107 pure green teas, and 42 oolongs.

Upton occasionally does things that I don't like. One thing that I've always found strange about Upton is that they sell numerous flavored teas that have artificial flavoring. I can't see ordering any of these teas, personally. Yet I don't think this detracts at all from the quality of their pure teas. This morning I tried a tea from a new tea garden in Nepal, Singalila Estate. Upton not only has some outstanding teas, it has some unique and novel offerings, including some herbs that I buy regularly that are hard to obtain elsewhere, like lemon myrtle.

I also think Upton is consistently fair in their pricing, and consistently accurate in their writing of commercial descriptions of tea. And Upton is just one example; I can think of other companies whose loose tea I really like, but which also sell flavored teas or tea bags that I would not be interested in, including Rishi Tea, Arbor Teas, Harney & Sons, Foojoy, Adagio Teas, Hampstead, and Ten Ren Tea.

Boycotts: where to draw the line?

In my comment on Tony's post, I brought up the topic of boycotts. I don't think that the exclusion of companies from a list necessarily is the same thing as a boycott, but I do think that such inclusion or exclusion makes an implicit statement about what companies you wish to support buying or not buying from. And I think that it is generally more useful to compile lists of companies based on what they sell, rather than what they don't sell. I brought up boycotts because I think they are the sole exception, at least in my value system, from this principle.

There are certain times when I think it is appropriate and constructive to refrain from supporting a company because of a certain product they sell or a certain practice they are engaging in. For example, if I learned that a company was knowingly profiting from something grossly unethical, or directly engaging in unethical business practices, I would remove them from listings of tea companies, and recommend against buying from them.

Some examples of behaviors that would get me to do this would be using black-hat techniques to manipulating search rankings (see boutique spam for an example), deliberately misrepresenting a product, publishing bogus health claims to promote a product.

And in terms of boycotting a company because of a service or product that a company could provide that I would have ethical problems with, I would like to point to something that happened when I was at Oberlin college, 1999-2002. Oberlin ousted Sodexo-Marriott as the company running their dining halls, and disqualified them from bidding on future food service contracts, because the company had investments in privately-owned, for-profit prisons, both owning its own prison in England, and owning a portion of Corrections Corporation of America. The school decided, and I would say rightfully, that there are serious ethical problems with supporting a company that derives profit from the incarceration of people. When I learned of this, I decided to personally boycott Marriott hotels as well.

And now to the second point I wish to respond to.

Bullshit: what is it and what is it not?

I'm often reluctant to use the word bullshit with people, especially when I'm being conscious about offending people who have differing views. But I do think the word is a useful one, often capturing a meaning and connotation that no other word captures exactly.

That said, I do not like Tony Gebely's use of the term bullshit to refer to flavored teas or tea bags. I'll be the first to admit that some things in life are just straight bullshit. I see a lot of comments in political rhetoric that I think could be accurately labelled with this term. Examples include when politicians or candidates make claims of subjective interpretations as fact. "The policies of Clinton / Reagan / (Insert favorite president here) resulted in economic growth / recovery / (Insert positive result here.)" Really? When people call bullshit on these statements, they're standing on solid ground: cause and effect is complex, correlation does not imply causation, and the political and economic systems are not fully understood by anyone.

Another example are gross generalizations about groups of people or cultures: "Rap music is so anti-intellectual" (Really, have you ever listened to Black Thought or Talib Kweli)? "Muslims are terrorists and hate America." (Really? The Pew Research Center poll below suggests a hefty majority of American Muslims believe terrorism is never justified.) Or a common one among my liberal friends: "Members of the tea party movement are racist and xenophobic." (Really? Have you ever had a serious conversation with anyone who is a member of the tea party movement? And which of the numerous tea party organizations are you talking about, since there are so many different groups with this name?) These generalizations can be accurately described as bullshit.

And then there are the times when someone is talking, in a presentation, job interview, or just a casual conversation, or perhaps writing in an article, or writing an essay on an exam, and you know that they're just totally making stuff up. I see stuff like this on tea company websites or on the less reputable tea blogs sometimes, in tea descriptions, or pages talking about the health benefits of tea. And I also think it's accurate to call out this stuff bullshit.

But I would not apply this label to something that just doesn't fit your tastes!

What do you think?

Are there any tea companies whose loose-leaf tea you really like, that also sell tea in tea bags, or flavored tea, which you are less interested in? What types of unethical products or services would a company need to provide before you'd consider boycotting them? And do you use the word bullshit in public speech? Where do you draw the line between bullshit, and things you just don't like or don't think are correct?

P.S. Tony, I still think you are awesome, I just felt like giving you a hard time in this post.

Tea On A Very Cold Day

2012-01-04T14:40:00.000-05:00

Last night and this morning it was very cold where I live. I don't know the exact low but it was forecasted to be around 17 degrees F, and it felt like it. Not only was it the coldest night of the year so far, but it well over 10 degrees (F) colder than the coldest night we have had up until this point, making it feel like a bit of a shock. Living in the city now, there are fewer natural things that I was able to photograph to capture the cold; without any visible ice or frost, this is the best I could come up with:

Bare branches against a blue sky often evoke the association of cold for me, as the coldest days in winter tend to be the clear ones.

I sometimes check the weather in different parts of the country, to get a sense of perspective. I was surprised that it was significantly warmer this morning in Minneapolis, which tends to average about 15-20 degrees colder than Philly in the month of January.

Tea when it is cold:

When it is very cold, I tend to want to drink a greater volume of hot liquids just to stay warm. This includes tea. However, because I don't like consuming additional caffeine, I tend to brew the tea more weakly. Often I achieve this by using a larger brewing vessel. Usually, my default mugs to make tea in hold about 12 ounces of water. On cold mornings, such as this one, I often prefer a larger mug...in this case, one that holds about 16 ounces, or two cups. I have one mug that I bought recently that I drank from today:

This mug was produced by a local potter who sells his pottery at the Clark Park Farmer's Market in West Philadelphia, every saturday. I really like his work, and it is very reasonably priced. His work is very clean and neat looking, yet simultaneously earthy and organic. Much of his work has a pattern of overlapping colors, blending to produce even more colors, produced by dipping the work in glazes covering part of it, and then repeating at a different angle. I hope to return to highlight more of his work because I think he has some genuine artistic flair; this simple photo doesn't really do justice to his creations.

Another thing I do on cold days:

Another thing I do when it's very cold is to stretch tea one infusion beyond when I would normally steep it. For example, if I would normally steep an oolong (western-style brewing) twice, before discarding the leaves, I steep it a third time, and enjoy the last infusion for its warmth, even if it is somewhat bland.

Do you drink more tea when it is very cold?

Do you drink more tea when it is very cold? Do you just deal with the additional caffeine, or do you brew the tea more weakly like I do? Or do you drink other hot liquids like hot fruit juice or herbal teas?

Back From Break, SEPTA's Holiday Trolley, and Transit & Sustainability

2012-01-02T16:25:00.004-05:00

Over the holidays, I enjoyed a lot of tea, but I did not write about much of it, because I needed a break. Because I did not post over the holiday break, I want to share one picture from during this time period which captures both a little bit of the holiday spirit, and also shares something of personal importance from my life.

Here is a SEPTA trolley, decked out in Christmas lights:

There are a lot of SEPTA trolleys, but to my knowledge, only one of them is covered in lights like this one. All of the trolleys flash "Happy Holidays" on their signs, alternating with the route number, but I liked the unique touch offered by this one trolley.

These trollies are not directly related to tea (beyond the fact that I rode one of these trolleys to and from World Tea East back in September), but they are directly related to another topic that I am passionate about: sustainability.

Public Transportation And Sustainability:

The U.S. used to have trolleys or streetcars in nearly all of its larger cities, and many smaller ones as well. Unfortunately, the streetcar systems were completely dismantled in most cities, and mostly dismantled in others, such as Philadelphia. The southern end of West Philadelphia is one of the few neighborhoods that kept its system mostly intact. The trolleys branch out and follow the major streets, going away from the city. Travelling towards the downtown, the trolleys come together at 40th street and enter a tunnel, becoming a subway, which travels downtown, ending at 13th street, and connecting with the major north-south and east-west subway lines, with free transfers.

Now, thankfully, much of the U.S. is starting to think about rebuilding these systems. Philadelphia recently restored one discontinued line, the Girard avenue trolley, and some smaller cities have rebuilt trolley systems, such as Little Rock Arkansas' River Rail Streetcar, run by the Central Arkansas Transit Authority. Pictured here is another type of transit, a regional rail station, featuring heavy rail lines that can carry large volumes of passengers over moderate distances:

Public transportation, whether bus, trolley, or other rail, promotes sustainability because it can reduce car traffic, which not only reduces energy use and pollution directly, but also provides indirect benefits: with fewer cars on the road, the remaining cars can get to their destinations faster. Public transit also allows riders to relax, getting to enjoy their commute or travel time, talking, looking out the window, or reading, rather than having to focus on the road. By looking out the window on buses, street trolleys, or elevated trains, people learn more about their communities, including learning about businesses located on or near transit lines. People also can converse with fellow passengers, and get to know regular riders.

Public transportation is like tea:

Public transit thus helps to reduce stress levels and also helps to connect people to each other and their communities. In this respect, I think it is a lot like tea, and I think that many of the same people who enjoy tea because of its relaxing properties and potential to bring people together might enjoy riding buses, trolleys, or trains for the same reasons.

Slowing Down: RateTea.net, RateTea.com, RateTea, and the Holidays

2011-12-20T16:36:00.009-05:00

I was posting daily for a while, feeling very inspired to write, but I've slowed down, at least for this week. I can't keep up that level of energy indefinitely. Today I want to write a brief post highlighting some of the things that have been occupying my time and thought energy. But I'm also announcing that I'm taking a bit of a break for the holidays, where I will be enjoying tea a lot without writing about it as much. I'm not sure how much I'm going to slow down or take a break, but it's definitely going to happen.

Domain name news:

I was excited to buy the domain RateTea.com, which recently expired. There's a rather interesting story about this, involving Joshua Chamberlain of J-Tea International.

Yesterday, we switched RateTea.net to RateTea.com, and changed most of the naming that refers to the site to the more general RateTea. All the old links will remain valid and will be seamlessly redirected to the new site, so you don't really need to update any links, but we would prefer if people use the new domain for future links, and you can certainly update any links if it is easy for you to do so. If you missed it, you can read the official RateTea newsletter about the switch, and/or the press release: RateTea.net Acquires RateTea.com Domain, Becomes Named or Branded RateTea. The move is going smoothly, but there is a lot of work tying up the loose ends.

Whenever I go through with something like this, I get a little nervous. Is it going to influence search rankings of the site? So far, I haven't noticed any sort of a change. One thing I have noticed, however, is that because the URL's have all changed, all the social bookmarking / share counters have been reset. I think this is a little unfortunate, as I think those shares reflect the hard work of myself and the others on the site, and now they have been reset to zero until people re-share the pages via google, twitter, and the google +1 buttons. But I think this is a small price to pay for a change that I hope will look a lot better in the long-run.

Enjoying tea:

I have a lot of samples that I have not yet written reviews of. I received a gift of tea from Steph of Steph's Cup of Tea and I have yet to brew a single one. I've been drinking a lot of Ahmad tea Ceylon and not writing or thinking about it particularly deeply, just enjoying it. Upton Tea Imports also sent me some samples, as did Imperial Tea Garden. I've posted a few reviews but many of them are going to have to wait.

What do you think?

How much of a break do you take for the holidays? And do you think the change of RateTea from .net to .com will prove to be a good one in the long-run?

My Top 5 Squidoo Pages on Tea

2011-12-18T03:03:00.000-05:00

I publish on a ton of different sites. I'm inherently a bit of a dabbler. One of the sites I publish on is called Squidoo. Squidoo is a bit of a quirky site; the first time I saw it I honestly did not see the purpose of it, and I actually found it quite annoying. However, over time I began to see its value. I actually recommend for serious webmasters and bloggers to check out and fiddle with Squidoo because it is an excellent way to learn about how to engage readers with interactive features.

Squidoo is a self-publishing website, but one that is structured very differently from a simple website or blog. It allows you to create pages by putting together modules, which can contain text, images, embedded content, or interactive features like discussions or polls, to name a few.

I have published a couple dozen pages about tea on Squidoo, and here are the five most popular. These articles are more casual and meant to appeal to a slightly different audience from my tea blog:

Tea vs Coffee - Caffeine, Health, Cost, Acidity, and Benefits - You probably know ahead of time that I'm going to come out advocating for tea; I try to give solid reasons for my preference though.

Loose Tea Companies - Where to Buy Loose-Leaf Tea Online and In Stores - This page highlights a few of my favorite companies, and also gives some general advice.

Hibiscus Tea (Roselle) - Health Benefits, for Hypertension and More - This lens focuses on hibiscus tea and its various supposed health benefits, with a particular focus on its blood-pressure lowering properties.

My Tea Blog - Tea, Sustainability, Herbs, Ecology, and More - A page about this blog, intended to draw in readers to this blog from the Squidoo community.

Tea Bag Brands - The counterpart to the looose tea companies page, I was surprised to find that this page generated significantly less interest and traffic than the page on loose-leaf tea. Is this a sign that the tide is turning in favor of loose tea?

What do you think?
Have you ever used Squidoo as a self-publishing platform? If so, please leave a comment so I can connect with you on that site as well. What do you think of the format / features that this site has to offer?

Infusing the Flowers of the Christmas Camellia - Pretty But Not Tasty

2011-12-16T16:57:00.001-05:00

I really love infusing flowers, either mixing them in with tea (especially black or green teas), or using them as an herbal tea of their own. I have a big bag of rose petals at home that I bought at a Mexican store (where they are really inexpensive) and I frequently steep on their own. Recently I wrote about a blooming Christmas Camellia that I found growing in my neighborhood, and I observed that the flowers had a wonderful fragrance that was similar in many respects to the floral qualities exhibited by some green oolongs.

I thought, maybe I could infuse the petals in hot water, like I do rose petals, or like people do the sepals of the hibiscus (roselle) plant. Here is a picture of the petals and flower centers (which I included because they were the most fragrant):

I used boiling water and steeped for quite some time, I did not time it exactly but it was a longer infusion. Here is the resulting cup:

It looks pretty, but unfortunately, it did not taste good to me. I would describe the infusion as having some of the tannic qualities of black tea, but in a muted way, a sort of underlying unpleasant bitterness, and some of the cooked fruit quality reminiscent of hibiscus tea, another quality I dislike. The floral fragrance of the fresh flowers was completely lost. I sipped it a bit to sample, but did not drink it.

I like experimenting in life. Sometimes you need to try some things that you don't like in order to discover the things that you do. Even though this didn't turn out that well, I'm still glad I tried it.

Warning! Do not experiment infusing random flowers:

As a side note, I want to warn people that it is not necessarily safe to go around infusing non-food plants. Everything I have read about Camellias has suggested to me that all parts of the plant are non-toxic, not just to humans but to mammals in general, and I have read that this particular species is used as a food plant, with its seeds used for oil, and that it also is used to produce an herbal tea.

There are some flowers commonly used as landscaping plants, however, which are highly toxic. If you want to experiment with brewing up an herbal tea from a plant that is not normally used for herbal teas, do some background research first to make sure it is safe.

What about you?

Do you think this plant just isn't good to infuse? Or perhaps would the flower taste better if dried first? Or perhaps is the issue that I used a cultivar selected for its visual appearance and not aroma?

Why Did I Create RateTea When Steepster Already Existed?

2011-12-15T08:41:00.005-05:00

This post was inspired by a discussion on the TeaChat forums, When/why did you start drinking tea? In this discussion, one of the forum users posed the question:

What was your reason for creating ratetea when steepster already existed?

The answer was long, so I decided to write it as a blog post rather than just reply on the forum. Most of you probably already know about both RateTea and Steepster, but for some quick background info, these two sites are the only two interactive tea-related websites that have a database of individual teas classified by brand / tea company, which allow anyone from the internet to sign up and write about tea and rate individual teas. Both sites were launched in 2009, but Steepster was launched considerably earlier in the year than RateTea.

The above picture shows old screenshots of both RateTea and Steepster...this is actually not what the sites looked like when they launched though, unfortunately, I do not have a screenshot of Steepster after its launch, and it would be a bit of work to resurrect an old copy of RateTea from then.

I actually had no clue that Steepster existed until some time after I had launched RateTea to the public.

When I went to create RateTea, it was inspired by RateBeer. I was drinking my tea one morning, Upton Tea's Chun Mee Dao Ming to be specific, when I thought..."I wonder if there's a site like RateBeer, but for tea".

I actually searched exhaustively for interactive tea-related sites before starting to develop RateTea. I discovered TeaViews and the Tea Review Blog, and various forum sites, but I did not come up with Steepster. Steepster did not show up in any google searches, and I searched exhaustively, not just for topics related to tea ratings and tea reviews, but a whole other series of searches related to tea and social networking sites, web 2.0, interactive websites, and anything I could think up. A few tea blogs probably linked to Steepster back then, but I was not as engaged with the blogging community then, and most prominent tea bloggers did not start writing about or linking to Steepster until later.

In all honesty, I may not have developed RateTea if I had known about Steepster, but that's now how things went. When I first discovered Steepster, I was annoyed and frustrated. I had invested about five months of effort into singlehandedly developing and launching a site, and here was another site that was developed by a company that clearly had more resources (three employees, based in NYC, means they must have a hefty funding source) and experience in developing interactive websites. I am not a competitive person, and, in the business world, I don't like competing; I would rather limit my work to things I can do better than other people, and shy away from work that other people can do better than me. Back then, RateTea was very minimal, so I can say without a doubt that at the time, Steepster looked better and more professional than RateTea in virtually every way.

My frustration was compounded when, about six weeks after launching RateTea, Steepster added ratings. Prior to this point, Steepster only had a "tea log", allowing a twitter-like stream of written posts about tea. I have no idea if Steepster was inspired to add ratings in response to the launch of RateTea, or if they had developed the feature on their own and were going to launch it independently of anything I had done. For all I know, they might not have known about me until I tweeted at them on twitter under my @RateTea account, in response to their addition of the ratings feature to their site. I also recognized that even if RateTea actually did offer tea ratings to the public first, being technically first in this regard wouldn't help the site much because Steepster was already more established and being more actively used.

Abandon RateTea or keep working on it?

I was now faced with a decision: abandon the project I had invested a lot of time into, or keep going with it and find a way for it to coexist with Steepster. I thought a lot about what my vision for the site was, and whether or not I'd be able to create a unique resource that would be the best resource on the web in some regard, or whether I'd just be taking second place to others with more resources, skills, or knowledge than me. And when I started thinking about my vision for RateTea, and looking at Steepster, I realized more and more that the sites were fundamentally different, and not only that they could coexist, but could have some positive synergy, as well as collectively appealing to a broader audience and meeting more needs than either one site could alone.

My vision for RateTea:

What I wanted to do with RateTea was to create an independent repository for accurate tea information on the web, one that I could use as a vehicle for promoting transparency and sustainability in the tea industry. That is, I wanted it to be fully independent of any tea company, a website that does not sell any tea and does not even have any affiliate links. RateTea uses only third-party advertising on the site.

I was impressed by the massive empire of high-quality sites like TeaChat, TeaMap, and the like, owned by Adagio, but I saw a need for something that was not associated with any one company. And I also wanted something that could be viewed as the most accurate, most definitive tea resource. Unlike Steepster, RateTea screens reviews from new members, and the site's terms of use prohibit companies from rating and reviewing their own teas.

Tea as a vehicle for food culture:

I also wanted to use RateTea as a vehicle for getting people to think more about their tea: where it comes from, and how it is produced. For this reason, we classify teas to a greater level of detail, not just black, green, etc. but down to specific cultivars, specific provinces or even counties of China, and then we have an article on each style of tea, each specific region. And, rather than just appealing to tea connoisseurs, I want the site to draw in casual tea drinkers and get them to start thinking about their tea.

But the vision is not just about tea, it is really a global scheme which I intend to use as a platform for influencing and reshaping food and drink culture in America and worldwide. I want to push people in the direction of the slow food movement, embracing traditional foods, paying more attention to how their food and drink tastes, etc. For myself, when I got more into beer (and then tea) in this way, it opened up the door to thinking more about food. This is another reason why I have a lot of info on the site about climate and how tea is grown, on the region pages. I want people to become aware of issues like climate change, soil degradation, and also to learn about gardening, growing their own herbs, etc.

Very different from Steepster:

When I explain the full vision of RateTea, it is apparent that it is vastly different from Steepster. The site is a social networking site, and an interactive site where anyone can rate and review teas, but this is only a small part of it: it is also intended to be a massive repository of accurate information, and a vehicle for quiet, information-based activism that I hope will transform an entire industry by making it more transparent, accountable, and committed to sustainability. And more broadly, I hope it will influence the national and global food cultures in a positive way as well.

And this is what motivates me:

And that's why I'm so motivated to keep working on it and make it succeed even when there's a "competing" site that has more funding, more technical expertise, and more paid employees, each of which is probably making a lot more money than I am. Sometimes I still feel frustrated, not just about Steepster, but just in general. Steepster is a well-designed site, and a product of honest business and hard work. What really irritates me are the sites using blatantly unethical practices. I think...why does X website get more traffic / media attention / have more facebook fans / have better search rankings? Why am I not making more money? I see websites that have a message I see as negative or harmful, or are spreading misinformation, I see websites engaging in black-hat SEO practices to manipulate their search rankings, and I see companies using marketing that plays off all sorts of insecurities in unwholesome ways, like the weight loss message used to market tea to women. And I don't want to do these things, and I see that I am earning less money because I'm living with more integrity. And it frustrates me at times.

But I'm not interested in giving up. I know that my projects, not just RateTea, but other longer-term projects like Merit Exchange, or the Cazort.net political platform, are worthwhile contributions to society, and so long as I have enough resources to live comfortably, I can't imagine doing anything other than working on the projects and goals that I am most passionate about. And I know that right now, RateTea already is an awesome resource. The header of the site says: "The most comprehensive tea resource on the web." Anyone who reads this blog knows I write at length about honesty in marketing, and I wouldn't make this claim unless I believed it wholeheartedly. When I launched RateTea, I didn't make this claim, because the site wasn't good enough to make it honestly yet. Now it is. And I hope the quality of the material on the site will speak for itself and that others will recognize the quality of this work, and over the long run, take down their links to the unscrupulous websites and replace them with links to the higher-quality resources that I and many others have created.

What do you think?

What do you think of the relationship between RateTea and Steepster? Have you ever worked on a project only to find that someone else did something similar, and did a better job in some ways? What are your thoughts on competition vs. coexisting and working together by focusing on your strengths? Do you ever get frustrated when you see unscrupulous businesses making more money or getting more traffic or attention than you or your business? Do you think I'm being honest with the claim that RateTea is the most comprehensive tea resource on the web?

On Haiku, and Haiku on The Half Dipper, and on Appreciating Art

2011-12-14T08:40:00.002-05:00

This post is about a tea blog called The Half-Dipper. If you do not know of this blog, I would recommend checking it out. It is a great blog to read for tea lovers, especially die-hard sheng Pu-erh enthusiasts, but in this post I want to highlight another aspect of this blog, its haiku. As of writing this post, Hobbes, the author of this blog, has shared well over a hundred haiku.

On haiku:

Most people are familiar with haiku, a Japanese form of poetry. You can read a bit about this form on Wikipedia's page on Haiku. Haiku, like most poetry in languages other than English, is a form that cannot be easily translated or truly appreciated in English in the same way. Rather than arguing about authenticity of haiku in different languages, I just want to remark that the form and structure of the poetry becomes different in a different language. It becomes a different art form, a new form which, in my opinion, is valid in and of itself.

When English speakers learn about haiku, they often learn about the syllabic structure, traditionally, 17 syllables divided into lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. However, there is a lot more to haiku than this structure alone (and some modern haiku deviates from this structure). Haiku historically focused on nature as a subject (or a whole paradigm) for poetry, and this aspect can be just as important as the syllables. Even modern haiku that features urban or more modern subjects often reflects this sort of natural approach, with the poem saying something about the natural or organic nature of life, or drawing contrast by emphasizing something unnatural. Another aspect of haiku which is extremely difficult to translate or even approximate in English is the Kireji, a cutting word, which is used to divide two thoughts or ideas, the comparison or juxtaposition of which is central to the poem. Some of my favorite Japanese haiku (alas the author's name eludes me now) uses this juxtaposition to engage in a sort of self-deprecating humor related to Buddhism, the relationship of humans to nature, and the limitations of being human.

What I like about Hobbes' approach to haiku:

Hobbes typically includes a photograph with each haiku, which I often find enhances my ability to experience or appreciate the poem. I also find that many of the poems have a clearly evident juxtaposition of two contrasting ideas, in the spirit of the Japanese form, like I discussed above.

But what I like most about Hobbes' approach to haiku is that he often explains the meaning of the poem in a comment. If you visit his blog and read a haiku, I recommend always clicking to expand / read the comments, because he often posts his own comment after each poem, giving his interpretation or further explanation of what his intentions were with the poem.

I absolutely love this, I love when any artists or writers do this. I think there's something really wonderful and beautiful about explaining why one created a work of art or poem, what it means, and what its intention is. I also like the way in which this commentary is presented, nestled away in a hidden comment. This allows readers to read and experience the poem free of preconceptions, coming to their own interpretations, and then read the author's interpretation or ideas after the fact. I think this is just a wonderful paradigm in which to experience and appreciate art, one that is flexible and free, but also helps people to become more connected to the artist and aware of the artist's original intentions.

Read some:

If you want to check out some of these poems, travel over to the Haiku section of the Half-Dipper. And next time you create a work of art, whether it be a poem or anything, try this approach of attaching a little brief commentary or explanation of your intentions after the fact, hidden away somewhere that allows people to experience the art first, and then read your interpretation later. You may find that you really like the results this approach produces.

Molasses in Tea

2011-12-13T09:20:00.000-05:00

A post on the tea blog Steep, Sip, Smile, ’tis the season for holiday teas got me thinking. This post was about holiday teas and holiday cookies. The post resonated me because of the way the author, Mary Beth, remarked that she is usually not a big fan of sweets and tends to like her tea unsweetened.

The thought of "holiday teas" and holiday cookies got me thinking about the cookies that I like most. One type of holiday cookie that I really love is gingerbread cookies, and I like gingerbread cookies that use a lot of very dark molasses. I like the cookies to come out very dark brown, almost black, and I like them to have a strong molasses flavor but without being very sweet. One way to achieve this is by using blackstrap molasses, a very dark type of molasses that is not particularly appealing looking:

This photo by Badagnani, courtesy of Wikimedia commons, licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Molasses, an interesting by-product:

One thing that I find interesting about molasses is that it is a by-product of the production of refined sugar. As sugar is refined, all the other things in the sugar cane become concentrated in the by-product. As a result, molasses is extremely high in iron and other mineral nutrients. According to the USDA Nutrient database, a tablespoon (20g) of typical molasses contains only 11 grams of sugar, yet has 5% of your iron and 4% of your calcium for the day. This may not exactly be the healthiest food, but it sure beats refined sugar.

This whole phenomenon is interesting to me because it reflects some of the things that are harmful about how our society treats food. We highly process and refine certain foods, and in doing so, the more "desirable" foods actually become less nutritive. The refining of sugar is in many respects analogous to the refining of grains to produce white flours. But this is just an aside...back to tea.

Molasses in tea:

Have you ever used molasses to sweeten tea? If you do, I would not recommend using blackstrap molasses like that pictured above. I actually don't have any molasses on hand so I can't even try this out, but I was thinking about the combination of tea and molasses and wanted to throw the idea out there.

My intuition is that I'd like to put molasses in a strong, malty black tea like an Assam, or perhaps a deep, fruity black tea like Keemun. I'd also imagine that it would be hard to get it to dissolve...molasses is extremely viscous and tends to be slower to dissolve than honey.

I really have no idea how it would taste though. If anyone has tried it, or tries it after reading this post, please let me know.

The Importance of Context - Violinists in the Metro, and Tea Prices

2011-12-12T14:25:00.000-05:00

One of my friends recently brought an interesting phenomenon to my attention. Back in 2007, a journalist for the Washington Post orchestrated an interesting social experiment in which the famous violinist Joshua Bell played a piece by J.S. Bach in a Washington D.C. Metro Station during rush hour.

There's a brief page on NPR and a radio program about it: A Concert Violinist on the Metro?. If you want to watch just the video, you can see it here:

This whole experiment is fascinating to me because of the huge disparity in how people receive and respond to this violinist in different contexts. People pay steep prices to buy a ticket to see this award-winning musician play, and concert halls fill up when he performs. Yet the same musician, playing the same music, is completely ignored by a vast majority of people.

How is this relevant to tea?

I think that this social experiment is actually directly relevant to the world of tea, in two ways, both in terms of the enjoyment of tea, and the choices people make when buying tea. The case of the famous concert violinist going mostly ignored in the subway reminds me a lot of how people are shelling out tons of money on expensive tea sold in high-end shopping malls, while missing bargain-buys such as the ones highlighted in my recent post on cheap tea. Why? Context.

Context in Buying and Enjoying Tea:

It is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon that people will (often baselessly) attribute higher quality to a product, including food and drink like tea and wine, if the product is more expensive. That's right, if the tea has a higher price tag, you will think it is more expensive. There are several factors going on here.

A psychology book, Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini, sheds some light on this phenomenon, citing multiple factors:

Committment & Consistency - People are more likely to think that something is better if they gave up more to obtain it. In tea terms, people are more likely to think that a tea is higher quality if they spent more money on it, or went through greater lengths to obtain it (such as putting energy into searching for a bargain or researching online, or obtaining it from a little-known shop in an inconvenient location).

Social Proof - Because prices often reflect market demand, people often assume that a more expensive tea is expensive because it is in high demand, and therefore, other people like it so it must be better.

Scarcity - People are more likely to think a tea is better if it is scarce or difficult to obtain, such as if it is frequently out-of-stock, or only sold in limited batches. This is one reason why tea companies include weasel words like rare in their tea descriptions.

Beware of manipulation by marketing:

While there is some truth in all of these factors, unfortunately, all of these factors can be gamed or manipulated by unscrupulous tea companies looking to sell low-quality tea for a higher price. For example, people often assume that a higher price is related to scarcity or demand, but companies are free to set their own prices, so the price tag alone says nothing. And companies can also make teas seem artificially scarce by only ordering a small quantity and then having it go out of stock quickly.

For this reason I think it's good to be cautious. Some teas are genuinely rare or scarce, and some teas are more expensive because greater care has been put into their production. A few tips I would offer are to carry out blind taste tests (which can sometimes produce surprising results), and, when receiving teas as samples, to sample the tea and form your impression of it before looking at the tea's price. And, when buying tea online, shop around to see what the typical prices are for similar teas (or, in some cases, the same exact tea).

What do you think?

What do you think of the video / experiment with the violinist in the metro station? What about context as it applies to buying tea or enjoying tea? Do you have any additional tips for how to protect yourself against manipulation by marketing? How do you determine which teas really have the quality to justify their price?

Top 5 Individual Tea Reviews on RateTea

2011-12-11T03:10:00.001-05:00

This week, for the top five post, I have chose to share the most often viewed individual reviews on RateTea. This is not necessarily the same as the most often-viewed individual teas, in fact, all five of these reviews are of somewhat esoteric teas that are not particularly well-known and are not particularly often-viewed on the site.

The list:

1. Review of Rituals Orange Pekoe & Pekoe Cut Black Tea by Ernie

2. Review of Dong Suh Brown Rice Green Tea by Me

3. Review of Typhoo Tea by Sir William of the Leaf

4. Review of Wild Harvest Fair Trade True Green Tea by Me

5. Review of Badia Linden Leaves Tea by Me

Why are these the most often-viewed reviews? Your guess is as good as mine. They're not the longest or most detailed reviews on the site, and they're not even the ones that have been most shared or talked about. I do find it interesting that they are all tea bags, and all brands that are relatively low-profile in the U.S.

An Unusual-Shaped Mug

2011-12-09T08:02:00.001-05:00

One of my friends, Allison Bishop, has made some interesting pottery. While at a cookie party at her apartment (where, incidentally, some very high-quality loose-leaf teas were consumed), I noticed this mug that she was drinking tea from:

I really like the way this mug looks, but I also like the way it feels when holding it. It is handleless, and best to hold with two hands.

There is something organic and earthy about it. It also got me thinking about drinking tea from a relatively wide, flat mug, and I realized that I had never drunk tea from a mug or cup with a wider, flatter shape like this one.

Tea Snobbery: At Least I'm Not Like Those Snobby Tea People

2011-12-08T09:15:00.003-05:00

This post is inspired by a discussion on the Tea Trade Forums, How Snobbish is the Tea Community. I started writing a reply but then I realized that I wanted to write more than just a forum post. My reply was also influenced by a post I read recently on the blog Ruqyo's Song: Tea and Poetry, titled: 'There is Nothing I Dislike', referencing a famous quote by Linji, a well-known Chinese buddhist who, ironically, was known as a bit of an abrasive figure, as Buddhists go. But I digress.

Disdain for the tea bag is often associated with tea snobbery. I think there are many compelling reasons to avoid tea bags and prefer loose-leaf tea, but I think that, like any preference, this opinion can be taken too far, and can become snobbery.

The notion of "snobbery" can be subjective:

I think "snobbery" is something that can be found in many communities, but it's something that is subjective, in the eyes of the beholder, and hard to pin down. The sorry state of Wikipedia's article on Snob seems to reflect the difficulty of talking or writing objectively about this topic. Yet, subjective as it is, snobbery is something that I tend to have strong feelings about: I dislike it rather strongly. I think that snobbery actually causes harm in two ways: it harms the tea industry and tea culture by alienating people from tea, and it also causes harm in general by introducing negativity into the world and imparting a sour or bitter note into human relationships. Directly, this harms business, and indirectly, it makes the world a worse place by pushing people away from the idea that all human beings have inherent worth and are deserving of the same respect.

What is snobbery?

I will say that I have encountered people in the tea world, both online and in person, who have personally struck me as snobby (thankfully, these people are in a small minority). But rather than getting sucked into subjective negativity, I want to start by actually defining tea snobbery. What is the difference between tea snobbery, and legitimate differences in opinion, as well as legitimate differences in level of experience with tea and education about tea? I want to quote Ruqyo Highsong here:

When it comes to tea, I often find myself coming to terms with people drinking tea the way I don't think they should. Tea bags. Mesh infusers. Tea blends. Etcetera and so on.

I think these remarks are getting at a key aspect of how snobbery operates. Note the word should, a word which I have stopped using for reasons I explained in an earlier blog post.

I think snobbery, at its essence, is the idea that people "should" behave a certain way, or, to word the definition without the word "should", the idea that people are somehow better than others, more worthy of our respect, because of their choices, preferences, or their level of education or understanding of a specific topic. Tea snobbery is not the same as acknowledging or identifying that some people know more about tea than others. Tea snobbery is when you think that you have "better" tastes in tea, or that your level of knowledge makes you somehow a better person than others with less discerning tastes. Tea snobbery is not when you want to share your knowledge of tea with others, it is when you want to talk at others and impose your knowledge on them, possibly without their consent. Yes, I've seen this happen in some tea businesses, sadly, and it's very bad business, alienating customers.

My confession:

I've been guilty of various sorts of snobbery in the past. I've always been someone who highly values learning and education. I have two advanced degrees from prestigious schools. It's easy for me to get sucked into the idea of thinking that these things make me better than others, and it's perhaps even easier for me to think I'm better than others for not thinking I'm better than others for these reasons, if that makes any sense. After all, we live in a society where we are rewarded, sometimes at least, for superior knowledge. People who are more highly educated often make more money, and even in areas where education does not pay off, people are given frequent praise, especially in school, when they exhibit superior knowledge, such as on exams and other assignments. We are taught, unfortunately, and wrongly, that knowing more makes us better people. And I've gotten sucked into this mentality on multiple occasions. And then our society also values humility, so when I get out of the status trap, I fall into thinking: "Wow, look at how great I am, I'm not like all those snobby people judging others based on their level of wealth or education." ...and snobbery sets in again. Staying of out snobbery's grasp can be tricky!

What I want, however, is to not be remotely snobby. I want to learn voraciously, and cultivate excellence in all aspects of my life, but I want to share my knowledge freely (not impose it on others forcefully or hoard it for my own personal gain), and I want to use whatever skills and abilities I develop to help others, rather than just using it to manipulate or control others. And I want to connect with all people, people of all levels of ability and education, so that I may learn from people who know things I do not know (which includes, no exaggeration, everyone), and may share my knowledge with others who do not know everything that I know (which, again, includes all people, no exceptions). And, perhaps most difficult of all, I want to be able to be modest and humble about whatever abilities I have without looking down on all the people who arrogantly flaunt their knowledge and abilities.

What do you think?

Do you get sucked into snobbery when thinking about tea? What helps you get out of it? Have you been alienated from a business by a snobbish owner or employee? Have you ever been the victim of someone trying to "educate" you about tea without your consent? And how do you deal with that really tough, meta-level problem of getting snobbish about the fact that you're not snobbish?

Being Evergreen: What Does it Mean that the Tea Plant is Evergreen?

2011-12-07T10:19:00.002-05:00

As the Christmas season approaches here in the U.S., evergreen plants like spruce (for Christmas trees) and holly become culturally important. What does it mean to be evergreen?

The tea plant is an evergreen plant, meaning that it is green year-round. However, the term "evergreen" usually carries some additional meaning or connotation: the term "evergreen" is typically used to refer to plants that are green year-round in areas where a number of the other plants are deciduous (losing their leaves). The following photo shows an example familiar to people living in wet temperate climates like the eastern U.S., an evergreen pine tree in the midst of a bunch of deciduous trees in winter:

Evergreen plants are not the same as plants with needles (coniferous plants). There are broadleaf evergreens, like the tea plant, as well as deciduous needle plants, such as cypress, larch, and dawn redwood trees.

The fact that the tea plant is evergreen tells us several things about the nature of this plant, and in this post, I will explain a few things about what being evergreen means for a plant, from an ecological perspective.

Why are plants deciduous?

The short answer for why some plants lose their leaves and then later regrow them, rather than keeping them year-round, is that in certain climates, the environment or conditions are not beneficial for keeping the leaves year round. These unfavorable conditions usually take the form of certain periods of time that are either too cold or too dry. In the eastern U.S., the main seasonal stressor on plants is the cold winter. In other regions, such as parts of Sri Lanka or Africa, or even parts of the southwestern U.S., the main seasonal stressor is drought. Asia, including China, India, and southeast Asia, critical areas in tea production, are interesting in that they have both cold and dry conditions occurring together: this whole region has a strongly seasonal precipitation pattern, with dry winters.

When it is cold or dry, plants risk being damaged by the cold or drought. Plants can maintain their leaves under these conditions, but it takes resources, such as reserves of water, or expenditure of energy. Plants, like businesses, are faced with a cost and a benefit to keeping their leaves. Since plants produce energy from sunlight, and light levels are lower in the winter, the benefit of keeping leaves in the cold season is lower. The same is true of dry periods; most plants will not benefit much from keeping their leaves through dry periods -- even though there is ample sunlight, the plants usually just go dormant because they do not have enough water to continually photosynthesize.

The leaves of deciduous plants, like those of this pawpaw (Asimina triloba), tend to have relatively delicate or thin leaves that are light green in color, contrasting with the tougher and darker green leaves of evergreen plants. Why?

Think of a person trying to keep their home warm. People can choose to keep their home warm by burning more fuel, or they can invest more energy into insulating their home, allowing them to maintain the same amount of warmth while burning less fuel. Investing in insulating one's home is costly up-front, but pays off in the long-run. For this reason, homeowners and property owners are likely to invest in insulation, but short-term renters are unlikely to make similar investments.

Similarly, plants can keep their leaves safe through cold or dry periods by expending energy or water (a short-term expenditure), or by investing in a more robust leaf structure. The more robust leaf structure may include waxy coatings that help hold water in the leaf, conserving water during dry periods, and it may include resins and other chemicals that allow the leaf to operate at lower temperatures without expending energy. Evergreen plants tend to have tough leaves: they tend to be thick, leathery or waxy in texture, and tend to be very dark green in color.

The following leaves from Camellia sasanqua, a close relative of the tea plant, are a typical example. This plant, like all Camellias, has leaves adapted to both cold and dry conditions in winter:

Building a more robust leaf is costly to plants: firm structures and waxy coatings in particular are very energy-intensive to manufacture. If a plant is to get a good return-on-investment on a robust leaf structure, it needs to keep the leaf for a longer period of time, typically 2 or more years, so that it can gain back enough energy from photosynthesis to make the investment worthwhile. Like a business that needs to earn revenue to survive, a plant will die if it does not earn back its investment of energy through photosynthesis.

Why are some plants evergreen?

The explanation above establishes that plants are deciduous in climates with cold or dry seasons because the plants are not able to gain more than they expend by keeping their leaves year-round. If this is true, then why does one encounter some evergreen plants even in climates with periodic cold or dry seasons? And why do the coldest climates, such as the Boreal forests of northern Canada and high altitudes in warmer climates consist mostly of evergreen needle trees like spruce and fir?

The main factor is actually availability of nutrients, such as nitrogen. Deciduous trees drop their entire set of leaves every year, and need to resprout them. Building leaves not only takes energy, but also takes nutrients. Although the energy balance is in their favor, the balance of nutrients may not be. If the plants are growing in a nutrient rich environment, such as most of the forests of the Eastern or Midwestern U.S., the loss of nutrients is not much of an issue: the plant can just pick up new nutrients through its roots. But in areas with fewer nutrients in the soil, the yearly loss of nutrients is too crippling to the plant.

This phenomenon explains the dominance of evergreens in rocky outcroppings with poor soil, and on coastal areas and in pine barrens with sandy soil. It also explains the dominance of evergreens in cold climates, because as the climate gets colder, leaf litter breaks down more slowly, and eventually a point is reached at which few of the nutrients in the leaf litter are actually available to the plants growing in the soil.

Back to the tea plant:

The tea plant is evergreen, and it is a broad-leaf evergreen which grows tough, waxy leaves, quite unlike the tender, newly-sprouted leaves used to produce most of the tea we drink. Its leaves are adapted to get through both cold and dry winters characteristic of the Asian climates where it is native, and, in a broader sense, its evergreen nature is an adaptation to growing in nutrient-poor conditions, such as the rocky outcroppings of the Wuyi mountains.

What do you think?

Do you find the topic or phenomenon of plants being evergreen as interesting as I do? Do you have any thoughts to add?

Romanization of Chinese Tea Names: Wade-Giles vs. Pinyin

2011-12-06T08:52:00.005-05:00

Buying, selling, writing, and talking about Chinese tea in the English language can be rather complicated and confusing, owing to uncertainty about the names of teas. The Chinese language is unfamiliar and alien-sounding to most English speakers, although the base-level of cultural awareness of the Chinese language among the general U.S. population has increased dramatically in recent years. One thing that complicates the naming and spelling of teas is the use of different systems of Romanization. The following screenshot of a chart on Wikipedia shows a few common Romanizations of Chinese:

Romanization is the translating of names from one language into the characters of the Roman alphabet, the alphabet used in English and many other Western languages. There are several different systems of Romanization of Chinese, but the most well-known two of these are Pinyin and Wade-Giles.

Wade-Giles Romanization:

Wade-Giles Romanization is an old system for transcribing Chinese characters that was developed by Sir Thomas Francis Wade, a British Diplomat, during the mid 19th century. Wade-Giles romanization was the dominant form of Romanization in English speaking countries for most of the 20th century, and was used in an overwhelming majority of books published on China until Pinyin began to be adopted.

Because tea culture was firmly established in the West during this period, many of the Wade-Giles spellings of names of tea, such as Pouchong, stuck, either in their literal form or in closely-related spellings. Other spellings, like Lapsang Souchong and Oolong, are artifacts of some other Romanziation system.

Pinyin Romanization:

Pinyin is a more modern system of Romanization, which was developed organically, based on building off earlier systems. Zhou Youguang was a Chinese linguist who figured prominently in the development of Pinyin, although many people were involved in its development. Pinyin was created in the 1950's and initially published in 1958, but the system has been revised since then. Pinyin was created with the official support of the government of the People's Republic of China, and the system retains official backing to this day. There are several variants of Pinyin, including Tongyong Pinyin, adopted briefly by the Republic of China (Taiwan), but the differences are slight.

There are compelling advantages to Pinyin over Wade-Giles and other earlier systems, although there are ways in which it is less intuitive as well. Although Chinese pronunciation does not come close to corresponding cleanly in a one-to-one way with any Western Languages, and is hard to map into Roman characters by any means, Pinyin offers several improvements. Some of the sounds beginning with "chi" in Wade-Giles did not correspond well to the Western "ch" sound, and are represented by "ji" in Pinyin, which is a closer match to how English uses the letter "j". Similarly, Wade-Giles' use of the letter "j" could be particularly unintuitive, and has been replaced with "r" in some cases where it is a much better match. One consonant in Pinyin, however, which I find unintuitive is "c", which makes a "ts" sound that was written as "ts" in the old Wade-Giles system. Pinyin also switches the "d" and "t" relative to Wade-Giles, which leads to much confusion, and Pinyin uses separate "b" and "p", using "p" for the aspirated syllable rather than Wade-Giles which used an apostrophe to mark aspiration.

In the tea world, some of the results of these changes are Tung Ting -> Dong Ding or Pai Mu Tan --> Bai Mu Dan, and returning to the three examples above, Pouchong --> Bao Zhong, Lapsang souchong -> Zhengshan xiaozhong, and Oolong --> Wu long.

Barriers to Adopting Pinyin for Tea Names:

In spite of the fact that Pinyin has been widely adopted as the primary means for romanizing the Chinese language in the West (as well as in China), there remain a number of barriers keeping these names from being adopted in the tea world. One of these is the alien-looking spelling of some tea names. Zhengshan xiaozhong is a good example...even some people such as myself who are at least somewhat familiar with the difference between Pinyin and Wade-giles are unlikely to recognize this name as being the name as "Lapsang Souchong" at a brief glance.

Another barrier, in a very specific case, is that the term "Wulong" or "Wu long" has become associated with the fad (and scam) of weight loss teas. Legitimate tea companies thus are forced into making the choice of using the old Wade-giles spelling Oolong, which is widely used in the tea industry and among tea enthusiasts, or using the Pinyin "Wulong", which strongly evokes (and is associated on the internet with) the weight loss fad.

How do I handle romanization?

I've adopted a fairly complex take on how to handle romanization, both in general and on RateTea, where I've taken some effort to standardize how Chinese tea names are handled. I settled on using the most widely accepted spellings, rather than universally preferring one romanization over the other. But because Pinyin has been replacing Wade-giles on a global level, when the two names are used with roughly similar frequencies, I have given a preference to Pinyin. I also make a prominent reference to the Pinyin spelling at the introduction of each RateTea article on specific styles of Chinese tea, even for teas typically referred to in older Romanizations, and I use Pinyin spellings for all provinces and counties of China.

What do you think?

Do you have any opinions or preferences on the romanizations of Chinese tea names? Can you think of any advantages or disadvantages of either system, or any barriers to the adoption of Pinyin in the tea world, beyond those which I have mentioned here? How do you personally handle these differing spellings and romanizations when you talk about Chinese teas?

Christmas Camellia (Yuletide Camellia) - Camellia sasanqua

2011-12-05T12:26:00.000-05:00

I live in a climate relatively far from where the tea plant is commercially grown, in a region where it can only be grown as a peculiar, delicate garden specimen, in highly sheltered areas. I've heard that there are a few specimens of tea plants growing around Philadelphia and Delaware, but I have yet to see one.

However, I recently stumbled across a more cold-hardy camellia, and I wanted to highlight it both because it is a beautiful and somewhat unusual plant, and also because it sheds some interesting light on the tea plant and on how the relationships between different plants in the same genus tend to work.

The plant pictured here in this post is the Christmas camellia, scientific name Camellia sasanqua, placing it in the same genus as the tea plant. This plant is about as closely related to the tea plant as a crabapple is to a commercial apple, or about as close as cabbage is related to mustard. Plants in the same genus but different species can sometimes (but not always) hybridize, and usually share certain major similarities, but they can also have major differences (Bunchberry, a tiny plant growing on the forest floor in cold climates, is in the same genus as dogwood trees).

The next picture shows an immediate similarity to the tea plant in the sprouting leaves; I'm curious to return in the spring to see if this plant looks even more like the tea plant when it leafs out in the spring:

The Christmas Camellia is so named because it tends to bloom around Christmas time...very unusual as there are very few flowers blooming at this time, let alone ones as showy as this one. I am quite curious what the natural pollinators of this plant are, as insects tend not to be active in cold weather, and most bird pollinators have departed from temperate climates by this point in time.

This plant is not native to North America, and I would have mixed feelings about planting it. It's beautiful and offers a unique landscaping opportunity with the timing of its blooming, but I usually recommend avoiding the use of non-native plants for landscaping. This is certainly not an invasive species though; it is hardier than the tea plant but still a bit of a stretch for gardeners in the Philadelphia area. This plant is thriving, but it is in a city, in a sheltered location, planted close to a building and surrounded by other broadleaf evergreens. However, I will note that there are cases of other broadleaf evergreen plants escaping and becoming invasive species, including English ivy and privet (which becomes semi-evergreen in areas as cold as Pennsylvania). Both of these plants have adapted to a colder climate than their native habitat and have become a problem, choking out native plants in wild ecosystems in eastern North America.

Similarities in aroma between these blooms and tea:

I want to conclude this post with one final note about this plant, another point of similarity between this plant and the tea plant. Its blooms smell very similar to some of the floral qualities in greener oolong teas like Qi Lan or Tie Guan Yin.

I'm quite curious if this plant could be used to produce a tea-like infusion. I've been wondering about this for a long time; see my old post other camellias for tea, in which I mention this species. One point which I find compelling as a reason for pursuing herbal teas made from other camellias than the tea plant is that they are naturally caffeine-free, which might make them attractive to some people. I may try seeing if I can produce some sort of tasty infusion from this plant at some point. However, given that I'm no expert in tea processing, and that this plant has been cultivated primarily for its blooms, it seems like it may be a bit of a stretch to produce something that would actually taste good. I'll keep you updated if I undertake any project like this, which may need to wait till the spring.

How about you?

Have you ever grown this plant, or other camellias? Have you ever tried making a tea-like herbal infusion out of this plant, or any others?

Top 5 Tea-Producing Regions for Single-Region Teas, by Number of Teas on RateTea

2011-12-04T04:54:00.002-05:00

For today's Sunday Top 5 post, I'm focusing on the top tea-producing regions, but I am not ranking the regions by volume, but rather, by the number of teas listed on RateTea. If you are interested in the volume of bulk production, you can visit the Production section of Wikipedia's article on tea, which has a very interesting table of this ranking. The top 5 countries of this ranking are, in most common order, China, India, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, although the order changes subtly from year to year. The ranking of teas on RateTea shares only three of these countries in common, and the ordering is different:

Counting the number of teas on RateTea is by no means scientific, as there are a lot of arbitrary factors that have gone into influencing which teas have gotten listed, but I do think that this listing is actually a very good coarse indicator of which countries are more important or influential in the Western market for specialty teas, specifically, single-region teas, as blended teas will not be counted in this list.

China - 1079

India - 565

Sri Lanka - 262

Japan - 265

Taiwan - 160

After this top five, the count falls off precipitously. Kenya comes in with 39 and Nepal with 29, and there are no other countries with more than a handful of teas. Of the well-over 5000 teas listed, the overwhelming majority (1424) are still blends or teas of unlisted origin (1016) which are probably mostly blends.

Some thoughts on this list:

I find several things interesting about this list. For one, even though China and India are roughly equal in terms of volume of tea production, China almost doubles India in terms of representation among single-region teas. Another interesting factor is the absence of countries such as Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Indonesia in this list...all of which produce substantially more tea than Japan. Taiwan isn't even in the top-10 of producers by volume, but it muscles its way onto the top 5 list as a clear leader among single-region specialty teas. Taiwan and Japan clearly focus on the specialty market.

Do you have any interesting observations about this list? Do you think it's a good coarse indicator of these countries representation in the Western market for single-region teas? Are there any factors here that I may have overlooked?

The Paradox of Unremarkable Tea

2011-12-02T10:33:00.002-05:00

I have been writing about a lot of rather long posts about rather weighty and deep topics lately, so I thought of tackling a lighter, and more boring subject today, the topic of unremarkable teas.

Unremarkable teas are rare:

How much tea do you drink that is just not very interesting or notable? I sample a lot of teas, and I actually find them mostly pretty interesting. I am the sort of person that tends to be pretty interested in life, and in tea, and I tend to find interesting qualities in most teas, so there isn't that much tea that I find unremarkable. Unremarkable is not the same as bad. Bad teas usually get my attention. Sometimes they can be terrible. Undrinkable teas are the worst...the ones I pour out into the sink. I hate pouring out tea. But this experience itself is remarkable...it doesn't happen that often, thankfully, but it leaves an impression on me. In order for a tea to be unremarkable it needs to tread that fine line between good and bad. It needs to be good enough that I enjoy drinking it, but boring enough that it doesn't leave much of an impression. It can't be similar enough to other teas I've had that it leaves an impression on me. It can't have any interesting aromas that I have never been exposed to before. It needs to achieve that delicate balance between being similar enough to other teas I've tried that it doesn't stand out as new or different, but not so similar to any notable teas that I notice the similarity enough to make a mental note of it.

The more I think about it, the more remarkable and notable it seems when a tea is unremarkable. How odd. And the data backs this perspective up:

I have used the term unremarkable exactly nine times in writing reviews on RateTea, of the five-hundred-something teas I've reviewed. Interesting, no other reviewers have yet used the word "unremarkable" in their reviews on the site. Which teas did I find unremarkable? Honestly, I do not think they are worth mentioning. Do a google search if you really want to know. They're really not bad teas.

Lego Bricks: Components, Quantization, and the Discrete, and Tea

2011-12-01T09:01:00.004-05:00

When I was a child, I used to play a lot with Lego bricks. I love Legos; I think in many respects they are an ideal toy. Besides being really fun, I think they also encourage creativity and help develop spatial reasoning skills and manual dexterity. Pictured here is a box of Lego bricks:

One thing that is interesting about Legos is that they are inherently finite and limited, unlike other creative media, such as drawing or painting, or even playing with a musical instrument. When drawing, an artist can choose to draw anywhere on the paper, and a musician can choose exactly when to play each note, how loud to play it, and what tone or timbre to play with, whereas with Legos, the bricks can only connect in a predetermined number of ways.

But as anyone experienced with playing with Legos knows, the amount of possible combinations of even a modest number of lego bricks is so great that it is essentially endless for our limited human comprehension.

Components, The Discrete, and Quantization:

In the language of mathematics, Legos are discrete, whereas many other forms of art are continuous. This distinction parallels the distinction between calculus, which studies continuous changes, and discrete mathematics, which studies things broken into individual units. In the language of physics and quantum mechanics, Legos are quantized. Both of these mean that legos can be broken into smallest units or components, which can be placed or combined only in certain pre-determined configurations.

The Nature of the Universe:

When we look at the world around us, we see a world that looks for all practical purposes continuous. For example, we can raise our arm and move our arm or hand through various motions of distance or angle. We can cut a slice of cake, or a cucumber, exactly where we want to, rather than being constrained by only being able to divide it into a certain number of pieces.

But people who have studied science in more depth will know that the continuous nature of the world around us is actually an illusion. What looks like the unbroken surface of our skin, or the surface of the cucumber pictured above, is actually made of cells, and what looks like a smooth piece of metal is actually an array of individual atoms held together by electromagnetic forces. Furthermore, more modern advances in quantum physics have given us both theoretical grounds and empirical data to suggest that distance and time itself are quantized--that is, that there is a "smallest unit" of distance and smallest unit of time, and that particles cannot exist just anywhere in space and time. Like lego bricks, they can only be placed on the allowed grid.

Components, Quantization, and The Discrete, and Tea:

These concepts may seem very far removed from tea, but they are actually much more directly related than you might think. There are many macroscopic elements of our world that are broken into indivisible, discrete components. On a very basic level, we see these in terms of the individual leaves of a tea plant, which are well-defined units that we can see after brewing whole-leaf tea. But the same is actually true of more deeper things, things that are actually relevant to the important questions of how we experience tea. One particularly poignant example of something that is broken into a finite number of components is the olfactory receptors which we use to perceive aroma. The quantization or finite nature of the olfactory receptors is of paramount importance to how we experience tea because aroma is arguably one of the most important aspects of tea.

Humans, like any animals, have a finite number of receptors for aroma. These receptors are very numerous and very diverse, and they vary greatly from one individual to another. But for each person, the same basic fact or constraint is true: each chemical activates some finite number of receptors, in some combination, which are then processed by our brain. And the number of chemicals out there in the universe, even in our daily environment, far exceeds the number of aroma receptors we have. Our perception of smell is limited. This is why there are a variety of different chemical compounds which smell similar to us. When two teas seem to share the same aroma, it can sometimes mean that they share individual chemical components, but it can also mean that they have chemical components that are similar enough that they activate some of the same receptors.

When we try to communicate our experience of aroma to others, we run into another form of quantization: language. There are only a finite number of words with which we can describe aromas, and there are far fewer words available than there are possible combinations of olfactory receptors that can be activated by the chemical compounds in a cup of tea.

The Limitations of Being Human, and Being At Home in the Universe:

Smell, however limited it is, is still extremely complex, even when constrained by language. But I find it interesting to think about how, when it comes down to it, our experience of everything in life is finite, limited. It reminds me of our inherent limitations as human beings, but it also can make us feel more at home in the universe. Perhaps it is not so bad after all that we are finite human beings, as the very universe we live in seems to also be finite, discrete in some strange sense, like a set of lego bricks. But just like the lego bricks, it is so complex so as to effectively be boundless and infinite, offering far more depth and richness of experience than any one person could ever hope to experience in their lifetime.

Tea and Honey Bourbon Whiskey

2011-11-30T09:34:00.001-05:00

Today I am sharing a post that is rather acharacteristic of me in several ways. For one, I am sweetening my tea, and for two, I am featuring a type of alcohol to do so. However, in a broader sense, I think this post fits with my character as the amount of sweetness and alcohol that I added was very minimal.

I am not much of a drinker; I never have been and I likely never will be. I don't like going to bars and I never feel the need to get drunk. But I do love the taste of many kinds of alcohol. It is no secret that RateTea was inspired by RateBeer, where I have been an active user for years. I enjoy beer more than any other sort of alcoholic beverages, but I do like several types of liquor. My favorite of these is bourbon. I find something about bourbon to be enticing...it's smooth yet complex, and I like it so much that I can drink it straight, although I usually like to add a dash of water to it.

Recently, at the house of some of my friends, someone procured a bottle of Wild Turkey American Honey Bourbon, a honey-sweetened bourbon of the Wild Turkey brand. This is not the sort of thing I would drink on its own. I tend to avoid sweet alcohol, and I like plain bourbon without any honey. But this drink was more subdued flavor-wise than pure honey, and it was pleasingly aromatic, and I got the idea of using it to sweeten black tea:

I chose a first-flush Darjeeling, the Darjeeling from Two Leaves and a Bud, and added just a dash of the bourbon. The result was really interesting. For one, the addition of the bourbon changed the character of the tea, much more so than adding sweetener alone, although less so than adding milk. The bourbon seemed to take some of the edge off the tea. This tea was already a relatively smooth tea, low in bitterness and tannic qualities, but I found it was even smoother upon the addition of the bourbon. I also found that the aroma of the bourbon seemed to blend seamlessly with the tea. Both were rather floral, and in oddly similar ways.

This was an interesting experiment, and the results were pleasant. I could see myself trying something similar again, perhaps with different types of liquor or different teas. Have you ever added liquor to your tea? Does this idea appeal to you at all?

Dollar Store Tea: Lindsay Gardens Tea

2011-11-29T16:22:00.000-05:00

I like exploring dollar stores, although I often don't buy much in them because I tend to seek out high-quality merchandise and, as I explain below, sometimes buying low-quality "bargain-priced" merchandise can actually increase your costs in the long-run. But sometimes I do discover true bargains and I always enjoy searching for them. I recently discovered a store, Dollar Days, on 48th street in West Philadelphia, which has a fairly large selection of food products, and among them, tea. The following photograph shows the tea for sale in this store:

This tea was all from Lindsay Gardens Tea, a brand which I had never heard of before I saw it in this store and took this photograph. I did not buy this tea and I'm probably unlikely to try it unless someone else has already bought it and offers me a tea bag to try, because I don't like throwing out tea.

I love shopping for bargains, but I think it is important to think about the broader picture when considering price, rather than just buying things because they are cheap. The tea pictured above is a good example. While I can't say much about its quality without actually sampling it (and I have not done so), I'm skeptical about its quality. It's clearly a brand of low-end tea bags, and I tend to avoid these brands regardless of price, because I think that high-quality goods often offer better value. But even if this brand offered high-quality tea, would it really be the best price available?

Cost-per-cup Analysis:

The following analysis will clearly demonstrate the supremacy of loose-leaf tea over tea bags as a bargain buy. First of all, the price above, $1 for 20 tea bags, is exceptional. Except for buying very large packs (100+ teabags) in bulk, it's rare to find prices as low as the one above. But in loose-leaf teas the prices can go much lower.

I recently featured a handful of teas in a post cheap tea: loose-leaf teas offering outstanding value. Among these, the cheapest was Ahmad Tea's Kalami Assam, an unusually good Assam tea. This tea, which I bought one pound of for $6.15, costs between 3-4 cents per cup, assuming about 2.5 grams of tea per cup, a substantially more liberal quantity than most low-end tea bags contain. The Lindsay Gardens tea above, from the dollar store? Assuming one tea bag per cup, 5 cents a cup. The Ahmad tea is actually an example of a relatively high-quality tea. There are other teas that are still quite high-quality that are much cheaper even. As an example, take Turkish tea from Caykur, all of which is grown without pesticides. It tends to be smooth black tea, available at a fraction of the price of the Ahmad tea above.

Even if you are searching solely to minimize your cost-per-cup, you'll nearly always get a better deal buying cheap but good-quality loose-leaf tea than buying the cheapest tea bags on the market.

Overzealous Trademarks for Tea Names: Numi Tea and Chinese Breakfast

2011-11-28T10:39:00.007-05:00

This morning I met my brother in Metropolitan Bakery in West Philly, which is a cute little bakery and cafe, one of the few cafes of its type that does not have wireless internet. I actually really like the lack of wireless internet, as it keeps the cafe focused on people actually connecting with each other (although smartphones, unfortunately, throw a wrench in this). But I digress.

In this cafe, I drank a cup of Chinese Breakfast™ Yunnan Black Tea from Numi Tea, which I enjoyed and wrote a review of in case you're curious...but this post isn't about the tea, it's about the fact that the name of this tea is marked by a trademark symbol. This wasn't just any chinese breakfast tea, it was Chinese Breakfast™. This got me thinking about trademarks.

What is a a trademark?

The trademark symbol (™) is used by companies to denote the fact that they are using a symbol as a trademark. There are two types of trademarks, registered and unregistered. Registered trademarks are denoted by the (®) symbol. Trademarking a name or symbol, even if the trademarks are unregistered, provides a degree of legal protection for a company, in the case that other businesses use the same name.

What is the purpose of trademarking?

The idea of trademarking is simple: a company invests money, time, and resources establishing a reputation, and this reputation becomes associated with the name of that company and its products. If another company is able to come on the scene and name its products in the same way as the original company, it is able to "steal" the hard-earned positive reputation of the first company without having done the work to build up its own reputation. Furthermore, new companies on the scene could offer a lower-quality product, thus riding off the established company's reputation and tarnishing their image. If you want to read more on this topic, there's an extensive, fairly technical Wikipedia page on trademarks.

I'm a firm believer in the general validity of trademark law. I think that in general, it is a good thing. However, I also think it can be taken too far.

Taking trademarks too far:

Some companies unfortunately abuse the system of trademarks and trademark law by trying to register trademarks that are already in use as common phrases. Trademark abuse refers to a company inappropriately registering trademarks, as well as using their trademarks to legally threaten other companies, either to force them to rename their products or to extract royalties.

An example of a trademark of a common phrase is the company Life is Good, which has registered the phrase "Life is Good" as a trademark. This is, in my opinion, an overzealous use of trademarking. If I were a judge and I heard a case in which someone challenged this trademark, I would probably strike it down. The issue, as I see it, is that "Life is Good" is a very common phrase, and the company Life is Good seems to base their whole business model on selling merchandise based on the "Life is Good" slogan, which was in existence long before the company trademarked this phrase. I don't know when they registered the trademark, but according to the company's website, their first shirts with this slogan were presented in 1994. I do not know if this brand has actually sued anyone, but even if it has not and does not ever sue anyone, I still get a weird feeling whenever I see the registered trademark(®) symbol after the phrase "Life is Good". It does not give me good feelings about the company.

There are numerous examples of companies actually suing people over extremely vague trademarks. There's a long list of trademark abuse cases on Tabber's Temptations page on Trademark Abuse, which includes such absurdities as attempts to trademark the phrase Love Potion, or the word stealth. For a particularly nasty case, a cable company actually started suing all sorts of companies with the term "monster" in their names, including a mini golf company.

Because of the issue of trademark abuse, and the negative connotations it evokes, I think it is very important that companies tread lightly in their use of registering trademarks or marking names or symbols as trademarks. For example, my company Merit Exchange LLC (which owns RateTea) has a trademark (unregistered) for its name and the merit symbol used to represent it, which I explain on the Merit Exchange copyright notice. I would not even think of trying to trademark a general name like "community economy". Similarly, RateTea (as well as the domain name RateTea.com as well as the former name RateTea.net) is a trademark, but I would not try to trademark more general terms like "tea ratings". Even though RateTea was the first site to offer online tea ratings open to the general public, there were prior sites (like Teaviews, and many individual bloggers) which already published numerical ratings of teas. Even if there were no prior examples of tea ratings anywhere, I still think it would be unethical and probably legally inappropriate to try to trademark a general phrase like that. And if I were to attempt an overzealous trademark, I would just alienate others and generate hostility towards my site and my company. I'd make myself and the company or website look bad.

And this is exactly what happens when companies overreach in their use of trademarks.

Back to Numi Tea and the Chinese Breakfast Trademark:

I personally believe that the term Chinese Breakfast is too general to trademark. The name, and similar names, are already in use by a number of different tea companies. For example, Rishi tea sells a "China Breakfast". I do not know which company created their tea first though, because I have not researched this topic. The way trademark law works, the name "China Breakfast" is similar enough to "Chinese Breakfast" that if the Chinese Breakfast trademark were ruled valid, the name "China Breakfast" would likely be infringing upon it--especially since both teas are Yunnan red (Dian hong) teas of a similar style and from the same region.

But I think that a case based on trademarking the term "Chinese breakfast" could and would break down in court. Prior use of the phrase is one factor, and I think if this could be established then the case would be sealed. But even if it were not in prior use, I still think it might be too vague and general to trademark. The name is similar to English breakfast and Irish breakfast teas, which are styles of tea that are not trademarked or owned by any particular brand, and which are defined by their character, not by association with a particular company or even particular origin of tea. "Chinese breakfast tea" is a very general term which evokes a strong traditional breakfast tea, with a simple modifier implying that the tea either originates in China or is a style consumed in China. I also think that if a trademark of a general term like "Chinese breakfast" were upheld in court, it would set a bad legal precedent that would lead to a rush for companies to register other names like "Turkish Breakfast", "Kenyan Breakfast", or possibly more esoteric terms. This rush would favor big companies with more resources for advertising and legal teams, and it would do nothing to reward companies for investing long-term resources in development of quality products, and it would ultimately create an anti-competitive environment that was not productive or beneficial to the tea industry as a whole, especially to tea drinkers.

Numi Tea is a company that prides itself on its ethics: it is a leader in sustainability, with a high portion of teas that are certified organic and also fair-trade certified as well. When I see the trademark symbol after the name Chinese breakfast, it doesn't give me a good feeling. Like my reaction when I see the ® symbol after the phrase "Life is Good", my immediate association is with frivolous lawsuits in which larger companies use their wealth and legal teams to bully individuals and smaller companies. I have no idea if Numi has ever done this, or would ever do this (I certainly hope that they would not), but the point is, by writing the ™ symbol after the generic name "Chinese Breakfast", they open the door to this sort of abuse. If they were to quietly remove that symbol, they would be sending a signal to people like me and to the world that they considered themselves above this sort of petty behavior, and instead wanted to focus on the quality of their product speaking for itself. And they can still benefit, legally and ethically, from the protection of trademark law, protecting their brand name.

(Numi, incidentally, is a registered trademark, and I would assert that this is proper and ethical use of trademark to protect brand name and reputation.)

What do you think?

Where do you draw the line between trademark abuse and legitimate use of trademarks? Do you think that this particular case of Numi trademarking (albeit not registering) the name "Chinese Breakfast" is going too far? Or is it within the range of what you think is acceptable?

Top 5 Favorite Black Teas Of The Moment

2011-11-27T12:11:00.000-05:00

People often ask me: "what is your favorite tea?", and those who know me a little better may ask the more open question: "Do you have a favorite tea?", to which I usually answer "not really, although I have a few favorite teas at the moment". My tastes in tea change frequently, so it's hard for me to pick universal favorites. However, at the moment, there are five black teas that I can pick out as favorites. These include teas that I've tried recently as well as ones I have not had in some time, and am simply remembering:

TK18: Livingstonia Estate GFBOP - I've tried a few Tanzanian teas now, including a very good one from Teas Etc, and I've liked all of them. This one, however, is my favorite, and is one of the most interesting / unusual black teas I've tried yet, with tones of wintergreen and a suggestion of Queen Anne's lace in the aroma. It is a high grade of broken-leaf orthodox tea.

Makaibari Estate Darjeeling First Flush from Arbor Teas - As I've written about before, I love everythig I've ever tried to come out of Makaibari estate. This was not my favorite tea from theirs (this title goes to a long-leaf green tea), but it is the favorite batch of black tea I've tried.

The now-discontinued Himalayan BOP from Upton Tea Imports. I have tried a number of similar teas Upton added after retiring this one, but I haven't found one I like as much as this one. This tea is inexpensive, Darjeeling-like, but very edgy, with a greener character for a black tea, yet considerable bitterness. My next-best bet for a similar tea is one from Jun Chiyabari estate in Nepal, provided by Imperial Tea Garden, but I have yet to find a tea in this genre that I like quite as much as Upton's discontinued one.

Panyang Tippy Golden Needles Imperial - A tippy black tea, also from Upton, this tea was remarkably light for a Chinese black tea, and had an aroma suggestive of pastry crust, yet with considerable complexity.

Darjeeling from Hampstead Tea - This tea is also from Makaibari estate, and to my knowledge is a mixed flush tea, although this is not explicitly stated. It is my second-favorite black tea from that estate, richer and with more depth and bitterness than their first flush but still with some of the first-flush character in the aroma.

I also want to add that I think all of these teas are reasonably priced, but the Livingstonia Estate GFBOP is a particular bargain.

As a disclaimer, Upton Tea Imports is my favorite tea company, which biases me to order and sample more teas from them than from any other company. I'm sure there are many other outstanding sources of black tea out there. These teas mentioned here are simply the ones that got my attention the most.

More Thanksgivings For Tea

2011-11-24T09:06:00.001-05:00

Last year, I published a post around Thanksgiving time, Thankful about Tea. I am still very thankful for the things mentioned in that post, and I would recommend reading it if you missed it. This post is in the same spirit. I am not just thankful for tea, but thankful for many things that have some connection to tea. I am thankful for:

I'm thankful for Sylvia Odhner and her work that has helped RateTea look much nicer, as well as for her wonderful friendship that has helped me to grow in more ways than I can put into words.

I'm thankful for the time I have in my life to slow down and enjoy a cup of tea multiple times throughout the day, and for the rest and mindfulness that these small breaks produce.

I'm thankful for the earth's ecosystems that have given us tea, together with the myriad of different plants and animals we use for food, drink, and all sorts of other purposes.

If you eat turkey this thanksgiving, please remember where turkeys come from, and that they originated as wild creatures with great dignity. Look at the agility demonstrated by this wild turkey, which was perched high in a tree and flew across a large expanse of open water:

Happy thanksgiving!

Blogging Advice: Writing on Other Sites

2011-11-23T10:49:00.001-05:00

Today I read a post on Sara's blog Tea Happiness titled Steep Thoughts- The Shamlessly Promoting Stuff Edition, in which Sara writes about the Tea Review Blog. I really like the Tea Review Blog; it is a lot like Teaviews, another site that I really like. In many respects, these two sites, featuring a team of reviewers that post reviews of teas, fill a niche that is intermediate between individualized tea blogging and community sites that are open to the public for free sign-up, like RateTea and Steepster.

I did not think there was anything overly promotional about Sara's post, and this got me thinking about when a blogger goes too far in promoting material posted on another site. I am sensitive to this because I do not want to come across as overly promotional about RateTea or any of the other sites that I run. I have definitely seen blogs that cross this line (including ones I would not overly label as spam), and I came up with the following advice to offer. Feel free to take it with a grain of salt, or offer your own perspective!

I think this issue is important for tea bloggers, however, as many of us publish on a variety of different sites, from microblogging social networking sites, to guest posts on other blogs, to community sites, forums, and the like.

When you publish on other websites:

I have two key guidelines or recommendations to bloggers who wish to promote their writing pieces on other blogs or websites. Whatever you do, make sure your blog retains its character, and share things in context.

Make sure your blog retains its character:

If you mostly write detailed posts with a chatty tone, or if you mostly write elegant, poetic posts with beautiful photography, then keep your posts in this style even when you wish to share your writings on other sites. If I subscribe to a blog, it is often not just because I like the content and subject matter, but because I like the style and presentation.

My blog is often characterized by the inclusion of nature photographs, followed by slightly far-fetched analogies between what is going on in the photo, and the subject of the blog post. Just as this Yellow-bellied sapsucker (a sap-eating woodpecker) is migrating south to warmer regions for the winter, some bloggers find it fruitful to migrate over to posting material on websites other than their blog. However, unlike migratory birds, bloggers usually have the best results if they continue to publish unique posts on their blog throughout the year, even if they do start publishing elsewhere as well.

Sharing things in context:

I tend not to like blog posts that consist of a single link to a writing piece or blog post on an external site. This sort of sharing of links is appropriate for twitter, facebook, Google+, and a variety of other sites. By sharing links like this on a blog, you are losing the main benefit of all-out blogging rather than using these other "microblogging" services.

If someone arrives at your blog post, they're set up to read something...at least a paragraph or two, maybe. If they come to your post, they're ready to absorb information, and more than just a single sentence or link. If you just include a link, you're wasting their attention, losing an opportunity to engage with a captive reader. Furthermore, by making someone follow the link to another site, you can sometimes be wasting your reader's time, especially if you share a post on twitter that takes the reader to a page that just links over to another page. It sounds silly, but people do it more often than you might think.

What does it mean to share something in context?

There are many different ways to share things in context. You can write a blog post about a different topic, and link to one of your articles that expands on a topic you mention tangentially or in passing. You can write a blog post that highlights a collection of articles you've written, with a blurb about each of them. And, if you really do want to write a blog post that serves solely to point the reader to one article on a different site, I would recommend:

Share why you think this post would be exceptionally interesting or relevant for your readers to read.

Add something unique, like unique or exclusive commentary on the article, such as a personal reflection on why you wrote it.

Write the post in the style / character of your blog.

Include such posts only sparingly in your blog.

What do you think?

Do you like this advice? Do you follow it yourself? Do you think I have been doing a good job of following my own guidelines, or am I a hypocrite? Any other related advice to offer, to me or anyone?

Hibiscus Tea (Roselle) - Flor de Jamaica & Lowering Blood Pressure

2011-11-22T16:45:00.003-05:00

I usually tend to write about teas, herbs, and other beverages that I especially like, but this time I thought I'd share one that I do not particularly like, although a large number of others seem to love it. And while I may not like it, I find it very interesting because of the overwhelming scientific evidence that it can be effective at treating high blood pressure. This drink is hibiscus tea, an herbal tea made from the calyces (sepals) of the roselle plant (Hibiscus sabdariffa). Pictured here is an iced glass of this beverage:

Hibiscus tea goes by many names, in part because it is widely consumed in so many different countries and cultures. In Egypt, this drink is often referred to as karkadé(كَركَديه‎) which is just Arabic for hibiscus, and in much of Latin America it is called Jamaica, short for agua de flor de Jamaica.

The picture above shows the roselle plant, used to produce this herb. It is widely cultivated in hot, tropical climates, such as Egypt and Nigeria. On RateTea, you can find listings of different sources of hibiscus, including both tea companies selling it as an herbal tea, and herb companies selling it as a bulk herb.

Why I don't like hibiscus: sourness, cooked vegetable aroma:

Hibiscus produces the most sour herbal infusion of any herb that I've tried. It is even more sour than many fruits. Because of its intense sour flavor, it is often blended with other herbs, and, whether it is consumed on its own, or in blends, it is typically sweetened, often heavily so. I tend not to like sour qualities, and hibiscus is over the top on the sourness for me.

I also am not crazy about the aroma of hibiscus. In some respects its aroma is rather fruity or berry-like, and I like these qualities, but I also find that it has a strong cooked vegetable or cooked fruit aroma, much like what your home will smell like if you've been making large quantities of jam. I find this smell mildly unpleasant, and this is another reason I'm not a fan of hibiscus.

But you may love it...I find that most people like both sourness and jam more than I do!

Hibiscus is a common ingredient in herbal blends and flavored teas:

Even if you may not be aware of it, it is highly likely that you actually have consumed hibiscus in some form or another. Hibiscus is one of the most common ingredients in herbal teas, including the Celestial Seasonings Zinger® series, where it serves both to impart a deep purple-red color, and to add sourness to a blend. As you can expect, I don't particularly like these blends. The only mainstream commercial blend that contains hibiscus as a main ingredient, that I actually enjoy, is Bigelow's Sweet Dreams. Hibiscus is also sometimes blended with tea; I've tried a black tea blend with hibiscus; I wasn't a huge fan of it.

Hibiscus and Hypertension (High Blood Pressure):

I've researched a fair amount about the medicinal uses and health properties of various herbs, and hibiscus was one herb that stood out in that it has an overwhelming amount of strong evidence supporting its efficacy for treating a specific, rather serious health condition: hypertension (or high blood pressure). Not only has hibiscus been found to be effective at lowering blood pressure in multiple controlled clinical trials, but it has even been compared to a number of different prescription antihypertensive drugs, and it was found to be as effective as one of them. Furthermore, unlike prescription medications used to treat hypertension, hibiscus was found to have a complete absence of strong or serious side effects. As something that has been widely consumed as a beverage for hundreds of years, it seems absurd that people would take one of these medications without first trying hibiscus, especially in cases of milder hypertension. If you want citations to these studies you can find citations and some more detailed discussion of these studies on RateTea's page on hibiscus tea.

One of my motivations for sharing this post is to get the word out about hibiscus. Hypertension is a widespread problem in America, and most of us probably know at least a few people who are suffering from this condition. It certainly cannot hurt to try regularly drinking a few cups of this herb to lower your blood pressure before trying out a potentially riskier prescription drug. If you choose to drink it in herbal tea form, however, be careful about how much sugar you add, as high-sugar diets can contribute to or worsen hypertension.

Hibiscus may also have some other health properties, although these have been less extensively studied, and only have suggestive support, mostly from animal studies. These properties include an antipyretic (fever-lowering) effect, protection against liver damage, and lowering of cholesterol.

Do you like hibiscus?

I'd be curious to hear from other people...do you feel similarly about this herb as I do, or do you actually enjoy it? Did you know about these studies on hypertension? Would you take an herb like this one, before taking prescription medication?

Flavors Sinking to the Bottom of the Cup, and Stirring Tea

2011-11-21T16:04:00.018-05:00

Pictured here is the bottom of a cup of black tea:

One thing that I've noticed while drinking certain teas is that certain flavors and qualities of a tea tend to sink to the bottom of a cup. This is less of a problem when using a relatively short, wide cup like the one pictured above, and even less of a problem when using smaller teacups like those more commonly used in China and Southeast Asia, but even with these small cups, this phenomenon can occur.

What exactly sinks to the bottom of the cup?

From my own experience, I've found that flavor, more than aroma, tends to sink to the bottom of the cup. The bottom of the cup of tea tends to be stronger in flavor, more bitter, more sour, and to a slight degree, also sweeter. Astringency also tends to concentrate at the bottom of the cup. However, there are a few unusual teas in which I've found aromatic qualities sank to the bottom of the cup. One such tea was Huo Shan Yellow Buds (Huoshan Huangya) from Upton Tea Imports, in which the bottom of the cup had hints of olive and wine which were totally absent from the top of the cup.

For some brief science, tea contains both dissolved chemicals and suspended solids. Dissolved solids leave the tea transparent, whereas suspended solids are visible if you look closely enough, and from a distance, contribute to an opaque or cloudy visual appearance to the tea. Suspended solids only stay in water because the water is moving; if the water does not move, they will eventually settle to the bottom (imagine the green dust left at the bottom of a cup of sencha). Truly dissolved chemicals do not sink to the bottom of the cup once dissolved: they remain dispersed equally throughout the liquid. However, as the amount of mixing in a cup of tea, especially a tall cup, can be limited, dissolved substances still tend to be unequally distributed throughout the cup. This is particularly true (terrible pun here) when there is a lot of suspended particulate matter, small pieces of tea leaf, at the bottom of the cup, as dissolved substances are continually leaching or infusing from these tiny pieces of leaf.

In general, you tend not to taste suspended particulate matter, and rather, only taste things that are actually dissolved. So what is going on here is that suspended particulate matter, tiny pieces of tea leaf, concentrates at the bottom of the cup, and then various flavor components infuse from this matter. You might think that the cloudy or opaque teas would be more likely to exhibit the flavor-sinking quality, and I've found this true to some degree, but there are exceptions, like Two Leaves and a Bud's Darjeeling First Flush, which produces a very clear cup, and yet still has much of the flavor sinking to the bottom of the cup. I suspect that much of the particulate matter is so small that you cannot see it, but that it is still not truly dissolved.

Teas where I find some of the flavor sinks to the bottom of the cup:

For examples of this phenomenon, I've found that while drinking Dragon Well from Novus Tea, the flavors (bitterness, sweetness, etc.) tend to sink to the bottom of the cup. In the Formosa Amber Oolong (TT55) from Upton Tea Imports, I found a sourness sank to the bottom of the cup. A black tea in tea bags which I reviewed recently, Vienna, from The Foreign Office, had a strong bitterness that sank to the bottom of the cup.

I also find this phenomenon happens with herbal teas. For example, I find that when brewing Monarda sp. (bee balm, wild bergamot, oswego tea, etc.), a lot of astringency tends to sink to the bottom of the cup. The same phenomenon occurs, although in a less pronounced fashion, with other mint-family plants. I definitely notice it, for instance, with orange mint.

Stirring Tea:

If you drink tea from a larger cup, especially a taller mug, and you find that you don't like the fact that certain flavors or aromatic qualities tend to sink to the bottom of the cup, you can just stir your tea. But I don't necessarily always want to make my tea more uniform. Sometimes there is something pleasant about enjoying the different facets of a cup of tea...the fleeting, transient aromas at the top, leading into bolder flavors at the end.

Stirring your tea is something that most people associate with the addition of milk or cream and/or sugar, but it is something that I find can be helpful even if you drink your tea straight like I do.

How about you?

Do you ever notice that certain qualities in your tea sink to the bottom of the cup? Do you like or dislike this phenomenon? Do you stir your tea because of this? Do you seek out taller cups, or smaller ones, to magnify, or minimize, this phenomenon?

My Top 5 Favorite Flavored Teas

2011-11-20T04:35:00.008-05:00

This post continues my Sunday series of top 5 posts; we'll see how long I can keep this up! I usually prefer pure teas to flavored teas, but from time to time I encounter flavored or scented teas that I really like, including a select few that contend on equal ground with my favorite pure teas. This post highlights five of such teas, my five favorite flavored teas.

Rose Green Tea Organic, from Upton Tea Imports - This tea surprised me in that it is flavored with "natural flavors", meaning extracts or essential oils, and that I still liked it. I rarely find teas flavored with extracts in this manner, that I still like. This tea is edgy: dark and rich, and not particularly floral. It has a very strong rose presence, and the base tea blends very well with the rose.

Osmanthus Oolong Se Chung from Upton Tea Imports - I love osmanthus-scented tea, and greener se chung oolong (particularly huang jin gui) can strongly resemble osmanthus in fragrance. This is an example of a scented tea that blends seamlessly: although it is obvious that this tea has been scented, it is impossible to me to tell where the osmanthus ends and the tea begins. This tea is simply a joy for me to drink.

Jasmine Green Tea (Jasmine Yin Hao) from Rishi Tea - I do like Jasmine tea, although I wouldn't say that it is my favorite style of flavored tea across the board. This particular tea, however, my favorite Jasmine tea, is one that I especially like. It has a classic jasmine tea profile, but it is less perfumey and I find it exceptionally smooth while still being full-bodied and deep.

Earl Grey Leaf Green Tea from Hyson - This tea literally blew me out of the water. It is a whole-leaf green tea from Sri Lanka, with rather large leaves. It is completely unlike any other Earl Grey, totally lacking the strong bitterness, and instead, having an overall character more similar to a good Jasmine tea: smooth and very aromatic. The base tea is like an exceptionally smooth gunpowder green or chun mee.

(Tied for fifth) Rishi Masala Chai - This is my favorite pre-blended masala chai, and evidently, all other reviewers on RateTea also agree that it is their favorite commercially available masala chai blend. It's the only masala chai blend on the market that I like better than what I can blend on my own at home. The other contender is Vanilla Mint Pu-erh from Rishi Tea, a tea that sounded quite unappealing from the name, but which impressed me quite greatly when I actually drank it. This is a very smooth, earthy tea with a cocoa-like character (although, contrary to what the aroma might suggest, it does not contain any cacao).

What are your favorite flavored teas? I am especially interested in hearing from people who, like me, have a strong preference for pure teas, as these are the people who are most likely to share my tastes.

Leaves and Water: It's Not What But Where, and Nutrient Pollution in the Tea Industry

2011-11-18T16:19:00.000-05:00

One way of looking at tea is that it just leaves and water. Here is a photo I took in Philadelphia, which shows leaves and water:

There's really not much here that looks like tea. Occasionally, fallen autumn leaves will "infuse" in streams or standing water, producing a rich dark brown infusion which looks a lot like black tea. But this is not happening in this photo, which shows freshly fallen rain.

Furthermore, most of us would probably agree that tea is generally a good thing, yet in this photo, neither the leaves nor the water are in a place that is terribly convenient. The water has flooded the entrance of a driveway, and the leaves are covering the sidewalk, and are slippery.

It's not what, but where, that matters:

Sometimes, in life, we just don't have enough of a certain resource in order to achieve some sort of goal. People go hungry for lack of food, or businesses can be limited by availability of some supply or raw ingredient in their production process. There is often no other way to remedy these sorts of problems other than finding whatever resource is needed.

In our modern society, most problems are of a different nature. Things are in the wrong place. These sorts of situations are often able to be solved in ways that turn them into a win-win situation, in which a problem in one area becomes a valuable resource in another. A good example of such a solution is recycling, which can turn waste (which is costly to dispose) into raw materials or inputs in an industrial process to create something of value.

Another good example of a problem of things being in the wrong place is nutrient pollution. Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, are often limiting factors in both ecosystem growth and agricultural productivity. For this reason, commercial agriculture often treats crops with synthetic fertilizers, rich in nitrogen. These fertilizers are often applied liberally, providing far more nitrogen than is actually necessary for the crops. In the case of some plants or crops, excess nitrogen can be taken up by the plants in the form of nitrates and nitrites, which are harmful to eat in quantity (think of the issues associated with eating too many nitrite-treated meats). The remainder is not utilized by the plants, but runs off into the water. Once the nitrogen is in the water, it can damage or destroy aquatic ecosystems through a process called eutrophication. Eutrophication is a major problem worldwide, on all continents, and affects roughly half of lakes throughout North America, Asia, Europe, and South America (less in Africa, because Africa is less developed). Other problems include soil acidification, and contamination of the water supply with nitrates.

Over-fertilization in Tea Production:

The over-use of fertilizer is unfortunately a problem that exists in the tea industry.

The tea plant is a plant with very low nutrient requirements (think of how it grows naturally on rocky outcroppings in the Wuyi mountains), but it is an evergreen plant that naturally invests in its leaves for several year's worth of use. The continuous harvesting of leaves puts a heavier demand for nutrients on the plant, so it becomes necessary to add some form of fertilizer to replenish these nutrients.

Organic agriculture sometimes helps, but organic certification alone is not necessarily a guarantee that the right level of fertilizer is being applied. (see this source) The key solution to the problem of over-fertilization is to apply less fertilizer. Organic fertilizer still contains nutrients, and still causes problems when there are too many nutrients.

Fortunately, there are relatively easy ways for these problems to be addressed. Furthermore, as is usually the case of problems caused by things being in the wrong place, the outcome is actually a win-win situation. One solution is to use lime fertilization instead of conventional fertilization schemes. Another is to simply use less total nitrogen. There is some evidence that using less nitrogen actually results in slightly higher yields of tea. See this source for a study of Japanese tea fields, backing up these ideas.

I am hopeful that over time, we eventually completely solve not only the problem of nutrient pollution, but all other problems of things being in the wrong place. In the case of nutrient pollution, the solution is already known, it just needs to be implemented. For more problems in our world, we need more brainstorming, experimentation, and study. But I find it empowering to think about things in this way.

What are some problems that you see in the world around you that are examples of things being in the wrong place?

A Walk in The Cemetery

2011-11-17T18:05:00.000-05:00

I like the idea of moving away from writing specific reviews of tea, and finding other ways to capture the experience of tea. I am in Cafe Clave, and I just finished a cup of South Indian Select from Novus Tea. For me, tea is often a refreshing break. Another way I take a break is by walking in Woodlands cemetery. Here are three photos I took in this cemetery in October:

A red-tailed hawk carries a stick for its nest.

I frequently encounter Chinese characters when reading tea-related topics online. I rarely encounter them in this cemetery. This tombstone caught my eye and got me reflecting on the bonds that form between people across different cultures, which you can often see in the names and inscriptions in this and other cemeteries.

Institutional-looking high-rise dorms rise from behind the organic row of trees. The dorms belong to the University of Pennsylvania, a school which, at least to me, evokes connotations of order and control more strongly than a typical university. This is the view as I walk back towards the exit of the cemetery.

I find there is something inherently slow-paced and reflective about cemeteries. They are old, and provide markers of lives past. This particular cemetery has an organic nature to it, a wildness, that I like very much. As I leave it to get back to work, I reflect on these things.

The interplay between order and chaos, between control and freedom, is one of the topics that seems to come up again and again when I think of anything relating to food, drink, and ecology. I can taste it in my cup of tea just as I feel it when walking back into the city, from this cemetery.

Drying Herbs: Lemon Balm, Red Perilla, and Spearmint

2011-11-16T17:42:00.001-05:00

When the rare October 2011 snowstorm hit a few weeks back, there had not yet been a frost, and I was expecting there to be one, based on weather reports of below-freezing temperatures. The frost never materialized, and there has yet to be a frost in a broad region from Philadelphia southward (although isolated points southward have experienced some light frost).

But in anticipation of the frost, I harvested a bunch of herbs from my neighborhood. I took some of them from plants growing wild on unmaintained property, but much of them I gathered from Tabernacle United Church, with the permission of their gardener, who also informed me that the church used no chemicals on the garden. This picture was taken when the herbs were in the early stage of drying:

In the cold weather, the indoor heat of my apartment quickly dried out these herbs. They are now long-since completely dried and I have been using them to brew herbal teas, and also as ingredients in soups. I want to highlight two things in this post.

The Herbs:

In the lower-left of the photo is lemon balm; I use this herb exclusively for brewing herbal tea, which I drink in quantity. I rarely blend it with actual tea, although I frequently blend it with spearmint and other herbs.

At the top, only partially visible, is spearmint. This particular batch of spearmint, harvested from the church's bed, is exceptionally sweet, producing a totally smooth, candy-like infusion completely devoid of any bitterness or astringency. It's actually not my cup of tea; I prefer the edgier, more bitter or wild-tasting spearmints. But it is good for a change of pace and I imagine that a large number of people might strongly prefer this variety of spearmint.

At the right is red perilla or red shiso, which I wrote about before, on my post on red shiso (perilla) for herbal tea. This batch has a little tougher leaves than the others, and I've found it is a little less enjoyable as a cooked vegetable, but it still produces a delicious herbal infusion.

These herbs all have much fresher, stronger aromas than anything I could order from a catalogue.

The Church, and The Idea:

I want to thank the church and their gardener for giving me permission to harvest these herbs. But more importantly, I want to highlight to everyone the possibility of churches and other organizations growing edible plants on their grounds, and people in the community harvesting these plants. This is a classic example of edible landscaping. On my other blog, I wrote about fruit trees as edible landscaping, but herbs actually make for an easier and quicker option.

If you work with an organization in any capacity related to their grounds or maintenance, I would encourage you to look into edible landscaping, and consider making the plants you grow available to those in the community. You will be providing a valuable asset to the community. Make sure to avoid using any chemicals on your grounds, so that everything is safe to eat.

And if you do not work for any organization in such a capacity, I would encourage you to reach out to organizations when you see edible plants. They may just be going to waste. This is not the first time a church has eagerly given me permission to harvest plants growing in their gardens.

Such arrangements essentially create a free resource; they are one of the most sustainable ways to produce herbs or food, and they also help promote a more sustainable culture by helping people to be more closely connected to the food or herbs that they are consuming.

Have you ever entered into an arrangement like this, on either end of it?

Life in Teacup - Featured Tea Blog

2011-11-15T10:39:00.005-05:00

In the past I have reviewed and recommended some tea websites, and today I decided it would be good to review a tea blog. I follow dozens of blogs, and I appreciate every blog that I follow or link to, so a review or feature does not mean that I want to favor one particular blog over another, just that I was thinking about one particular blog at the moment, or have some reason for wanting to share it.

One blog that I often enjoy reading is the Life in Teacup Blog, by Gingko Seto. Life in Teacup is a small tea company, run by Gingko, which specializes in Chinese teas. You can find a number of reviews of their teas, which I find consistently high-quality, on RateTea's page of Life in Teacup Reviews. You can also find Gingko Seto on twitter, where she is always eager to engage in tea-related conversation.

About the Life in Teacup Blog:

The Life in Teacup blog is rather atypical among tea blogs. It has long, detailed posts, and often goes into considerable depth. Gingko shows insider knowledge about Chinese tea, and at times, deep research, and there is a lot of unique information in this blog that you cannot easily find elsewhere. But what I most like about this blog is the personal twist or perspective that Gingko puts on the blog. Gingko, like me, is a bit of an experimenter who tends to seek out teas and aspects of tea culture that are novel, unusual, or interesting, while at the same time highly valuing tradition. I find this combination of traits refreshing and rather rare in our society (although more common among tea enthusiasts than the general population).

Although I do subscribe to this blog, it's one of the few blogs where I am less likely to read a post in full when it is posted, and instead, return to it repeatedly when I am researching a specific topic.

For this reason I want to point you to two sections of the blog, based on topics you might be interested in.

The Discussion on Long Jing, which is currently in the middle of unfolding, is a serious of posts about Dragon Well / Long Jing, a type of Chinese green tea.

Strange, funny, silly and scary teas - This collection of posts is just fun...what can I say?

Some of the tags / topics, including oolong tea, and puerh, and the biggest category, chat, for the more chatty / casual / random posts (many of which are still quite informative and deep).

Gingko's Affinity for Mug Brewing:

Lastly, I want to point out one aspect of this blog that I like. Gingko is a big proponent of brewing whole-leaf green tea loose in a glass mug, and I would credit her as being the main source of motivation to get me to experiment with this method, which I think is an under-appreciated method for brewing tea, one often producing very good results. The Life in Teacup blog is full of photographs of a number of different types of green teas being steeped loose in a glass mug. This brewing method really lends itself to photography (and thus, blogging), and I find that you can see the leaf in this method in ways that you can't by any other common brewing method.

So, in summary, if you like Chinese teas, I'd recommend checking out both the Life in Teacup blog, and the store.

Did you know of Gingko and Life in Teacup before this post?

Were you familiar with Gingko's blog, and the Life in Teacup company, before reading this post?

Constructive Criticism vs. Diatribes & Rants

2011-11-14T07:59:00.003-05:00

I recently read a post on Lainie Sips about company complaints in blog comments. Lainie takes what I think to be a good and reasonable approach to moderating comments. She begins by talking about legitimate grounds on which to criticize tea companies, and then remarks:

...I don’t feel comfortable allowing diatribes against individual tea companies on my blog.

This got me thinking, and I realize that I generally like to use a similar approach to moderating comments or discussions.

There's a difference between honest, constructive criticism (which I always publish) and insults or rants (which I generally delete in comments). Occasionally there is a fine line, but I think there are some objective guidelines you can use to distinguish between the two.

What distinguishes constructive criticism from a diatribe or rant?

The following guidelines can be useful to think about whether you're moderating comments yourself, or considering posting a comment when you are genuinely upset about something and not sure whether or not you've taken it a little bit too far:

Constructive criticism makes concrete suggestions of how to improve the service offered, or what qualities (or prices) would be desirable in a company's offering of teas.

Constructive criticism criticizes specific actions of people or businesses, or specific attributes of a product, while showing respect for the people involved in running the business.

Constructive criticism states the criticisms once and accurately, without unnecessary repetition or exaggeration.

Constructive criticism speaks from personal experience in matters of opinion, using I statements.

A diatribe or rant often hurls criticisms without any sort of suggestion for actually correcting or improving the situation.

A diatribe or rant often exaggerates and uses unnecessary repetition without communicating any useful information.

A diatribe or rant presents personal opinion as universal fact, and often makes accusations without taking responsibility, such as saying that the company's teas are bad rather than saying that you think they are bad. Rants and diatribes often speak in generalizations rather than speaking in specifics.

A diatribe or rant often makes personal attacks on individuals or global negative statements about a business or company, rather than criticizing specific actions of an individual or company.

And, one important note: constructive criticism gives a name and contact info, whereas diatribes and rants are often published anonymously.

Examples of text you might find in a diatribe or rant:

This company's tea is terrible.

The people who work here are idiots who don't know tea.

This company is the worst: they'll screw up your order, and you might as well give up on ever getting your money back! You won't even be able to get through to them!

The first of these comments presents opinion (you think the teas are terrible) as a universal fact (the teas are terrible). The second uses a universal negative label, idiots. The third talks in generalities...it is obviously describing a personal experience that went wrong, but instead of taking responsibility and sharing that experience, it attacks the company from a distance, implying that everyone will have the same negative experience, but without sharing the experience the person had.

Examples of harsh, but constructive criticisms:

I think this company's teas are highly overpriced; I've bought teas that tasted similar to me from other companies (X,Y, and Z) for a quarter the price.

I've sampled a number of teas from this company, and I have yet to find a single one that I like. I thought their green teas were especially bad; many of them were undrinkable and I ended up throwing them out.

I had a terrible experience with customer service from this company. When my tea arrived, I received the wrong order, and one of the bags had burst open during shipping. I was unable to reach customer service by phone, my emails were ignored, and I have yet to receive a refund or apology. I would definitely not recommend buying from this company.

These are harsh criticisms, strong negative statements about a tea company, but they are constructive. They present opinion as opinion, speak from personal experience, and are specific enough to be useful. And as negative as they are, they retain a certain degree of respect for the company and the people involved in it.

By clearly explaining why the customer had a negative experience, these criticisms enable companies to act to improve their offerings and/or service. With the first comment, the company could compare their offerings and prices to the other named companies. In the second case, the company could re-evaluate the sourcing of their teas, starting by focusing on green teas. In the third case, the company could look at what is going on from an ordering, shipping, and customer service perspective, and also contact the customer to see if it is still possible to rectify the situation.

For further advice about how to write constructive criticism, you can read my older post Reviewing Teas to Give Useful Feedback To Tea Companies.

Drinking Tea for Memories, My Memories of Tea in the Dining Hall, and a Wish

2011-11-11T11:11:00.006-05:00

I'm scheduling this post for 11:11 on 11/11/11, because it contains a wish.

This post is inspired by a post by Ken Macbeth, on lahikmajoedrinkstea, titled Red Rose memories. The post relays a story from Cara in Cleveland about her grandmother, and memories she has of drinking Red Rose Tea.

Cara talks about how she does not actually like the taste of Red Rose Tea, but she finds that it brings back pleasant memories of her grandmother, and drinks it more for the memories than for anything else.

Aromas in particular can be some of the most powerful agents at conjuring up vivid memories from our past. Tea, stimulating multiple senses, but primarily manifesting itself in the sense of smell, has a particularly rich potential to bring back memories in this way.

A memory of mine:

I touched on this topic very early in my tea blog, in my post how I became interested in tea, but a formative experience in my life, and the place where I first started to deliberately sample different teas (not to mention a broad range of foods) was the dining hall at Oberlin College, where I went for undergrad. Pictured here is one of the few pictures I have from this period of my life:

This photo was taken with a manual camera and scanned into the computer years later; when I started college, digital cameras were virtually unheard of; they cost thousands of dollars and I had never even seen one. When I graduated, I received my first digital camera, evidence of the changing times.

I loved the dining hall at Oberlin college.

Why did I like the dining halls at Oberlin so much?

I found it very easy to meet people in the dining hall. Often, it would happen with little effort: I would sit with one friend or with a table of familiar friends, and then new people would join the table, and we would introduce ourselves or be introduced. Even when I went into a dining hall alone, I found it was often easy to meet people. If I sat alone, people would often join me, and if I approached a stranger or table of strangers, they were nearly always open to me joining them and starting a conversation. I met more people in the dining hall than any other way in college.

I could always go to the dining hall, alone, unplanned, and I could be virtually certain of running into people I knew. This imparted a sense of stability and security to my life, at a time when I had moved out to a new place where I knew almost no one and had no established friendships.

The dining hall was a reliable source of stimulating intellectual conversation. I never knew what to expect, but it was nearly always interesting. Often, people would talk about their classes, and through these conversations, I got exposed to knowledge and intellectual ideas from courses that I would never take and academic fields that I would never have any direct involvement in.

The dining hall was a place where practical knowledge was exchanged. People would talk about courses to take and professors to seek out or avoid. Classmates would talk about math and physics problems they were stuck on, musicians would talk about technique, expressiveness, and pieces they loved or hated to play, people would talk about where they wanted to live next year. In more intimate conversations, people would talk about relationships or their own personal life struggles. People would talk about anything and everything.

The dining hall was highly democratic, a place where there were no pretences of social status, where everyone was an equal. Everyone had to wait in lines and eat the same food, and everyone had the same choices. And the choices were almost always good enough that you could, sometimes with effort, secure a healthy, well-balanced meal.

At times, I really miss the dining hall. I've spent a large portion of my life after college eating alone, and when I eat with people, it's often with just one person. Currently, I am self-employed, but even when I've worked for large employers, I've often eaten alone. I've been shocked to see how many people in America eat lunch at their desks (Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal writes a great post about why this is a terrible idea), or worse, don't even eat at all. Many parts of my life after college have seemed like a desert to me, a lot like this photograph here, which I took in the American southwest, when I drove across the country:

Furthermore, I have found that getting together with people out in the "real world" requires a great deal of effort. I need to plan ahead, and this planning requires work, a commitment of time and energy. I have been unable to find community gathering places that recreate the sort of stimulating and wholesome environment that I found in the college dining hall. And I know that this dearth of spaces (physical and temporal) to connect with other human beings is not good for me, nor is it good for anyone. As political alarmists and reactionaries would like to say:

IT IS DESTROYING AMERICA! IT IS RIPPING OUR NATION APART!!!

I'm not joking here though.

My wish:

I'm hoping that people can read this and feel inspired, and moved to do their part to make the world more like the dining hall at Oberlin college. I want people to think: "That dining hall sounds awesome! I would love to have environments like that in my life!" My wish is that our world would have more environments like this, not just for me, but for all people.

The world is the way it is because of our collective thoughts, decisions, and behaviors. If we are open to meeting new people, we make the environment around us one in which it is easier for people to meet each other. If we create common spaces where people can go to eat with friends in a causal, relaxed atmosphere, then those spaces will exist in society and will be there as a support net for people who need these sorts of spaces. But if we judge others by social status, we move the environment in our social sphere more in this direction. And if we associate only with our existing clique of friends, we make the social environment around us more closed. On the other hand, if we engage in stimulating intellectual conversation with those around us, we create a stimulating intellectual environment around us. We can push things either in a positive or negative direction through the choices we make.

But there's only so much I can do in the short-term. One way I feel better is by remembering the happy times in the past, and the feelings of connectedness and purpose that these times were characterized by. And one way I can do this is by drinking tea.

Tea in the Dining Hall:

Back to tea...which teas did I drink in the dining hall? I drank Bigelow tea, specifically, their flavored teas and their herbal teas, including Earl Grey, Constant Comment, Plantation Mint, Mint Medley, and many others. But there is one of these that I drank more often than the rest: Sweet Dreams Herbal Tea, and because I drank it so often in this dining hall, it is the (herbal) tea that brings back the most memories. This effect is so strong that even drinking similar teas such as ShanTeas Lotus Wisdom (a blend also combining peppermint, hibiscus, and chamomile) produces this same effect.

How about you?

What teas evoke memories for you, and what memories do they remind you of? Do you like college dining halls? Was your college dining hall like the one I described? Have you found that sort of environment elsewhere in your life? Do you have any novel ideas for how to find or create that sort of environment?

Green Chaos: Randomness as a Source of Inspiration

2011-11-10T10:25:00.001-05:00

I recently read a post on Tea Musings, titled Green Chaos, which references a term used by John Fowles in his essay The Tree. In case you don't read or know of this blog, it's a collection of original poetry and, as the name suggests, musings. The posts are brief, expressive, and I find often calming and nature-oriented. This blog offers an interesting contrast to the standard, cut-and-dry, "talk directly about tea" approach that many of us (including myself, usually) take to tea, and I find it very refreshing and inspirational.

The photo pictured here is from Rittenhouse Park in Newark, Delaware, a deceptively large forested park nestled in between suburban areas. This park and its forest are oven overshadowed by the two nearby parks, each of which has larger tracts of forest: White Clay Creek State Park and Iron Hill Park. But I find this park and its wild forests beautiful as well.

This is the sort of green chaos that I find inspirational: it is a forest where trees and other plants grow wild, and it shows an intricate and almost endless pattern of order emerging from chaos, flowing into more chaos, with yet more order emerging. This is the world in which we thrive, feel most alive, and realize our full potential, not the tightly controlled environments that we often create around us in the modern world.

Wild ecosystems as a source of inspiration:

Inspiration is very important to me. In my work, I create things...writing, poetry, sometimes images, websites, software, ideas, and systems. And as hobbies, I create music, and improvisatory dance (swing dancing and blues dancing). I also create food when I cook, and when I grow and dry herbs, and sometimes blend them, to make herbal teas or flavored teas, usually just to drink by myself. All of these activities require inspiration. Even things that are often viewed as mechanical or technical, such as programming, require great inspiration to me. When I'm inspired, I can finish a task in a tiny fraction of the time, and do a much better job of it, than when I'm trying to mechanically trudge through it. I also need to use inspiration to solve problems in my daily life, from complex problems involving human relationships, to practical ones like how to reattach the knob to my antique dresser that fell off because the bolt was stripped.

Inspiration is not a luxury, it's a necessity.

If you read this blog a lot, you'll know that I often like to cite my sources of inspiration. Often, I'm directly inspired by another person's blog post, or a conversation I read on an internet forum. But there are other, more indirect, and possibly more important sources of inspiration in my life.

Chaos as inspiration, randomness as a resource:

If you are skeptical that chaos can be a source of inspiration, I want to provide you compelling proof of this fact, from a realm that is about as highly ordered and as un-chaotic as one can get: the realm of computers.

One of the things that I've done over the course of my life is server administration. A server is a computer, usually housed in a data center, which is the physical location for websites and other web-based services. Servers are at the very core of the internet, but many of us are not aware of them or how they work. Administering a server is something that relatively few people are familiar with. Indeed, now I use a managed virtual hosting plan to host my websites, and I only do small tweaks to the administration, but for a while, I was doing everything myself.

One interesting thing about understanding the inner workings of a server is something called the entropy pool. Servers actually have a need for randomness--it sounds crazy, but randomness is actually a valued resource under certain conditions, such as the highly controlled conditions in a data center. One of them is in the generation of cryptographic keys. If you want to create an encryption scheme, you need to have random numbers. If the numbers are not truly random (i.e. if they are generated by a simple algorithm) they can be predicted, and thus, the encryption can be easily cracked. Even in the world of computers and technology, randomness, or chaos (which can be referred to as entropy) can be a valued resource.

Back to nature:

We cannot live without nature, and I think all of us would agree on that. We depend on the Earth's ecosystems for our clean air, water, and also for our food, other natural resources, and of course, our tea.

But in addition, we also depend on the randomness of nature for inspiration. Without the randomness, our lives would be sterile. We would not be able to create things, to solve problems, or to do anything that requires creativity.

The dry leaf of this pouchong / bao zhong tea shows a similar interplay between order and chaos of the forest above. Unlike computers, it exhibits an organic sort of structure, a lot like the structure of the forest above, or this blackbird flock below:

What are the sources of inspiration in your life? What are the sources of chaos and randomness that you find most inspirational?

Lipton Tea - Brewing and Attitude Recommendations

2011-11-09T08:53:00.006-05:00

This post is inspired by an interesting observation. I was reading Steven Knoerr's 39 Steeps, and in the post Drink Cheap Wine . . . and Tea? (which is a great post, by the way), I noticed something interesting.

The first is a positive remark Steven made about Lipton tea. The second is (gasp!) a positive comment *I* made about Lipton tea. Here is a humble bag of Lipton tea, to get you in the spirit of this post:

Picking on Lipton:

Often, I think Lipton gets a bad rap. Because it's the dominant brand, it is the default tea for connoisseurs to "pick on". Ironically though, picking on it by default may actually help this brand maintain its place as the dominant brand in the market...but that's another issue. I was picked on a lot as a kid, and it's not terribly pleasant or constructive, not something I would ever wish on anyone, so rather than doing the same to Lipton, I'll share my genuine opinion about what I really think about this tea.

What do we expect from Lipton?

I think tea is influenced a lot by how we perceive it, which is one of the key aspects that Steven gets at in his post above. If we order a whole-leaf oolong tea with a steep price tag on it, and it just tastes bad, where does our head go?

Maybe I didn't brew it properly.

Maybe the tea was not stored properly.

Maybe I just don't know how to appreciate this particular tea or style of tea. (especially if the tea is an unfamiliar style that we do not regularly sample)

Maybe this particular batch is no good.

But if we have the same experience drinking a cup of Lipton tea, our head usually goes to a different place:

This tea is low-quality, mass-produced junk.

Is this justified? Objectively, we can look at Lipton and say: the tea bag contains finely broken leaf, fannings or dust. That means it's low grade. That means it's bad. But this logic does not hold.

Broken-leaf tea is not necessarily bad. For example, I tried a broken-leaf orthodox tea from Tanzania a while back, Upton Tea's TK18: Livingstonia Estate GFBOP, and one of my favorites was their now-discontinued Himalayan BOP Blend. These are not just "decent" or "passable" teas, these are teas I consider truly outstanding, and would gladly drink over any number of whole-leaf selections.

Lipton puts a great amount of care and resources into quality control, selecting teas and blending them to maintain a consistent quality of their tea as conditions change from season to season and year to year. Objectively, there's no reason to expect Lipton to necessarily be bad. And, if we do not enjoy it, it makes sense to at least ask whether or not we stored it properly, and brewed it so as to bring out the best in it.

My recommendations about Lipton:

If you are going to drink Lipton tea, treat it like any other tea:

Make sure it's fresh and has been stored properly.

Put some care into brewing it: make sure the water is boiling, heat your brewing vessel up so you're actually steeping the tea with boiling water, and carefully watch the steeping time (I recommend only 1 minute for a single cup).

My original comment on 39 Steeps was that I once gave this advice to one of my friends who was complaining about Lipton tea being bad. She told me after following the advice that she was very surprised, and that she really enjoyed the cup of tea. She told me that the resulting cup of tea was both less bitter and more flavorful than what had resulted when she had brewed the same tea haphazardly.

I want to make one final remark. I've tried a lot of teas, and Lipton's plain black tea is a lot better than a lot of teas out there. It's not the lowest of the low, nor is it really anywhere close. I've tried relatively pricey whole-leaf teas that I enjoyed much less, not to mention any number of other mainstream tea bags from the common brands in the supermarket, that I also think don't quite compare. Objectively, I think of Lipton as being somewhere in the middle in terms of quality, which is pretty impressive given its price scale of production.

What do you think?

Do you bash Lipton, or use it as an example of low-quality tea? Or do you enjoy it, and think it's actually pretty decent quality? Have you ever drunk Lipton, or any other mainstream, inexpensive, mass-produced teas, while putting care into properly storing them and preparing them, as you would expensive loose-leaf tea? What were your results?

You can read and share reviews of Lipton's Black Tea on RateTea if you are curious what others think, or want to chime in for yourself.

Makaibari Estate - My Favorite Darjeeling Estate

2011-11-08T09:54:00.004-05:00

I was inspired to write this post by a review I read on Sarah's blog Latte Tea Dah: I Now Dream of Darjeeling: Makaibari 2nd Flush Organic .

A couple years ago, I had sampled a few single-estate Darjeeling teas, but the prospect of being able to have opinions on individual estates was still way out of grasp, something that I could perhaps imagine others doing, but was nowhere near doing myself.

I still don't have many opinions, as there are a large number of estates that I've tried only one or two teas from, and many I have yet to try any teas from. But I do now have a favorite tea estate, and that is Makaibari estate. Furthermore, the Makaibari tea estate has an official website:

It's worth visiting the website, which has more information about the estate, including the garden's commitment to sustainability and ecological principles, and a photo gallery. You can also buy some tea directly through the website. It is rather unusual for individual tea gardens to have websites, and Makaibari is one of only a few that have extensive websites.

Discussion on the "best" Darjeeling estate:

I really don't like the word "best", but I want to point out that there was a discussion over 4 years ago on teachat, best darjeeling estate?, and of the four replies that name gardens, all four name Makaibari. Other gardens named are Castleton, Jungpana, and Arya. I haven't tried Jungpana but I will say, of these, I've tried enough teas to say that I like Makaibari the best of the others mentioned, simply because I've tried teas from Castleton and Arya estates that I was less a fan of.

Makaibari's teas are pretty diverse. I find them to tend on the lighter side, but still have some bite to them. One of my favorite teas ever was a long-leaf green tea produced by Makaibari estate. I also love their first-flush, and have had very good blended tea (blends of different flushes) from this estate, sold by the Hampstead tea brand. With each of their teas, I have been impressed by the complexity of its aroma. Their are two reviews, including mine, of their first flush as sold by Arbor Teas, on RateTea if you want to get an idea of what these teas are like.

Sustainability, Organics, and Biodynamic Agriculture:

Makaibari estate also stands out from the other tea gardens, not only in Darjeeling, but around the world, as it has been a leader in sustainable agricultural practices. Makaibari was one of the first organic tea operations, and also practices biodynamic agriculture, which goes above and beyond organic certification. Both the organic and biodynamic practices have been in place since 1991, but the history of conscious sustainability-promoting decisions goes back to long before the word "sustainability" entered the mainstream: in 1971 the garden shifted over to a permaculture-based system. There's a great Wikipedia page on permaculture: it's an ancient approach to both human settlements and agriculture that emphasizes stability and long-term prosperity, using awareness of ecological principles, and it's an approach that I support wholeheartedly. You can read a bit more information on TransFair's page on Makaibari estate...which also leads into one more remark: Makaibari estate also produces fair-trade certified tea.

I find it interesting that I first got interested in this estate because I liked the way its teas tasted so much, but then came to learn that it is doing all these fantastic things that are in line with my values and goals in life.

How about you?

Have you tried tea from Makaibari estate? Were you aware of all of the sustainable, ecologically-sound practices of Makaibari estate? Would you too like to see these sorts of practices be the norm, rather than the exception, not only in tea production, but in all agriculture, worldwide?

OpenSky, and Why Communism Failed

2011-11-07T10:14:00.002-05:00

Lainie Petersen of Lainie Sips wrote a blog post about a tea coupon special through a website called OpenSky. This was the first time I had heard of the site OpenSky, so I decided to check it out. Apparently, tea is one of the products that this site occasionally has deals on.

But when I visited the site, it reminded me, among other things, of Communism, which inspired this post.

My memories of Communism:

I've never lived in a Communist country, but I was born in 1980, when the cold war was still very much alive, and I remember, as a child, the rhetoric and public talk of Communism, with the unified "Eastern Bloc" of Communist countries from the USSR through Eastern Europe. And I remember the fall of the Berlin wall, and the breakup of the USSR. My mother, being a German professor, felt that we had to get over to Germany after the wall came down, and I remember going to Germany in the summer of 1990, after the wall came down, but before reunification. We arrived in East Berlin on the day that East Germany was changing their currency to the West German Deutsche Mark; shopping on that day was chaotic and confusing, but to an American at the time, prices were dirt cheap. I was only 10 at the time, but this experience left a lasting expression on me, and I think it helped fuel my propensity to think critically about economic systems.

I did not take any photos on the first trip, but I returned to East Berlin in 1996, and stayed with a host family. The photo above is from this trip; it depicts a Strassenbahn, meaning Street-train, a trolley much like the ones I ride now in West Philadelphia. The pictured trolley is a modernized one, an upgrade from the decrepit trolleys that I saw during my first trip, and occasionally during my second trip.

Even in 1996, East and West Germany were like night and day. East Germany had construction everywhere, although it still looked poor and falling apart. And even to an American like me, it was easy to spot and distinguish East and West Germans by their body language and dress. There was considerable evidence of cultural tension, and I saw the toll that Communism had taken on East Germany and its people.

Learning about Communism:

I've also heard about Communism through other means. My roommate during my first year in Oberlin was Armenian, and talked about his experiences during Communism. I also have known, less closely, numerous Russians, East Germans, and others who grew up in Communist countries, over the years. One thing I learned was that East Germany was by far the most prosperous and functional of the Eastern Bloc Communist countries, and that the level of poverty and dysfunction in other areas was far greater. Add on top of this the authoritarian control of the government, punishing any sort of dissent, and overly paranoid to the degree that it employed people to spy on just about every citizen, and you have a culture and society that created such depressing but beautiful works as Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet. Shostakovich, by the way, was contemplating suicide while writing that work. Have a listen:

Besides listening to Shostakovich, I've also extensively read the works of Marx, not just The Communist Manifesto, but also some of his earlier works, in which he takes a more metaphysical approach, talking about how people are spiritually connected to the product of their labor, and how capitalism results in alienation of people from the product of their labor, through paying for labor. And I've read enough Marx and know enough about Communism to know that Communism in the Soviet Union would have been absolutely abhorrent to Marx.

Why did Communism fail?

I think I have a pretty good idea of why Communism failed. It failed because it was based around the idea of a small core group of people micromanaging an entire society, specifically, micromanaging its economy. This phenomenon is called a planned economy or a control economy. And it doesn't work.

Societies are too complex...they're more like an ecosystem than a machine. And a group of people, no matter how intelligent, simply cannot centrally plan everything needed to make an economy function at all, let alone function well. Even in a smaller country, some sort of decentralized system, like the free market, is necessary, or eventually, massive economic failure results. The only way for a government to be successful at managing its economy is to shape and guide the economy by setting up good incentives, rather than by trying to micromanage it. China realized this, and embraced a market economy and this is why China's economy did not collapse like the USSR did.

Now to OpenSky:

My first impression of OpenSky was not positive. The site immediately displays a squeeze page, a page with little content and few links, which prominently leads you to sign up for something. I wrote about squeeze pages and how they are a common feature of spam / scam sites on my post Tea Spam: Starting With The Most Blatant. This screenshot shows the squeeze page:

What exactly is this site about? Here are two quotes from the site:

"Our tastemakers don't just curate your shopping experience..."

And:

"They'll discover the best products for you."

Really? This is starting to sound a lot like Communism to me, not to mention that it takes the fun out of shopping (I love searching around for a bargain, love evaluating the quality of different products, and I love the process of comparing different stores or sellers against each other!). And also, it's been my experience that there are only three people who know my tastes better than anyone else, and who are consistently best at picking out products that are best for me, and these people are me, myself, and I. And it also has been the case, for the most part, that retail businesses themselves also play an important role in the selection process.

I don't need or want celebrities or specially appointed people (who aren't directly involved in running the business) picking out products. I'd rather just operate as I do...find sellers or businesses that seem consistent in their quality control and fair in their pricing, and buy from them. Didn't Communism establish that having a team of people trying to do a better job of this doesn't work?

What do you think?

Did you live through Communism? What do you think about Communism? How about OpenSky? Have you used it? Do you think it has a spammy-looking squeeze page? Do you think it's a Communist conspiracy to make our economy collapse through central planning?

Aesthetics: What Purposes Do They Serve?

2011-11-04T09:15:00.000-04:00

This post is inspired by a discussion on the Tea Trade Forums about the new East India Company, in which we began talking about whether or not luxury and idealism are necessarily at odds with each other. The general sentiment seemed to be that, to a degree, they are. But this post is not directly about that...it's about aesthetics.

In the discussion, David Gall posted a comment about how he appreciates beautiful objects, whether it be handmade art or well-designed electronics (he gives Apple computer as an example). I certainly think that aesthetics and beauty have great value, both for me and in general.

Some things, like sunsets, seem to be nearly universally appreciated as beautiful. But aesthetic senses, the sense of what things are beautiful, also vary hugely from person to person and culture to culture. One thing I think about a lot is the degree to which our aesthetic sense is culturally constructed, and can be changed. I like to think critically about aesthetics, and ask the question:

What effect is our aesthetic sense having on our lives, on our society, and on our environment?

Aesthetics produce real-world results:

Aesthetics are by no means superficial...they impact nearly all choices we make in life, from which products we choose to buy, to which streets or roads we choose to drive or walk on, to where we choose to live, to which clothes we put on in the morning. And, although some of us may not fully admit it, they also impact which people we choose to associate with. Many of the ways in which aesthetics shape our lives are subconscious...we make decisions to choose one thing over another, and these are sometimes major choices that impact our lives and the lives of other people as well.

An example of aesthetics having ecological impact:

One of the aspects of modern society in which subjective and highly variable aesthetics can have far-reaching ecological impacts is that of the grassy lawn. Pictured here are two patches of grass or lawn in Bryn Athyn, PA. The first:

And the second:

I chose these two photos because they are about as directly contrasting as you can get, at least, in Bryn Athyn at this time of year. Which is more attractive to you? The top picture is more lush and vibrant; the bottom picture is more barren looking, but shows greater diversity, both of color (with the two different flowering plants), and biodiversity. If you know me at all, you'll know that I prefer the aesthetics of the second picture.

When choosing something like which tea to drink, our aesthetic sense is mainly a question of personal taste. But in the case of these two pictures of patches of grass, there are actual impacts of choosing one aesthetic over the other. The top picture depicts an unnatural lawn, heavily treated with chemicals to maintain both a lush green color and a monoculture of one plant (and you know how I feel about monocultures). The chemically-intensive maintenance of this lawn has negative consequences on the environment, and even on humans--that lawn is actually on the campus of Bryn Athyn College, in an area where people often walk barefoot, thus exposing themselves to whatever chemicals were sprayed on the grass.

The second picture of grass, an untreated area, has much greater biodiversity, not to mention that it is less resource-intensive to maintain. More biodiversity means greater ecological value, and most importantly, there are none of the negative impacts associated with using herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. It looks a little bleak if you're used to the aesthetic in the first picture, but there's beauty hiding in the bleakness...the photo is taken during April, after all. If you are at all familiar with Pennsylvania's climate and ecology, you'll know that Pennsylvania does not naturally have lush, light-green colors year-round. April is a time in-between the browns and grays of winter, and the lush green foliage of spring...plants are beginning to bloom, but there's still a lot of brown and gray about. I personally find it beautiful.

This final photo shows a polluted stretch of the Delaware river, viewed from National Park, New Jersey, to remind us that, just as chemicals wash off and flow downstream, our actions flow into consequences. Fertilizers and chemicals used on lawns and in agriculture and industry kill wild animals, devastate ecosystems, contribute to cancer and other chronic diseases in humans, and destroy fishing industries downstream. This stretch of the Delaware river could be pristine; there could be abundant fish here, and it could be safe to eat these fish. In our current world, it is not.

Imagine what it could be like. And now:

You can choose your aesthetic sense:

You can choose which of the two pictures of grassy lawn to prefer. In this case, it's not a matter of personal taste. Choose the second one.

Blog Post Length

2011-11-03T10:38:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been writing a lot of posts and really long posts.

Sometimes I start to think that a shorter post format would be more accessible to readers. I don't have a good sense of how people read the posts on this blog, how much of a post they actually read, and how much they think about it.

On the other hand, the post length reflects a certain natural, self-contained progression of an idea that I want the post to encompass, and I don't think it would be easy for me to make my posts much shorter without cutting out essential ideas. And the post frequency reflects the degree to which I feel inspired to write.

What do you think? How much of my posts do you read? Does it vary by the post? Does writing more often make it more or less likely for you to actually read posts?

Perilla, or Shiso, in the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge

2011-11-02T12:18:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite hobbies is birdwatching, and one of my favorite places for birdwatching in the Philadelphia area is the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum, a large tract of open water and wetlands, with some surrounding forest, located across I-95 from the Philadelphia Airport. Here is one of the smaller, more secluded necks of water in this refuge, to give you an idea of what sort of habitat can be found there:

While walking on the main loop in the refuge, which goes between two bodies of water, I discovered a patch of naturalized perilla, or shiso. Back in september, I wrote about Red Shiso, or Perilla, a plant I have found growing wild in many locations in Philadelphia. This population of perilla was of a green-colored variety, and the leaves were yellowing slightly as the plant had gone to seed and was preparing to die down for the fall:

I want to write more about this particular patch of perilla, but first, an aside about invasive plants.

Invasive Plants:

Humans, through trade and colonization, have brought numerous plants with them, mostly plants that we cultivate for food, but also weeds that hitched a ride with other cargo. These plants often escape cultivation and establish wild populations in the native ecosystems.

Non-native plants are aliens in the ecosystems which they colonize. In most cases, they are poorly adapted to these ecosystems, and they cannot establish stable populations, and die out. But in other cases, they have unique adaptations that allow them to thrive in a new environment, and the other members of the ecosystems they colonize are not adapted to their presence. In particular, plants like perilla, which produce complex combinations of aromatic chemicals, toxic to insects, are often not eaten by as many native insects. The native insects co-evolve with native plants, and are not adapted to eat these strange new plants. The plant thus gains a competitive advantage, as it has fewer natural herbivores. It then colonizes the ecosystem and grows disproportionately, shutting out other plants.

Note that the perilla leaves show no insect damage. Older leaves of plants usually show some sign of insect damage by fall...for an example, look at the black cherry leaves in my old post on tea monoculture and biodynamic agriculture. While this is good for the perilla, it's not necessarily good for the rest of the ecosystem. Fewer insects eating plants means fewer birds to eat the insects, and total biodiversity is decreased. As biodiversity is lost, the capacity for the ecosystem to adapt to changing conditions is diminished.

I'm picking on perilla unfairly here. Although I've seen it growing quite vigorously and establishing large populations, I haven't seen it establishing a monoculture and totally shutting out other plants, the way some invasive species do. Although perilla is considered to be an invasive species in some areas, it is nowhere near the most problematic one in this area, and in the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, it is relatively harmless compared to a number of other plant species. Some more problematic invasive species in this particular refuge are Phragmites, and some of the non-native honeysuckles.

Back to the perilla:

Out of curiosity, I gathered a small handful of leaves, enough for a single cup of herbal tea. The results of drying them can be seen here:

The Review:

I was steeping this tea as I was writing this post, and then I proceeded to drink a cup of it.

This perilla is noticeably different in aroma and flavor from the red-leafed variety. It has a much more minty aroma. The red variety had a strong licorice/anise quality; these qualities are still present, but weaker, and I would describe them as more fennel-like than anise-like. The flavor is much sweeter. There are still skunky and vegetal undertones that, in my opinion, characterize this herb. I also would say this batch was less basil-like, although still somewhat so. There is a very strong quality of fennel or anise that lingers on the tongue, more so than with the red variety. The lingering finish also suggests dried hay.

Really interesting! And different enough from the red-leafed variety that I can see growing both in my garden! Still, I would prefer to grow native herbs, especially given the considerations I talked about above.

Do you think about whether or not plants are native to your local ecosystems, when considering what to grow in your garden?

Safety in Numbers: Perspective, and Not Getting Stuck in Your Ways

2011-11-01T11:12:00.001-04:00

A conversation on the tea trade forums, which references an article about how Twinings "New" Earl Grey formulation is not being well-received, inspired this post.

That article is about long-standing drinkers of Twinings old Earl Grey being outraged at this changed formulation...and it's about this phenomenon in general, and what it says about our tastes in tea, and in food, and about how we live our lives in general. The following collage of some of my favorite teas, with a few herbs too, is a sneak-peek of the solution to these problems: safety in numbers, not quantity of anything, but rather, diversity, the number of different teas we drink, which can be an empowering analogy for giving us stability in all aspects of our life:

To be honest, I've never liked Twinings' Earl Grey, even though I think Twinings is a company that, among the mainstream tea bag brands, does British tea well. One of my favorite tea bags is their Ceylon Orange Pekoe which I gave a fairly favorable review--better than some loose-leaf Ceylons I bought from Upton, my favorite tea company. But this is just a matter of personal taste, and is not terribly relevant. What is relevant here is that Twinings Earl Grey was the same for many years, and it changed. And people were upset. This type of reaction is actually rather normal and almost expected, whenever a product that has stayed consistent for so long changes. People get stuck in their ways.

What do we get angry about?

The article describes people as being very angry about this change. "An affront to tea", people posting angry complaints on Twinings' company site. I'll be the first to admit that I get angry about a lot of things. But I don't really get angry about tea. I get critical of tea, herbal tea, tea companies, and their business practices...in fact, if you read this blog a lot, you've probably read a lot of critical posts lately. But I'm not angry.

What do I get angry about? I get angry about injustice, and economic exploitation, especially when people profit through dishonest or coercive means. I get angry about sexual assault and rape, especially when it happens to people I care about, but really, when it happens to anyone. I get angry about people showing blatant disregard for other people and for their community, such as vandalizing common areas such as parks or public buildings on college campuses. And I get especially angry at people thinking that their wealth or social status entitles them to treat others of "lower status" with disrespect. I find this attitude abhorrent and it makes me want to just crush them with my bare hands.

I don't always handle or express my anger gracefully. Sometimes I lose my temper, and, believe it or not, I have actually yelled at people in public, using quite colorful language. More often, I just sit and stew and let it ruin my day or get me into a global, negative mood that makes me quite unpleasant to be around. And, in addition to the things above, I also sometimes get angry about superficial or irrelevant things. I want to make clear that I am not some sort of "enlightened being" who knows how to effectively handle my emotions all of the time.

But I do know one thing. I don't get angry about the quality of tea...even when it changes, and even when tea is really really bad. Why?

A sense of perspective:

It seems silly to me to get genuinely upset about a tea's formulation changing when there are so many other more important things to get upset about. It also makes me wonder who these people are who are getting upset, and what their lives are like.

There are some aspects of my life that I have found very difficult over the years. One of them is friendship, through various moves. I've formed so many wonderful, close friendships over the years, and one by one, I've seen friends move far away, or I've moved from my friends. First, I moved from high school, then my college friends dispersed, then I moved from Cleveland to Delaware, then to Connecticut, briefly to the west coast, and back to the east. Even when I stay in one place, people seem to come and go. Even when my friends stay in one town, they often vanish into their careers, school, family obligations, or other activities that eat up all available time in their lives. This process has been very painful to me, and continues to be painful on an ongoing basis.

And then I read the news and I read about earthquakes, floods, war, violence, and I read about the U.S. and our stagnating economy, and I see the partisan bickering and I see my own feeble attempts to build a consensus between liberals and conservatives, falling on deaf ears or being ignored as I post my articles to the facebook and twitter feeds.

And I sit here reading about people who are upset about tea and I wonder...where are these people's sense of priorities? Have they ever lost a loved one, do they care about war or poverty? I suspect that most of them probably have, and probably do care. But why are they getting upset about tea? Are they perhaps channelling their frustration into something irrelevant in the global picture, because they feel powerless to do anything about the things in life that really do matter, much like I often do?

Back to safety in numbers, and diversity:

While I'd like to think that I don't get upset about tea because I have a better sense of priorities and greater perspective, there may be a more superficial and less enlightened reason that is perhaps more powerful: safety in numbers. I can't possibly be upset if one particular tea changes, because I drink so many different teas. I'm never particularly let down when one of those teas changes or even if it is completely taken away, because there are so many other great teas out there.

But is safety in numbers really so superficial, or does it work because it creates perspective through diversity? If this approach works for tea, can it possibly work for helping us to cope with and address some of the really gory, gruesome problems in our lives, like the ones I touched on above?

Perhaps. I have personally found that when I've had a greater diversity of experiences in my life, and when I've come into contact with a broader range of people, and immersed myself in the lives and experiences of people of different ages and backgrounds and circumstances, it has given me a sense of perspective and stability that I don't have if I keep my life more homogeneous. With this greater perspective, I am better able to think up solutions to a broad range of problems in my own life as well as in the lives of others, and I am less likely to react in non-constructive ways to things that genuinely upset me.

What do you think? Does any of this ring true with your own experience?

HELPS Wellness Teas: Taste and Quality of Herbs

2011-10-31T14:38:00.003-04:00

This post is inspired by reading a review of HELPS Teas Organic R&R on Nicole's blog Tea For Me Please. I received a packet of samples from the HELPS brand (owned by the Pharmadus company) at World Tea East. If you want to read my full reviews (I have posted 4 and plan to eventually review all of them), you can read them on RateTea's page on HELPS wellness teas, although frankly, I recommend not reading those reviews and instead just catching the summary in this post:

Nicole was particularly harsh in her review of the R&R (rest and relaxation) tea, but, unfortunately, my reaction to these teas was similar. I haven't posted my review of this specific tea yet, but I've been quite disappointed by the quality of the blends from this company. They range from bland to undrinkable. At $5 for a box of 20 tea bags, such quality is completely unacceptable and is going to spell certain doom for this company in the marketplace.

On the R&R Blend:

Lemon balm is one of my favorite herbs: I drink it frequently, and I know what it tastes like. I've grown it, for years now, harvested it at different times of year, dried it, and brewed herbal tea from both the fresh and dried leaves. You can see a picture of it sprouting in spring of 2010, in my old blog post Four Herbal Teas You May Not Know About.

Passionflower, too, I've sampled on its own, and although it's more "herby", I also find it to have a more-or-less pleasing aroma, and a distinctive one too. Most people I know who have smelled passionflower describe it as strong smelling, but pleasant.

When herbs are bland:

When normally aromatic herbs (like lemon balm and passionflower) don't smell strongly aromatic, it's usually a sign that they're not fresh, and this is often a sign that the active ingredients that would promote relaxation are probably largely lost or decayed as well. Our society unfortunately often creates a strong pressure to drink things because they are "healthy", even if they taste bad. But our senses of taste and smell serve the purpose of ensuring that we only eat what is truly healthy...why ignore the messages that our own bodies and minds are telling us? If our senses tell us that the ingredients are not fresh, chances are, they are not fresh, and will provide little in the way of "health benefits".

This is not to say that all things that are good for us taste great. Some medicinal herbs are strong tasting, bitter, or have aromas that some people find unpleasant. But when you know what an herb tastes like when fresh, as I do with lemon balm and passionflower (and in these two cases, most people generally seem to think they both smell and taste quite pleasant as herbal teas), and your senses are sending you other signals, it's usually a sign that something is wrong.

The "right" ingredients are not good enough:

I think the combination of lemon balm and passionflower for a relaxing medicinal blend of herbs is a sound one in terms of being science-based and also having the potential to taste good. But the Pharmadus company needs to step up their quality control and use better herbs as ingredients if they want to be successful. If you want to drink a blend like this, I would recommend buying these herbs in bulk from a reputable herb company like Mountain Rose Herbs, if you want this sort of blend. Or, better yet, grow these herbs yourself!

I hope this post is not coming across as too harsh to the HELPS brand or Pharmadus company. I always want each company to succeed, and to do so by having a high-quality product. HELPS is obviously doing something right, as they seem to have picked herbs for their medicinal or wellness teas (and not just in this example) that are backed by solid science, and also that have the potential to taste good. But this product is simply not there yet. I recommend for this company to go back and re-think and re-design these products, perhaps starting by sampling herbs provided by other companies that focus on freshness and taste. And let this post also serve as a warning to any company thinking of launching a line of wellness teas...the quality of your ingredients is of paramount importance! People are not going to buy your product just because you tell them that it is healthy.

Tea Food Pairings - Black Grapes & Assam

2011-10-28T10:44:00.001-04:00

The subject of tea-food pairings is one that I have been wanting to explore more, ever since I discovered about a year and a half ago that spicy food enhanced a tea that I did not otherwise enjoy, and similarly, that I found shou mei, one of my favorite styles of tea, did not go well with spicy foods. But today, instead of spicy foods, the foods in question that I'd like to explore are grapes:

Pictured on the left are black grapes, and on the right, red grapes. These grapes were grown in California, and are currently in season, so are inexpensive and tend to be relatively high in quality. While I prefer buying local produce, I definitely prefer buying California grapes, while in-season, to produced shipped from outside the country.

I typically eat some fruit with my breakfast, and I've had a lot of these grapes on hand recently, so I've been munching on them as I drink my morning cup of tea. In the course of eating these grapes together with different teas, I've realized something about tea-grape pairings. This is not the first time I've explored tea-fruit pairings; see Pare down the teas to pair with your pear for a similar post based on a terrible play on words, or Grapefruit and tea for my discovery that one of my favorite breakfast fruits often spoils the flavors of many types of tea.

Grapes and tea:

Certain types of tea have a natural grape-like quality. Both Darjeeling black teas and Bai Hao Oolong often have a quality said to resemble muscat grapes, a specific type of grape. Of the two grapes pictured above, muscat grapes are probably more similar to the black grapes on the left...which brings us into the realizations of pairing.

The red grapes above, I found to be relatively neutral among fruits. They were crisp, lightly sweet, lightly sour, and somewhat watery, making them refreshing without really dominating the palate. These grapes seemed to go well with just about any teas I drank for breakfast, black, green, oolong, Pu-erh, or white. They did not get in the way of my appreciation of the tea, nor did they enhance it.

Black grapes:

The black grapes however, were another beast. These were a bit stranger, not the usual grapes you buy at the supermarket. They had a dusty outside, and their skin was noticeably astringent. The interior was intensely sweet, but less sour than the familiar red or green grapes, and they had a strong, deep aroma, reminiscent more of raisins than of most fresh grapes.

I tried these grapes with a variety of teas and I found that they tended to overpower most teas, including lighter black teas, green teas, and white teas. However, the mornings that I drank strong Assam (lately I've been drinking a lot of Ahmad Tea's Kalami Assam), I found that these grapes not only went well with the tea, but helped me to enjoy the tea in a more intense and deeper way than I normally did. It was hard to notice which qualities were from the grapes and which from the tea, as both left lingering flavors on the palate, but I found that sipping the tea after munching on these grapes led to an explosion of a deep, fruity aroma, like in some of the better Keemun I've tried--qualities sometimes present in Assam, but not to this degree.

How about you?

Have you ever tried grapes like the ones described here? Do you like eating grapes with tea? Which teas and grapes do you think go well together?

Definitions of White Tea: Raising Eyebrows

2011-10-27T10:33:00.002-04:00

This post was inspired by a series of conversations that I had with Tony Gebely of Chicago Tea Garden and World of Tea.

Perhaps this is the mathematician in me speaking, but I believe definitions are important. Without clear, agreed-upon definitions, dialogues, conversations, buying and selling, advertisement, and a variety of other business activities and everyday activities can become problematic. In some cases, such as in the case of white tea, definitions are not straightforward.

Definitions for a class of objects become problematic not in "typical" examples of their class, but in the atypical ones. One such problematic tea is pictured here:

This is shou mei(寿眉, longevity eyebrows) tea, purchased from Ten Ren tea. I chose this particular batch of shou mei to picture because it is the darkest in color that I have ever sampled. It looks like it may be closer to gong mei (tribute eyebrows), an even darker tea that is similar in style, and rarely available in the U.S. as it is considered low-grade.

The aroma of the dry leaf of this tea is suggestive of autumn leaves, so much so that it reminds me of playing in leaf piles in fall as a child. When brewed, this aroma becomes even stronger, and it has a dark brown color, a rich, caramel-like sweetness, and an almost tannic sort of astringency. In overall character, it is a lot more like a darker oolong than most white teas, but it shares many qualities of aroma in common with white teas; lighter shou mei can be very similar to darker examples of white peony / bai mu dan.

Is shou mei a white tea?

In order to keep this post as objective as possible, I have so far avoided the claim that shou mei "is" a white tea. Some individuals, tea companies, and other sources classify it as a white tea, but there are definitions floating around, such as two I reference below, under which it would not be classified as a white tea. However, I want to start by noting an observation: I have never seen any company selling shou mei tea and classifying it as anything other than a white tea. The companies which use definitions of white tea that would exclude shou mei do not sell shou mei. If you know of an exception to this rule, let me know, but I could not find one.

This observation certainly raises eyebrows.

Now, let's explore a couple authoritative sources who would not classify shou mei as a white tea:

Tea Association of the USA:

The Tea Association of the USA defines a number of tea-related terms in their Glossary of Terms: Industry Definitions. Although not the be-all and end-all tea authority, this organization's official definition definitely carries some degree of weight. Their definition of white tea is as follows:

Proposed New Definition
The Tea Association of the USA has proposed a new definition.
In order for White Tea to be so termed it should be:

Processed in accordance with the strict harvesting and processing guidelines originally established in Fujian Province, China

Made from finely plucked tender shoots (buds) of Camellia sinensis, which are fired or steamed and then dried.

There should be no withering, fermentation (oxidation) or rolling of the buds.

The liquor of White Tea is very pale yellow in color, and mild tasting in the cup.

Now, I am going to shift to my own subjective opinions. I do not like this definition. I think it is problematic for several reasons. There is one glaring inconsistency which I point out below, but this can be easily fixed or set aside separate from the rest of the points. Besides this, the main reason I object to this definition is that I see it as too narrow, leaving many teas, including traditional Chinese white teas like shou mei, such that they could not be included in this definition.

Here are some things I dislike about this definition:

"strict harvesting and processing guidelines" -- why give one particular method of producing tea preference over others? This comes across as possibly stifling innovation by labelling experimental processing methods as "not true white tea". I want to encourage and promote diversity in tea culture, traditions, and production, which includes both the embracing of diverse traditions, as well as the facilitation of developing new traditions. This aspect of the definition has the opposite effect.

The definition refers to the liquor of the cup and the flavor...which are highly variable, depend on brewing methods, and are to some degree subjective, and the definition given is very constraining. Even white peony or bai mu dan, which nearly everyone agrees is a white tea, has a widely variable color and flavor. I think that in general, a good definition for a broad class of teas (like white tea, black tea, green tea, etc.) does not refer to color or flavor at all.

This definition is internally inconsistent, depending on how you interpret words..."no withering" and "no oxidation" would actually exclude all white teas. In most usage that I've seen, "withering" refers to the normal drying process used to produce all white tea. And all white teas, including silver needle, are a tiny bit more oxidized than green teas, because they are allowed to dry naturally rather than being heated to stop all oxidation, as green teas are. This is why green teas have a more vibrant green color than white teas. The definition refers to white teas being "fired or steamed and then dried", but this specification sounds more like the processing of green tea, and this part of the definition would include green teas made from tips or leaf buds.

(This is my biggest criticism of the definition) The "plucked tender shoots (buds)" part of the definition would leave a number of teas, such as shou mei, without a clear way of being classified as any type of tea other than just "tea".

I'm not even a member of this Tea Association, and I have no standing or authority to do so, but I vote no on this definition! Send it back to the drawing board and come back with a new definition!

Harney and Sons Guide to Tea:

Another source that carries some degree of authority is the Harney and Sons Guide to Tea; written by Michael Harney (of Harney and Sons), a major and well-respected figure in the tea community. This book has a wealth of information about tea, is well-written, and is accessible to newcomers in the tea world. How does this book define white tea? Although the book does not set out a clear definition of white tea in one place, the book talks as if there is a well-accepted definition, and from various quotes we can piece together what this definition might be. Both of these quotes are from page 19 of the book:

White tea buds are plucked and "withered" or "air dried"...

Consisting only of buds, white teas...

This remark seems to be going even further down the line of the "white tea must consist of tender shoot and leaf buds" definition that I have seen in a number of sources. "Consisting only of buds" would exclude certain teas that nearly everyone would agree is a white tea, including white peony / bai mu dan. In fact, this fact highlights an inconsistency in this book, for later, Michael Harney goes on to write a section on mai mu dan, in which he unambiguously writes from a place that Bai Mu Tan is a white tea, yet he acknowledges (p, 28):

...Bai Mu Dan also includes some mature tea leaves.

To be more accurate, there are some white teas, such as silver needle, which consist only of buds, just as there are some black teas, like Yunnan Golden Buds (dianhong jinya/滇紅金芽) which do as well. But this attribute does not define or characterize white teas as a whole.

Perhaps I am an odd sort of person, having studied so much mathematics that I want things to be logically consistent. But I do care about consistency, and I would like to encourage as many people as possible to question their definitions, and embrace definitions that do not have these sorts of problems. Perhaps the problem with Michael Harney's book is that it never clearly defines white tea, because I suspect, given Michael Harney's level of knowledge, that if he sat down and thought about this matter, he would be able to come up with a definition that did not have any of these contradictions or drawbacks.

How to define classes of teas?

So I don't claim to have all the answers, but I personally believe that a good definition for a class of tea (black, green, white, oolong, yellow, etc.) is:

Consistent.

Simple.

Based on production process, not particular cultivar, not appearance or color of the cup or leaf, and certainly not flavor.

General or flexible enough to encompass diverse traditions, to encourage innovation within the category (including styles of white tea that may not have been invented yet), and to leave out as few "problem teas" as possible.

I'm not proposing any definitions here. You can read what I have on RateTea's page on white tea. I don't claim to like my own definition; if you check the site frequently, you'll know that that page has changed and evolved as I've researched this topic. I even go back and forth on some teas...is Xue Ya (Snow Buds) a white tea or green tea? What about moonlight white (which I've seen classified as a white tea, black tea, green tea, or Pu-erh). But one thing is for sure...shou mei is a white tea, in my world.

Back to shou mei:

Why do I think this tea, so dark in color, is a white tea? The simple answer is that the production process is more similar to other white teas than to anything else: the leaves are plucked, allowed to wither naturally, and dried. There is a clear continuum of flavor and aroma from shou mei to bai mu dan to bai hao yinzhen (silver needle) and, at least to my palate, it is clear that these teas belong to the same class.

Perhaps a stronger argument is that classifying shou mei in any other category becomes more problematic. It's clearly not a black tea, there is no bruising and full oxidation process, even though it is more oxidized, and although it's dark in color, it does not remotely resemble any black teas in aroma. It also does not closely resemble green tea...it's not immediately heated the way green teas are, and it tends to retain no more green color than other white teas, and its aroma and flavor have almost none of the characteristic qualities of typical green teas. It's oolong-like in character, and shares the partial-oxidation with these teas, but there is little else that that would qualify it as an oolong. If forced into one of these categories, I can see it being treated as a green tea or oolong tea, but I think most people would agree that this wasn't a very accurate classification.

And because shou mei is not made primarily out of tips or leaf buds, a definition of white tea cannot be limited to "tippy" teas.

What do you think?

I would encourage you to propose your own definition of white tea. I don't really know how to define it, and I'd like to refine and improve on the definition I have on RateTea. The purpose of this post is mainly to step on some toes and provoke some discussion, but also to invite criticism of my own definitions and articles with the goal of refining my own definitions.

And...if you're one of those people who likes the narrower definitions of white tea, limiting it to only include teas with a large portion of tips / leaf buds, could you please answer my question: how the heck would you classify shou mei?

Caffeine in Tea - It's Not Bad For You

2011-10-26T10:33:00.002-04:00

The subject of caffeine in tea is an interesting one. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation surrounding both (a) how much caffeine is in tea, and (b) the effect caffeine has on your body. I have written at length about the caffeine content of various teas, so this post explores the second question.

Public perception of caffeine:

There seems to be a widespread public perception that caffeine is "bad". One way you can tell that this is the case is that a number of tea companies market their teas as being "low in caffeine", whereas teas higher in caffeine are usually not labelled as such, and instead labelled with euphemisms or indirect statements such as "energizing" or "good for starting the day". People want to feel energized, but they don't want to consume much caffeine.

The success of decaffeinated tea, which is often highly inferior in taste to tea in its natural, caffeinated form, is also a testimony to this negative public perception. Some companies even sell decaffeinated green tea extracts, so that people can obtain the "health benefits" of the tea without the caffeine.

In this post I will argue that this attitude towards caffeine is irrational...it's a result of people taking an absolute "good / bad" view of a substance, rather than looking at a key concept: moderation.

People drink tea because of caffeine:

Granted, there are many reasons that people drink tea, inculding flavor, tradition, and expectations of certain health benefits. However, I do believe that, regardless of how many other factors come into play, caffeine is one of the primary reasons people drink tea, if not the primary reason. Tea does contain many other biologically active compounds, such as L-theanine; theanine in particular is known to interact with tea, so the topic becomes a bit complex, but the point is: tea contains caffeine, and people want to consume caffeine.

The evolution of caffeine:

Caffeine is an interesting chemical because it evolved in plants primarily as a biological defense. Caffeine is a poison, probably intended primarily to protect a plant against insects. This is why the caffeine tends to be concentrated in the tender new leaves, which are most in need of protection against being eaten.

Moderation is key:

The activity of caffeine in humans is in some sense a biological accident. A high enough dose of caffeine would kill a human, but a small dose provides a stimulating effect to the body and mind. Many chemicals are like this...nearly all drugs have a lethal dose and a therapeutic dose, and somewhere in between these there are middle doses where unpleasant side effects start to appear.

For caffeine, small quantities can provide a boost in alertness, improved concentration, and improved energy level. But higher amounts, or caffeine consumed at the wrong time, can cause a variety of unpleasant symptoms, both immediate and long-term, including jitters, feelings of malaise, weak and rapid heartbeat, anxiety, and insomnia. Some people are more sensitive to caffeine, either because of their own biology, or because of medications they are taking. But for the most part, the best way to approach caffeine is moderation. So, next time you hear or read someone explicitly or implicitly stating that caffeine is bad, respond by encouraging them to think about moderation rather than in strict good / bad terms.

Tea and Politics: Making Politics More Like Tea

2011-10-25T16:16:00.001-04:00

This post is inspired by Stephane of Tea Masters, who recently posted Review tea like a liberal and brew like a conservative. This post contains a few subtle but humorous cracks at American politics (and possibly French, although I know nothing about French politics), in the course of giving very solid advice about brewing and selecting teas.

But I want to comment on something else in this post, which is an observation Stephane makes:

Politics and tea don't mix well. At a tea gathering (can't use the word tea party anymore!), it's best not to speak politics, a divisive topic.

I've found this statement to not only be true of the world of tea, but of most aspects of life that are not political. But rather than just accepting the divisiveness as politics, I would like to question it, and provide a proposal of a way to re-create politics as a topic that can be positive and empowering to talk about. And, I'd like to use tea culture as a model or analogy of how to achieve this goal.

Why is the subject of politics "divisive" in conversations?

Most of you have probably observed or participated in a conversation about politics that became heated, argumentative, negative, or confrontational. Maybe you were the one who got fired up or frustrated, or maybe you weren't, and either someone else got confrontational with you, or you just observed two people arguing with each other. Once the conversation becomes heated, people stop listening and start talking past each other, often repeating themselves. People's stress level elevates, little of value gets communicated, and the people in the conversation, as well as bystanders, usually feel that the experience is negative or unpleasant.

The natural reaction of many people is to then avoid the topic of politics, reasoning that politics is inherently divisive. This reaction is especially common among people who, like me, value listening and good communication, and want to create a relaxed, positive atmosphere in which everyone feels comfortable and appreciated. It's also a common reaction among people who value their time and don't want to waste their time with unproductive arguments.

But the negative sort of dynamic described above does not happen accidentally--it has certain clear causes, and by understanding these causes we can become empowered to prevent them, and keep the conversation positive. And, contrary to popular belief, the underlying cause is not the topic of politics. It is how we think about politics.

How we think about politics:

Cognitive psychology has actually made some interesting advances that have the potential to explain the influences of thought patterns and thought processes on mood and emotions. If you want to read more on this topic, I go into more depth on this topic in a post on another blog of mine, A Definition of Extremism: Correctly Identifying and Gracefully Handling Extremist Views.

One interesting pattern that is easily observable in these conversations is that the escalation of conflict usually follows the use of black-and-white statements and overgeneralizations, often in the form of labelling. Some of these statements or ideas are spoken out loud, but many of them are held implicitly, in our heads. "All democrats / liberals believe / do X, Y, and Z." or "All republicans / conservatives believe / do X, Y, and Z." Even the simple act of labelling a person or group as "liberal", "conservative", "socialist", or "libertarian" is usually fallacious and unnecessary--most peoples views are complex and cannot be fully described by these labels. Exaggerating statements are another big culprit.

What can we learn from tea?

Tea is generally not a divisive topic. Why? As with politics, the answer lies not in tea itself, but in how we think about tea.

Most of us acknowledge and embrace the fact that different people have different tastes in tea. Even when we associate with tea drinkers who are most similar to us, we regularly come into contact with people who have vastly different tastes from our own. And we do not think it strange or problematic when our tastes differ...in fact, often, we listen to each other's differences of opinions, and make mental notes of them in case we encounter a tea that we think a friend might enjoy more than we do, or if we're looking to give tea as a gift.

But it's not just the types of thoughts and statements we make in association with tea that differs from the heated political arguments described above, it's also the speed and style with which we think about tea and talk about tea. Tea is often embraced during a time of rest or relaxation, a break. Tea is not a focal point of action, it is a liberation from action. When we think more slowly and say less, we can think more carefully, and we can focus on the quality of our thinking and make sure that our thoughts and words flow into constructive ends rather than just causing an escalating argument.

Can't we do politics like tea?

I believe that we can learn how to do politics more like we do tea. Although there may be some cultural barriers and inertia holding us back, I believe it can be done.

We cannot control others' thoughts, but we can control our own. If we are more aware of our own thought processes, and are especially conscious of our word choice in our speech and writing, we can at least refrain from the sort of incendiary statements, such as the false dichotomies, overgeneralizations, exaggerations, and labels, that tend to upset people. We can listen to people and make it more likely that they feel heard and understood, and we can go out of our way to show respect to people who disagree with us, as well as encouraging others who agree with us to show respect to those with different viewpoints.

One of my attempts to move the culture of politics in this direction is the Cazort.net political platform, which I maintain and have developed with the consultation of countless others with a broad range of political viewpoints. If you are interested in seeing what a political platform might look like without the sort of "liberal vs. conservative" dichotomy that exists in the U.S. and many other countries, I would invite you to visit that site. I am constantly refining and updating the ideas contained there, so if you have any comments, suggestions, or criticisms, I'd be most grateful (the site accepts comments there, so please comment on these points there rather than here).

Think about politics like you think about tea:

But most importantly, just give it some thought, and question the notion that politics is inherently controversial. It's not politics, it's how we think about politics. And maybe if we thought about politics more similarly to how we think about tea, many problems in our society would solve themselves.

Tea on Twitter: Twitter Lists of Tea Accounts

2011-10-24T09:05:00.002-04:00

This post was inspired by Nicole's recent post Twitter for the Tea Set, which gives some useful advice for how to use twitter effectively. Her post got me thinking about writing my own post about twitter, and I realized that I maintain a valuable twitter resource that many readers of this blog may not know about: tea-related twitter lists.

I already interact with numerous readers of this blog on twitter, but in case you're on twitter and have not yet connected with me, there are two places to do so: @ratetea is where I talk about tea under the official account of RateTea, and @cazort is my personal account, where I will share personal opinions and also tweet about things other than tea. Now for the good stuff:

My twitter lists:

Both for my own benefit, and for the benefit of everyone in the tea community, I maintain a number of twitter lists. You can find all the lists and brief descriptions on twitter, by clicking the screenshot above, but here is a more detailed description of most of them:

tea-companies - This list includes the official twitter accounts of tea companies (often, multiple accounts for bigger companies), prominent or important employees or owners of tea companies, and a few noteworthy individuals who sell tea on a small scale.

tea-bloggers - This list is a collection of tea bloggers, people whose blogs focus primarily on tea.

tea-chat - This is a list of "chatty" twitter accounts tweeting about tea--ones who generally will reply if you @-message them with something about tea. Most of these accounts tweet primarily about tea but some also tweet on other subjects.

tea-misc - This list is an eclectic collection of twitter users who do something "official" about tea, but are not normal tea companies or bloggers. This list includes tea associations and organizations, people who run tea-related websites that do not have a blog-like format, and people who work in the tea industry in capacities other than blogging and working for tea companies.

herbs - This list collects herb companies and companies focusing on herbal teas, as well as websites, bloggers, and other twitter accounts with a focus on herbs, herbal tea, or herbal medicine. A few tea companies with a good selection of herbal teas or medicinal herbs can be found here as well.

tea-houses - This list is a collection of tea houses, tea bars, tea rooms, and local tea shops...any place with a sit-down atmosphere that serves tea.

sustainability - This list collects twitter accounts with a focus on sustainability and environmental issues. It contains a few tea companies and a lot of other accounts; I'm somewhat selective about what I list here.

health - Twitter accounts tweeting about health. This list is a general health-related list, not limited to tea-and-health related topics.

Let me add you to my lists:

If you run a twitter account that you think would make a good addition to any of these lists, or if you'd like to recommend another account that you think would be good to add, just @-message me, under the @ratetea account. I often list accounts under multiple lists, if relevant. You can comment here if you'd like, but I'd recommend tweeting, as that way you'll reach me while I'm signed onto twitter and can easily respond.

Old Posts on Herbs & Herbal Teas

2011-10-22T01:07:00.002-04:00

Since this blog has far more subscribers now than it did a year ago, I periodically like to bring attention to some old posts that many of the newer readers may have missed...and today I want to bring attention to posts on the topic of herbs and herbal teas. Pictured is a collage giving a hint of what these posts have to offer:

Yes, I just said "herbal tea", a technically incorrect term which nonetheless is in widespread usage. This leads into my first post:

Is herbal tea tea? - In this post I explain why I use the term herbal tea both in this blog and on RateTea, even though herbal teas are not tea.

Monarda Tea Review - A review of herbal tea made from a plant of the Monarda genus, harvested locally in Delaware, with photos both of the plant and the steeping process.

Rooibos Protects Against Gamma Rays - I just had to draw attention to this post, which sounds too outrageous to be true, and surprisingly, is not.

Pineapple Sage Tea - Salvia Elegans - A post, with a photo, of one of my favorite plants to brew herbal tea from, and discussion of why you are unlikely to find this herb for sale on the market: this herb, delicious fresh, does not dry well.

Enjoy!

The Best Teas: Is It Just About The Caffeine?

2011-10-21T10:17:00.003-04:00

People who consider themselves tea connoisseurs, or perhaps even just tea enthusiasts, would usually like to believe that they have "discerning tastes", that they appreciate the "finer things in life", and specifically, the finer nuances of flavor and aroma when drinking a cup of tea.

Pictured here is some kukicha, one of my favorite styles of green tea, and one which demonstrates the spirit of this post: kukicha, tending to be low in caffeine, is not a usual focal point of connoisseurs:

This post is about a wrench thrown into the idea that we really have discerning tastes...the wrench is the observation that, at least to a large degree, people seem to seek out teas that are higher in caffeine. Not, mind you, teas they think are higher in caffeine, but teas that actually are higher in caffeine. (Which are two different things, unfortunately, due to the prevalance of misinformation in our society.)

But first I want to digress into the realm of beer and alcohol content, which offers a fascinating analogy of this same phenomenon:

Beer and Alcohol:

I was involved in rating and reviewing beer long before I got involved in rating and reviewing tea. In fact, RateBeer.com, where you can find my profile if you're curious of my tastes in beer, was one of the major sources of inspiration for RateTea.

When I first started using RateBeer, I was so excited about the concept. I loved craft brews, and unlike most people in my age bracket, I had little interest in getting drunk. I saw my use of RateBeer and my passion for craft beers produced by local microbreweries as a rebellion against the dominant drinking culture in our society, which ignores taste and focuses on getting drunk as quickly as possible.

Something raises an eyebrow: Alcohol content and ratings:

After having used RateBeer for years, and drinking, rating, and reviewing hundreds of beers, I started noticing something. Beers with a higher alcohol content invariably received a higher rating on the site. I also noticed this same trend off the site, among people who considered themselves beer enthusiasts or connoisseurs...a large number of them tended towards the Belgian ales and barley wines, with their very high alcohol contents. These brews struck me as more like wine than beer. Personally, I like beer better than wine, and I think this preference is in part because of the lower alcohol content of beer.

As an example, my favorite beer, the Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, with 5.8% ABV (Alcohol by volume) scores a 3.87 with 1223 ratings. The Great Lakes Blackout Stout, a beer that I think is good, but not anywhere near as good, but which has 9% ABV, gets 3.93 (this subtle distinction in score is actually bigger than you might think on the site). Another example, from my hometown, is how Lancaster Brewing Co's Amish Four Grain, with 5.6% ABV is rated much lower than the same brewery's Winter Warmer, 9% ABV. Personally, I think the four-grain is a much better beer.

Back to tea:

I've unfortunately noticed a similar trend among teas, albeit with caffeine in place of alcohol. For example, among white teas, silver needle has more caffeine than bai mu dan, which has more caffeine than shou mei. Guess which ones tend to be more expensive and are often written about by "connoisseurs" as being somehow "better"? Another example...sencha vs. bancha. Another example: tippy black teas (whether Assam, Yunnan, or whatever) vs. their non-tippy counterparts.

Although there's certainly a huge amount of variability, the teas with more caffeine tend to be more expensive, seem to be preferred by people "in the know", and receive better reviews.

Possible confounding factors:

There are other factors that could be contributing to these trends. Some confounding factors that I've thought of are that:

Tippy teas (more tips / young leaves, less mature leaves) contain more caffeine, and also have a more smooth or delicate flavor, and people may prefer the smoothness or other qualities, so the association with caffeine is accidental.

Tippy teas are more expensive, and people may be buying into the psychological fallacy that more expensive means better quality.

Because tippy teas are more expensive, they're more actively pushed by tea companies because of the higher profit margin, and we tea drinkers are simply fooled by their marketing into thinking they're really higher quality.

And of course, it also might be true that people don't actually prefer these teas, that there's just an illusion that they do, again, probably because of tea company marketing (unlike the world of beer, where there is hard data suggesting that people really do prefer the beers with a higher alcohol content).

What do you think?

Do you think that the caffeine content of a tea influences how much people like it, and that people tend to prefer teas with more caffeine because of the caffeine? Or do you think that it could be explained by confounding factors? Or do you think they really don't like these teas at all and it's just an impression caused by tea company marketing?