Tea Brick Identification Help: 2008 Sheng Pu-erh?

One of my friends was moving and giving away a bunch of stuff, and gave me a brick of compressed tea. Can anyone help me with identifying it? I see the characters for Sheng Pu-erh tea (生普洱茶), and I see 2008, so I assume this is some 2008 Sheng Pu-erh. If anyone could verify this and provide me with any other interesting or useful info, I'd be very grateful:

The front of the brick:

And the back:

Thanks in advance!

Truthfulness: Tea Companies: Be Cautious With Claims of Uniqueness

I recently read a post on SororiTea Sisters, a review of Assam Mothola White (White Assam) from Grey’s Teas. This post shared a commercial description of this tea, from the seller, which claims that "No other white teas are known to be produced in Assam." For those of you who don't know them, Grey's Teas is a tea company, based in the UK, which has quite a few interesting offerings in their catalog, such as an oolong produced in Assam, and white teas from Assam, Darjeeling, and other regions. I have never tried any of their teas though, but the company has definitely gotten my attention.

But their claim about no other white teas being produced in Assam raised a red flag for me. I'm not crazy about the passive voice ("...are known...") as it doesn't identify who is doing the "knowing" (or lack thereof). But I also had a gut feeling that this statement was untrue, when I read it. I have a good intuition for which types of teas, produced in which regions, are available, because of my work on RateTea. I did a quick check, using the powerful tools in RateTea that allow anyone (yes, you can do this too!) to search and filter for teas of a specific type or style, from a specific region. RateTea's listings of White Teas produced in Assam, India turned up 7 results:



Checking this list, I found Upton's offering (since retired from their catalogue) is indeed the same tea sold by Grey's Teas, from Methola or Mothola estate, as is the Assam white tea sold by Canton Tea Co and Stash Tea. But the other teas are different. Many are from Satrupa Tea Estate, and there are several distinct types or grades of tea available from this estate in Assam, all available through the Assam Tea Company, and some through other retailers.

So, this claim of uniqueness is an overstatement; Assam does indeed produce other white teas. I would urge Grey's Teas to update their description to reflect this!

Tea companies: be careful with claims (including uniqueness claims):

I urge companies to be cautious about making claims about your teas which depend on information that you may not have. Uniqueness is one example of this--uniqueness makes a claim not only about the tea you are describing, but about all other teas in an area or of a certain type. When making a claim of uniqueness, unless you have exhaustively travelled to a whole area and checked every estate, I don't think it's safe to make a claim about uniqueness. And keep in mind that producers and sellers may make false claims about their products' uniqueness in order to sell them, so be cautious about passing on a claim of uniqueness that a seller made to you. Instead, say: "We are not aware of any other white teas produced in Assam..."

This statement is more truthful because it speaks from your own personal experience rather than making a global statement. A global statement may or may not be true; a statement of your own personal knowledge is true.

Some ideas for rewording the description from Grey's Teas include:

• "Very few white teas are produced in Assam."
• "This is only one of a few white teas produced in Assam."

It is perfectly possible that Grey's tea wrote their description a long time ago, and that, when it was written, the statement was actually true. It is also possible that the company did not know of any other Assam white teas. In these cases, they could have written:

• "As of [whatever date], this was the only white tea produced in Assam."
• "This tea is to our knowledge the only white tea produced in Assam."
• "When we began carrying it, this was the only white tea we knew of produced in Assam."

These claims are more truthful, and their truth does not change when new information becomes available. This is because they speak from personal experience and/or include dates or historical info rather than making a claim of universal truth. These sorts of descriptions protect a company in the long-run, because they do not require diligently checking the description in the case that something changes and the description is no longer true.

False advertising can become legally problematic:

False claims of the uniqueness of a product are a form of false advertising that can range from a legal gray area to solidly illegal.

I seriously doubt that anyone would want to start a legal battle over something as trivial as the claim mentioned above, but as a general rule, making any false statement about your company's products can open you up to legal exposure, such as lawsuits from customers, competitors, or activist groups, or action from governmental agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. It also can look bad and discourage potential customers from buying your products, especially when you make a statement that a potential buyer knows to be untrue.

To impress potential customers with your knowledge, you want to speak from your experience and limit your marketing to material you know to be 100% truthful. No one knows everything, but it often conveys wisdom when a person communicates that they're aware of exactly where their knowledge ends.

What do you think?

As a tea shopper, how do you react when you encounter a claim that seems to be an overreach? How about if you work within a tea company? How do you react when a competing business makes a claim that somehow infringes on one of the products you sell? Do you consider how things might change in the future when you write descriptions of your products? Do you think that I am being nitpicky here, focusing on a tiny point, or do you think this is getting at an important issue of truthfulness in advertising?

And do you agree that in general, speaking from your direct experience and avoiding uncertain generalizations produces more truthful statements, and statements that retain their truthfulness better as time passes?

Why Can Green Tea Bags Be Worse Than Black Tea Bags?

Before I delve in, I want to explain the exact meaning of this post's title. Among tea bags, there is a broad range of quality. But my personal experience has been that green tea bags range much farther into the low end of quality, poor quality, than do black tea bags. In other words, the worst green tea bags are much worse than the worst black tea bags.

It's been my experience that there is a certain base level of quality one can expect from even stale, low-end tea bags of straight black tea, as well as familiar styles of tea like Earl Grey, Ceylon, Irish Breakfast, etc. And it has also been my experience that the best green tea bags are about as good as the best black tea bags...but I think there are some really terrible green teas out there in tea bags.

The following highly subjective diagram illustrates this point:

Why? Because people buy green tea for reasons other than taste:

Although there may be other factors, such as a tendency for black tea to hold its flavor longer, which can partially explain the phenomenon I'm getting at here, I think there is one factor that overwhelms the others.

I think the broader range of quality among green tea bags for sale in America can be mostly explained by noting that here in the U.S., people frequently drink green tea for "health" reasons, whereas they rarely drink black tea for health reasons.

Black tea, on the other hand, is consumed primarily for taste, so any products on the market that were bad beyond a certain point would quickly stop being purchased. Green teas, on the other hand, persist, because people are buying them and drinking them because they feel they "should" drink them. There's that word "should" again, causing problems in our tea culture.

My advice, to everyone, is to drink what tastes good to you. Not only will you be helping to shape the marketplace in a positive way by weeding out the inferior products, but you'll probably be healthier too because you'll be drinking fresher, higher-quality tea.

What do you think?

Do you buy into my reasoning here? Does your own personal experience fit with the point illustrated in my diagram? Do you agree that the word "should" and beliefs related to statements involving what we "should" drink can undermine quality and allow inferior products to persist in the marketplace?

Revisiting The Question Of Whether To Say "Herbal Tea"

Back in early 2010, I wrote a post Is Herbal Tea Tea? in which I explain. Recently, I read a post Let’s go there, shall we? on Joie de Tea, which expressed a similar sentiment. However, this post gets into an interesting aspect of this terminology, the question of inclusiveness vs. divisiveness:

...I regularly see people having other people jump down their throats before they can even have a sip of their lovely herbal tea, because the herbal-tea-drinking people called it tea rather than a tisane or an infusion. How tedious.

Let’s be inclusive, not divisive...

I found this post resonated with me quite deeply, not just because I also call these drinks "herbal teas", but because I could relate to the question of inclusiveness. I also get a gut feeling of some sort of exclusivity or snobbishness when I hear people forcefully insist on the correctness of the terms "tisane" or "herbal infusion", and even more so when they frame their statements in the negative, insisting on the "wrongness" of the term "herbal tea", or, in the most extreme cases, making personal attacks on people who use the phrase "herbal tea", such as by claiming that they "don't know anything about tea".

Why do I react this way? Experience with other pushy groups sheds some light:

Language is complex and dynamic. The meaning and connotations of words evolve over time, and even at a given time, not all people will use the same word a certain way. Furthermore, many words have specialized meanings within certain subcultures. Often, these "subcultures" can constitute people of a particular political ideology, or of particular religious beliefs.

There's nothing wrong with having specialized terminology, when it is necessary. But specialized language and jargon can cause harm in several ways. One way such language can go wrong is when it is used to exclude others, such as when people are judged by whether or not they follow the linguistic conventions of a small subculture (even when those conventions go against the usage of similar words in mainstream society). Another way in which language can go wrong is when it is used to push an ideology onto someone else.

Examples of pushy language:

An example of pushy political language would be how far-right conservatives describe as "socialist" any more liberal policy which they disagree with, or how far-left liberals might describe as "reactionary" or "facist" any conservative policy they disagree with. These uses of language, which differ from the widely-accepted definitions of these terms, serve to advance the agenda of the person using them, because they paint the opposing viewpoint in a negative light. Religion can also be one of the biggest offenders when it comes to using these sorts of negative labels (think "unbelievers", "heretics"); I am confident you can think up many of your own examples here.

Pushy language, in religion, politics, and other spheres, is usually much more subtle. One Philosophy or movement that I find uses language in ways I react negatively to is Ayn Rand's Objectivism. This movement uses language in several non-standard ways: one, the choice of name implies that the philosophy itself is objective--rather than having a neutral name and allowing people to choose for themselves whether or not they personally find the philosophy to be objective. Secondly, the philosophy uses certain words, like selfishness, quite differently from the mainstream uses of these words. The word "selfish" has a strong negative connotation in mainstream society, yet within the "Objectivist" philosophy it has a positive connotation.

Non-standard uses of language can restructure a person's value system:

I find these non-standard uses of language to be pushy because they can restructure a person's value system without their consent. When people begin to use language in a different way, it changes how they think. I am a huge believer in continuously questioning your beliefs, but I believe that people reach healthier conclusions when they question their beliefs consciously, rather than allowing their beliefs to be unconsciously restructured through processes like using special jargon. I find this to be a particular matter of concern because groups often choose their jargon or special language in such a way as to promote their own agenda (like the political examples above). When people allow for their beliefs to be restructured unconsciously, they open themselves up to being influenced by people or groups who would manipulate them for profit or gain, against the person's best interest, and also in potentially untruthful ways.

I think that this potential for unconscious manipulation of value systems is a very legitimate reason that people have for reacting negatively and defensively to language that is used in non-standard ways.

The religious group my friends and I are in the process of founding has discussed these issues at length. From the start, there was a strong resolve in our group to do everything we could to avoid being pushy or overstepping people's boundaries in attempts to advance our views. Because of this, one of the core rules of communication that we agreed upon was to Use language and definitions based on societal consensus. We are hoping that this rule, which few groups of any sort embrace as centrally as we do, will help us to create a novel religious organization that will succeed at avoiding the pitfalls of pushiness more successfully than past organizations have done.

Back to tea: what exactly is the mainstream definition of tea?

The mainstream definition of tea is a broad one. The word tea is not only used to refer to true teas, but also to a wide variety of other beverages prepared in the same manner as true tea. You can check the Dictionary.com definition of tea, which pulls from a number of different mainstream dictionaries, to verify this. The strict definition of tea as only referring to true teas made from the Camellia sinensis plant is one that is only agreed upon in a small subculture.

In conclusion: yes, I do think that insisting "tea" only be used to refer to true tea is divisive:

I hope I have convinced some people that there is indeed something inherently divisive about insisting that the word "tea" only be used to refer to true tea. I am a huge advocate for pure teas, and I have done and continue to do a lot of things to promote them, both in terms of sharing them with my friends, in terms of what I recommend to others, and in terms of how RateTea is structured. But I think that when people get too pedantic about the use of the term "tea", it actually harms this cause. It makes people react defensively, and it creates an inclusion-exclusion dynamic. This sort of decision harms the advancement of tea culture, and, if carried out in a business context, is a bad business decision because it can alienate potential customers.

You don't need to use the word "herbal tea". If you don't like it, then use whatever other term you'd like (tisane, herbal infusion, etc.). But, if you're going to criticize the use of this term, be mindful of how this criticism will be perceived...you may be having the opposite effect that you actually want to have!

On Soliciting Tea Bloggers to Review Your Samples

I've been uninspired to write lately, which is why my posts have slowed down a bit, but today I read a Google+ post by Nicole of Tea For Me Please that got me thinking and inspired me to write this post. So first, thanks Nicole!

Nicole commented about unsolicited comments from tea companies, which she describes as companies "...practically demanding that I write about their product and promote it to my readers without so much as a proper introduction..." This post sparked a lot of discussion.

Cinnabar of Gongfu Girl also offered a particularly relevant comment here: "It's always the same formulaic communication that starts with them saying how much they like my blog, followed by statements that prove they haven't actually read anything I've written."

The rude approaches described by Nicole, Cinnabar, and others in the discussion, can offend tea bloggers. They can make a negative impression, and they can make it unlikely that a blogger will ever accept or review samples from your company, or promote or write favorably about your company. In this post I want to explain how I think it is best to approach tea bloggers. This all seems like common sense to me, but the fact that so many companies don't follow it makes me think it is worth writing about.

Offering samples is a good thing:

First, I want to say that I love samples, and I think that sending free samples to bloggers can be a great way to gain visibility for your tea company. I'm certainly not trying to discourage tea companies from offering samples with this post. Rather, I would like to encourage tea companies to think about how they approach bloggers when offering samples.

Pictured here are some samples from Life in Teacup that I recently received. This company is one of my favorite tea companies, offering unusual Chinese teas that can be hard to find elsewhere:



Another very different shipment, also of high-quality Chinese teas, was from TeaVivre, a new tea company that ships directly from China, that has quickly gotten my attention as offering high-quality Chinese teas at reasonable prices:



If you want to read some reviews, I recently posted reviews of TeaVivre's Xin Yang Mao Jian and their Chun Mei (Zhen Mei), and of Life in Teacup's Zhang Ping Shui Xian, Charcoal Roasted, Zhang Ping Shux Xian, Traditional Greener Style, and Keemun Mao Feng. Stay tuned for more reviews.

So, how to offer samples?

If I were to give some advice to tea companies offering samples, I'd make the following points about how to approach tea bloggers:

• Be honest, and avoid flattery. Don't say that you like a person's blog, or read a person's blog if you are just finding it for the first time. If you actually read the blog regularly and enjoy it, then it's okay to say this, but it is better to show this by commenting regularly or referencing the posts in your own writing. But if you just found the person's blog in a list of tea blogs, and are emailing them primarily to offer samples for reviews, then say that. There's no reason to be ashamed of making honest attempts to promote your business, but flattery and dishonesty can make a very negative impression. These sorts of actions come across to me as unnecessary, unprofessional, and desperate, three qualities you absolutely do not want associated with you or your business.


• Understand that an offer of samples is an offer, and be fully content with bloggers refusing your offer. - It is reasonable to offer samples to a blogger with the understanding that they will review them if they accept the offer. But a blogger is always free to reject any offer of samples. Accepting samples, and reviewing them, even though it involves receiving a free product, is a lot of work. By offering someone samples, you are asking someone to do free work promoting your company. Getting upset at someone for refusing to do you a favor is never a healthy thing to do. And if you're upset, recognize that this is your own private issue and not the blogger's, and keep your thoughts to yourself--sending a nasty note to someone in a case like this is tremendously unprofessional and disrespectful.


• Read the blogger's blog and site, and make sure they are a good match for your offer, before offering samples. - If you offer samples of flavored green teas to a blog that exclusively reviews Pu-erh, you're making clear that you did not take the time to even glance over what the blog is about. In some cases, bloggers post policies about samples and reviews; make sure to read these notices if one is posted. Always read the "about" page if a blog has one, and always read a number of posts before contacting the blogger. By contacting a blogger without checking to see that their blog is a good match, you are wasting your time as well as the blogger's time.

Watch who you hire to do your PR:

Nicole also remarked in her comment that in some cases, it seems that companies are paying PR firms to do this. I want to chime in, publicly, that I've also experienced this. In one exceedingly silly case, I was having trouble with a certain company posting ratings and reviews on RateTea which I suspected to be fraudulent. The pattern I saw was a series of new sign-ups, all with hotmail addresses, who would write a few reviews (with 100/100 or near-100 ratings) of this company's teas, and never review any other company's teas or log in to the site again. Needless to say, I deleted the accounts, but in order to cut down on spam, I did some detective work and tracked them down to a PR consulting firm that the company had presumably hired. I emailed the firm, and although I did not receive a response or apology, the fake reviews stopped.

The moral of the story here is to be very careful when hiring PR firms. Because a PR firm who engages in disrespectful behavior like this can damage your company's reputation, I would advise people to really drill PR firms on the topics of respect, ethics, and interpersonal communications, before hiring them. If a company cannot demonstrate to you that they consistently communicate respectfully, honestly, and ethically, then find another company.

A sample solicitation:

If you want to offer samples to a blogger, it's really easy. First, make sure the blog is appropriate for your offer, and if not, find another blog that is more appropriate. Then write something simple, like:

"Dear X: I represent Y tea company; I'd like to offer you samples of teas for you to review on your blog, please let me know if you're interested."

If the person responds that they're not interested, thank them for their time and leave them alone. It's one thing if you have something specific more to say--that's fine, but including flattery, or adding a rude response if they decline your offer, will just dig you a deep hole that you may never get out of in that person's eyes.

Surface Area, Tea, Food, Physics: Do We Misuse The Word "Superficial"?

This post is about surface area, both as it pertains to tea, to food, and to everything about our world. In our culture, we use language in such a way that implies that, when dealing with anything, it's what's really inside that matters. Phrases like "on the surface", or the word "superficial" (which just means on the surface) are used to describe phenomena that are somehow more fleeting or transient, less reflective of true reality, and less important than things that are "deep", "on the inside", or "at the core" of something.



Diagram by Cmglee, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.

This post provides some powerful examples that demonstrate that this way of looking at things is not always valid. The world, both on a human level, and a fundamental physical level, does not always work in the way that the the word "superficial" suggests. The surface, or the boundary of a region, is often where the most interesting things are happening, and this phenomenon is widespread at all levels in our universe.

Surface and Boundary in Biology:

Anyone who has studied microbiology will undoubtedly be familiar with the cell membrane. Cell membranes, a double layer of nonpolar (oily) and polar (like water) substances creates a barrier which separates the interior of a cell from the outside world. Complex channels exist in these membranes to allow a living cell to control what passes through its walls, and structures attach to the membrane to allow it to interact with the outside world. A large portion of biological research focuses on the cell membrane or the various proteins and structures that exist within it.



Tea And Surface Area:

The surface area of tea leaf is of critical importance in determining how the tea infuses in water. The infusion of the tea's flavor and chemicals into the water happens at the surface of the leaf, so increasing the surface area will make the tea infuse more quickly.

The following is a photo of Imperial Tea Garden's Moon Swirl White Tip, a green tea from Hunan province. The complex curls and folds of the leaf provide greater surface area than the small, tightly rolled pellets suggest.



Breaking up the tea leaf increases the surface area, thus making the tea infuse faster. Finely-broken tea, like fannings and dust, have the highest surface area to volume ratio, and thus infuse fastest. On the other hand, whole-leaf tea with thick, tough leaves has the highest surface area to volume ratio, and thus infuses slowest of all, considerably slower than whole-leaf tea with thinner, more delicate leaves.

Thinking about surface area also helps us to understand the infusion behavior of flavored teas as compared to pure teas. When flavoring is added in the form of extracts or essential oils, the flavoring is added to the surface of the leaf. While some of the flavor may permeate deeper into the leaf, it is concentrated on the surface. The flavoring thus infuses very quickly. This is why flavored teas often have the strongest aroma of their "flavor" in the first infusion, and then taste more like tea in subsequent infusions.

Food, Surface Area, and Nutrition:

Surface area is relevant in food and nutrition as well. The skin of fruits and vegetables tend to be richer in vitamins, minerals, and proteins than the interior. Although not all fruit and vegetables have edible skin, the ones that do often have remarkably more nutritional value in their skin. As an example, let's look at the potato:

The USDA Nutrient Database tells us that 100 grams of baked potato skins have 4 grams of protein, 8 grams of fiber, and 39% RDA of Iron. 100 grams of baked potato flesh, on the other hand, while slightly less caloric (probably because they contain more water), only contains 2% of Iron, 2 grams of protein, and 1 gram of fiber. Baked potatos are not a good example for comparing Vitamin C content because the skin of the potato is exposed to more heat than the interior, so, although the skin is richer in Vitamin C, baked potato skins have similar vitamin C content. This is just an example. In some fruits, such as apples, the skin contains much more vitamin C by weight than the flesh. Moral of the story: don't peel your fruits and vegetables.



This blue potato has a lumpy shape, increasing its surface-area per unit volume. Buying lumpy, irregularly-shaped varieties of fruit can actually lead to better nutrition by adding more surface area. Similarly, buying small fruits also has the same effect.

Surface Area And Information in Quantum Physics:

There is some relatively recent work in quantum physics that has suggested a most peculiar result: it is possible that the amount of information that can be stored in a region of space is bounded not by its volume, but by its surface area. If you're a physicist, you can find the original paper here: Operational view of the holographic information bound, published in Physics Review D, Vol. 82, No. 12, 2010.

Doesn't it sound bizarre and counterintuitive? In other words, imagine a filing cabinet. The amount of information you can put in the cabinet depends not on the space inside the cabinet, but on the amount of area on the walls of the cabinet.

What does all this mean?

The point is...the phenomenon of the surface being more important than the inside of something, and the surface area being more important than volume for various practical reasons, is a phenomenon that appears again and again at all levels of our world: with tea, with food, with microbiology, and with the very fundamental laws of physics at the smallest possible scales.

So next time someone describes something as superficial, stop to think...maybe they're actually describing the things that really matter in life.

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

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?

1. 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.


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. 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?

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

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?

Flavored Teas, Tea Bags, Boycotts, and Bullshit

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.