Disappearing Tea Companies: Fresh Darjeeling Tea

This post is about a tea company that, unfortunately, has disappeared...presumably it is now closed.

In late fall of 2009, I received three samples from Fresh Darjeeling Tea, a company, started and run by Sonam Paljor Lama, selling exclusively Darjeeling tea. The company shipped directly from India, and specialized in what I would consider to be true artisan tea: carefully-selected, single-estate, single-harvest teas of unusual varieties and with unusual characteristics. Pictured here are all but one of their offerings:



This collage, which I constructed from the thumbnails saved on RateTea, shows the astounding diversity of teas offered by this company. Although some of these teas look a little bit like other Darjeelings, many of them do not. Of the company's 13 offerings, 5 were Darjeeling oolongs, two were Darjeeling white teas, one of which was in the silver needle style, and one was a Darjeeling green tea. But even the black teas were unusually interesting.

I corresponded with Sonam Paljor Lama, and he was very friendly; I was also very impressed with his level of knowledge of Darjeeling teas.

My experience of the teas:

When I opened the three samples from Fresh Darjeeling Tea, shipped directly from India, I was immediately struck by the freshness of the aroma; although green tea, especially fresh green tea, often smells grassy or vegetal to me, these teas had a certain freshness that I usually only ever encounter in actual live plants...a sort of smell of leaves and plant juices.

Upon brewing them, I was initially a bit overwhelmed by the vegetal character of all three teas. But the sample sizes were large, and I soon acquired tastes for two of the three samples (one I cared a bit less for). You can read my reviews of Golden Wire - GhopalDhara, Monk's Reserve - Castleton Estate, and the Soureni Organic Oolong. To this day, the Soureni organic oolong remains my favorite Darjeeling oolong.

The tea gardens and the traditions of them still exist:

I have not seen or heard from Sonam Paljor Lama in a long time, so I have no idea what happened with this company. It is a sad fact of business that an overwhelming number of businesses close or go out of business during the first two years of operation (usually during their first year). Although I was very sad to learn some time ago that this company was not still in operation, it gives me peace of mind to know that the tea gardens that produced these teas still exist. There are a number of companies that sell single-harvest, single-estate Darjeeling teas, including special batches of unusual teas like the ones pictured and described here.

How about you?

Did you try any of these teas? Do you have any information about what happened to this company? Have you ever tried these teas, sold through other companies? Which companies do you prefer to buy artisan Darjeeling teas from?

Tea Spam: "Boutique" Spam

This post is part of an ongoing series about tea spam--unsolicited advertisement on the internet, relating to the topic of tea. If you did not see it, I recommend reading my original post Tea Spam: Starting With The Most Blatant, in which I introduce the concept of the spam blog. If you don't wish to read it, a spam blog is a blog which uses automated software to steal content from other websites -- plagiarism and copyright violation -- and post it on a blog. The blog acquires readers and traffic from search engines, and makes money off advertisements.

Spam blogs are often run by automated software, so, even if the rate of income / profit from a given blog is very low, a spam blogger can create thousands of blogs and earn a considerable amount of income from stealing other people's work.

I've actually had some victories shutting down spam blogs, which I outline in that blog post, which also gives tips and guidance on how to get these blogs shut down.

Boutique Spam:

While a lot of spam blogs look, for lack of a better word, "spammy" (hastily constructed, and immediately evident to a trained eye that they are automated). Some time ago, Brandon of Wrong Fu Cha brought to my attention a phenomenon that he calls "boutique spam". Below is a screenshot from a spam site which makes daily spam posts. But this site has a professional-looking layout and is extremely well-designed:



At a glance, this site looks totally legit. It has a twitter account with a huge following (over 43,000 followers), and a facebook page. The site is continuously updated with new articles about tea. But...something is suspicious; who in tea has that many legitimate twitter followers? Even Tony Gebely (arguably a big name when it comes to tea on the web) only has 22,000-some. And if you look carefully at the articles, you see something very suspicious: a slightly unnatural wording or phrasing of the text. Here's an example:



Note the headline (click the image to see the full text up close) with the grammatically correct, but extremely awkward sounding phrase "A Brief Introduction Towards Blooming Tea". No human would ever write this. But a person might write "A Brief Introduction To Blooming Tea". This raised suspicions for me...it seems like automated article spinning, in which software automatically replaces words with synonyms, so that search engines will not be able to recognize the article as being the same as whatever original article it was taken from. This "article spinning" has two benefits to the spammer: (a) it allows the spammer to avoid detection by the copyright holder, and thus, avoid legal action (b) it allows the spammer to enjoy treatment as having "unique content" by search engines, which preferentially index unique content and generally avoid indexing or highly ranking duplicated content.

Finding the Original Content:

Finding the original article can be a bit tricky in some cases. Typing the title into google, replacing "Towards" with "To", immediately turned up some results which are obviously the same article. Interestingly, it was hard to find the original article, however, because the results I found seem also to be more spun articles on spam blogs. But...the degree to which this article has been duplicated throughout the web, and the fact that the wording on this article or blog post is so unnatural demonstrates without a doubt that the content is certainly not original and did not originate on this blog.

Shutting down spammers: what can you do to help?

We can all do our part to prevent web spam. Here are a few tips; the first two are the most important.

• Don't judge sites at a glance. Look a bit deeper before passing judgment. It takes a bit more time, but ask yourself: do you really want to be duped?


• Be cautious of what pages you link to, who you follow on twitter, which blogs you subscribe to or add to your blog's blogroll, and what you like on facebook.


• If you encounter a spam blogger using twitter, block and report them using the button / feature on twitter. Same goes for Facebook accounts--there's a "Report" button at the bottom of profiles.


• If discussing a specific spam blog or spam site, do not link to it even in discussing it as spam - it is best to only include a screenshot as I did in this post. This ensures that search engines do not follow the link to the site and end up thinking either that the site is legitimate, or that your blog too is promoting spam.


• Consider some of my tips on shutting down spam blogs, including emailing the domain host, web host, ad host, and reporting the site as search engine spam if it is appearing in search results. Here's Google's page to report webspam.

I'm also curious: had you encountered this site? Did you recognize it was a spam blog? It actually fooled me at first glance, and I had followed its twitter account, so don't feel bad.

Comparing Teas at Their Best, vs. Controlled Tastings

Bon Teavant recently published a post about Professional Tea Cupping which I found interesting, and which provoked some thought for me. One of the ideas of the method of cupping communicated in this post is to sample many similar teas, under controlled circumstances: by keeping the amount of leaf, water temperature, and steeping time constant.

This got me thinking...when I sample teas, I tend to like to experiment with brewing each tea in different ways. Even with a particular style of tea, there are some individual teas that I like to steep longer or shorter, using more or less leaf, and occasionally I may even vary the brewing temperature. While the scientist in me is initially attracted to the idea of carefully controlled tasting times, the tea drinker in me observes that what I really care about is how each tea performs at its best. In some odd cases, I have even found teas that I do not particularly like on their own, but like better than most other teas of their style when paired with particular foods; see my old post Tea-Food Pairings: Spicy Food Enhances an Otherwise Undesirable Tea.

Comparing Teas At Their Best:

When comparing teas to find my favorites, I like to compare a tea at its best. Thus, if I had four Long Jings or four Tie Guan Yins of a similar style and level of roast, I would likely settle on different optimal ways of brewing each tea, if I took the time to get to know each tea. Comparing them at their best, I think it would be unlikely that I would always pick the same tea as my favorite that I would pick if I ran a single carefully controlled experiment.

I also suspect that if I ran several experiments with different steeping parameters, I would probably also pick different teas as my favorite. Certain aromas, flavors, and other qualities are very pleasing if there is just a hint of them, but unpleasant if there is too much of them. Bitterness, astringency, and vegetal qualities come to mind as these sorts of qualities.

Allowing For Acquired Tastes:

Another aspect of tea tasting that I like is allowing my taste for a particular tea to develop. My first impression on drinking a cup of tea, especially one that has a novel or peculiar quality to the aroma, is rarely indicative of how much I am going to enjoy the tea after trying it several times over a period of days or weeks. I remember the first time I tried green Se Chung oolongs; I was not impressed. Now, this family of oolongs is one of my favorites. Another type of tea I needed to acquire a taste for were the highly vegetal first flush Darjeeling teas, with tones of asparagus in the aroma. At first, I thought these teas tasted unpleasant; now I love them.

Professional Cupping Cannot Do This:

Professional tasters who are selecting batches for purchase and sale cannot invest this time into each individual tea. Presumably, professional tea tasters have years of experience, and highly developed palates, which give them a fairly accurate impression of tea from a controlled tasting. It also seems likely that their tastes are more well-formed, and they probably do not run up against new aromas that they have not yet acquired a taste for as often as I do. But I do wonder if this method actually selects the best teas, or if anything is lost in this carefully controlled approach. The unpredictability and wonder with which I experience tea drinking suggests to me that it is at least possible that indeed, a lot is lost.

What do you think?

What do you think? Do you have any experience with professional cupping? Do you like to compare teas with carefully controlled steeping environments? Do you find that you may prefer radically different brewing methods to bring out the best in different teas of the same style?

Ideal Tea Sample Sizes: How Small, How Large?

This post explores the question of what the ideal sample size is to offer to a customer. Hopefully, it will be useful both to potential shoppers as well as to tea companies.

Pictured here are some different samples I have received recently:



Some samples also arrive in tins, although these are not pictured. In a later post I plan to talk more about the type of containers used for samples, but for now, I want to focus on one thing: the size of the sample. It is evident from the picture above that there is a fair difference in size of different samples. Keep in mind, the size difference can be even larger than the picture suggests, because different amounts of leaf occupy different amounts of space. The brown package contains a tiny amount of loosely-packed oolong, whereas the tiny vacuum pack in the back (which weighs much more) contains a much larger amount of tightly-rolled oolong.

Why are samples useful?

If you are a business, the value of offering samples is immense. In case it's not glaringly obvious, offering small sample sizes of each of your teas is a way to help your customers to discover which teas they like, while minimizing the risk of the customer making big purchases that they are unhappy with. The last thing you want is a customer to sink a large amount of money into a purchase that they find out that they do not enjoy. If, on the other hand, the customer purchases several samples and does not like one of them, the loss is relatively small, and the customer has gained useful information.

What is an ideal sample size?

In my opinion, the ideal sample size is small enough that there is not much waste if the customer does not like the tea and large enough to try the tea several times and experiment with brewing.

I have seen sample sizes ranging from 2 grams to 1 ounce (a little over 28 grams). 2 grams is, in my opinion, much too small, as it is only enough to brew a single cup of tea, Western-style. Such a small sample size does not allow for repeated sampling and thus does not allow for any experimentation with brewing. Gong fu brewing, of course, is out of the question.

28 grams, on the other hand, is too big. Fortunately, I have lucked out in my purchases, and all 1-ounce samples I have ordered have been quite enjoyable to me. Sometimes it can take me time to acquire a taste for a tea, but in most cases, if I've brewed a tea three or more times, over a week or more, and I still fail to appreciate it, I probably am not going to like it at all, and the remainder of the sample is wasted unless I can find someone else who likes it.

I think 15 grams, or a little over half an ounce, is a sweet spot for me, in terms of sample size. This allows for 6 or more Western-style brewings, or for 1-2 Gong Fu brewings, with leaf left over if only done once. Being able to experiment with different styles of brewing helps me to really understand the tea.

Sample Pricing:

The size of tea samples is closely related to pricing. For inexpensive teas, especially with smaller samples, the cost of packing and labelling the sample is probably going to be larger than the cost of the tea itself.

For pricey teas and larger samples, the cost of the tea becomes significant. This phenomenon is very clearly evident in the catalog of Upton Tea Imports, which has a minimum sample size of $1 for 15 grams, and many teas with this price point, but also many teas which go much higher, including for smaller samples (the priciest I've seen from them was $8 for 2 grams).

My recommendation to companies is to price your samples as low as you can without losing money or undercutting the price of the next-largest quantity after the sample. Why? Samples are a great way to bring in new customers, and they prevent existing customers from ending up with teas they are not happy with. You might say: "But what about people who just like sampling teas...like you, Alex? Won't they put us out of business?" First of all, I said as low as you can without losing money. But I also want to point out that the people, like me, who order obscene numbers of samples and then never order those teas again, are the people who really think about tea. I may never re-order the vast majority of teas I sample, but I write about each one of them online, and often talk about them with my friends. By catering to the sampling crowd, you get free advertisement.

What do you think?

If you are a tea drinker, what is your ideal sample size when you are looking to try new teas? How often do you order samples, and how big a factor is sample size in choosing whether or not to buy from a company?

And if you work for or own a tea company, how do you determine the sample size to offer? And how do you set the price?

Babelcarp: A Website For Translating Chinese Tea Terminology

Today I want to introduce a resource that I have been using for quite some time, and that was very helpful in researching material for RateTea: this is Babelcarp: A Chinese Tea Lexicon, a website with an extensive database of tea terminology. Babelcarp is run by Lew Perin, who is available on twitter under the handle babelcarp.



What's in the name?

Babelcarp is a play on the name babelfish. The babel fish was created in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, and came to life as Babelfish, an online automated language translator, which was run by Altavista back in the day, and is now run by Yahoo. Babel is an obvious reference to the Tower of Babel, well-known from the biblical story. Carp, on the other hand, are a diverse group of freshwater fish native to Europe and Asia; they are important in China; cultivated carp originated in China, so the carp is a suitable symbol of a Chinese translator. The word carp also means to complain or find fault--which is also relevant here, as using babelcarp can help you to become more critical of some of the misuse of Chinese tea terms that is common on the web and elsewhere in Western society.

Why use babelcarp?

Babelcarp is an exhaustive resource that goes very deep into Chinese tea production and culture. It's somewhere between a dictionary and encyclopedia...almost like a glossary specifically oriented for Chinese tea enthusiasts. To give you an example of how deep it goes, there is an entry on chaxiaoluyechan (Cha2 Xiao3 Lu4 Ye4 Chan2) = (茶小绿叶蝉 or 茶小緑葉), which is a leaf-hopper insect that is responsible for the unique flavor of Bai Hao Oolong.

Another feature I really like about babelcarp is that it provides the tones to pronounce the names in Mandarin (denoted by the numbers after the romanized syllables), and lists both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Having both is important, as mainland China uses simplified characters, and Taiwan and many older Chinese communities in other countries use the traditional characters.

Visit babelcarp for yourself, type some terms into it, and see for yourself how useful it is! If you write about tea online, especially Chinese tea, you will likely find it an unparalleled resource. It's also good site to bookmark or remember if you regularly need to translate Chinese tea terminology. And hopefully, after this post, you'll easily remember the name.

Downtime, Tea, Birding, and Warblers

The term downtime or down time has two uses. In computing and information technology, or when referring to any sort of technology or machines, downtime refers to the time on which a system or machine is down or out of operation. In human terms, however, downtime can refer to a period of rest or relaxation. I hesitate to use the term "non-productive" because I find rest to be of paramount importance in productivity. In fact, one of the things I most like about drinking tea is that the time to make and then drink tea provides a break. Even if you drink tea at a desk, while working on other things, the act of pausing to take a sip provides a microbreak; these tiny breaks can reduce the risk of work-related injury, as well as enhancing your concentration and focus.

Today, however, I took more than a microbreak. After starting work fairly early, the servers that RateTea and a number of other websites that I run are hosted on experienced some downtime. While this was slightly annoying, the problem was fixed relatively quickly. During this time, however, I was unable to do the work I wanted to do. Given that it is still during the peak warbler migration season, I headed outside to Woodlands Cemetery to do some birdwatching.



Unfortunately, I did not have my camera on me; the above pictures are all pictures I have taken, of warblers, at various times. Today I saw a black-throated blue warbler, pictured upper-right, and a northern parula, pictured lower-left, and a black-and-white warbler, pictured top left. The other bird pictured here, yellow-rumped warbler, I did not see today (they tend to arrive in large numbers in a few weeks), but I also saw a chestnut-sided warbler, pine warbler, bay-breasted warbler, magnolia warbler, and American redstart. All in all, I saw 8 species of warbler and 23 total species of birds. Given that this was just a casual walk around an urban cemetery, and not a planned trip where I tried to see as many birds as possible, I find this amount of biodiversity staggering.

When I returned, the servers were back up. This was down time for me, but I was still working in a sense. I systematically gathered data on what birds I saw, and entered the data into eBird, which is a joint effort of the Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. eBird solicits data from casual volunteers as well as scientists and people conducting systematic bird surveys, and collects it into one master database, a lot like I collect data on tea into the master database at RateTea. If you birdwatch, eBird is an invaluable resource, but even if you just find wild birds interesting and want to learn more about them, I would also recommend checking out this site.

Warblers, Other Birds and Tea?

What do warblers, or birds in general, have to do with tea? I've noticed that a number of tea bloggers write about birds from time to time, and I've noticed that people who are interested in wild birds tend to be more likely to be interested in tea, and vice versa. Why? Often, I find tea bloggers mention birds when they mention changes in seasons, as the changes in which birds are present and in the birds' songs and behavior marks the changing of seasons.

But I also find that birds and tea actually have some more things in common, possibly because they are both organic or natural, dealing with living organisms: they both have a similar type of diversity. And both birding and tea appreciation involve honing one's perception. With tea, it's mainly smell and taste, and with birds, it's sight and hearing, that one develops. When one starts drinking tea, it's pretty easy to see and taste the difference between black tea and green tea. When starting to watch birds, it is also pretty easy to tell a crow from a sparrow.

The warblers, on the other hand, are often among the most challenging birds to identify. Many of them only arrive during a brief 3-week window of migration, once in the spring, and again in the fall. A large number of warblers have different plumage in different seasons, and have different male and female plumage. Furthermore, they're tiny, and most of them move very quickly; many of them tend to spend most of their time high in trees, where they are often backlit or hidden by branches or foliage. Learning to identify these birds is a lot like learning the differences between one tea garden and another, or being able to just look at a steeped oolong leaf and know what cultivar it came from. Birding and tea are both areas where one can continually learn more, developing greater skill and greater nuance in perception.

How about you?

Do you value down time? Have you ever experienced server downtime? Do you think one of the most valuable aspects of tea is way it provides a restful break? Do you pay attention at all to wild birds? Have you ever been birdwatching, had a bird feeder, and you ever heard of eBird?

Let me know!

Milestones: Happy Birthday RateTea

Happy Birthday to RateTea:

This past monday, the 19th, marks the 2-year anniversary of RateTea. This is a rather exciting milestone for me, and I feel rather silly having missed it.

Some of the biggest accomplishments related to RateTea lately involve a series of subtle and a few not-so-subtle changes to the visual design of the site, which I am hoping to continue, with the help of Sylvia, who is now working with RateTea on both the look and feel of the site, and as an editor. These changes include making a professional logo so that the site can have a consistent presence across the web, and printing business cards with the logo. And of course, attending World Tea East was also an important milestone.

My 500th Review:

Yesterday marked my 500th review on the site, which was a review of Maya Tea's Tulsi or Holy Basil. I've become quite a fan of this herb, having sampled 5 commercial blends of it. It is relatively tough to find 5 different commercially-available sources of Tulsi, although I currently have only 6 different sources listed on RateTea's page on Tulsi. I also have had tulsi grown myself...both fresh and dried...so add 2 more to that mix.

I find it interesting that my 500th review wasn't actually tea. Of those reviews, 92 of them are of herbal teas. I certainly am very interested in herbal teas and one of the things that I want to do is to convince people that just about any plant can be as interesting as tea, if you put as much effort into carefully cultivating it, and then appreciating it. But of course, most of my reviews are about tea--and pure teas, not flavored ones (276) so this is still where my focus is.

Happy first day of fall!

Another interesting milestone is the changing of the seasons; today is officially the first day of fall. I began the day today with a cup of Caykur's Earl Grey...this is a tea produced in Turkey, and the brand, Çaykur, is fully-owned by the Turkish government. This particular tea, although broken-leaf, was quite good, especially for its very low price. I hope to write more about Turkish tea, as the tea itself, and the economics of it, are both rather interesting topics.

But, for now, I must conclude this post...I have a busy day ahead of me, and it is raining. (I love rain.)

Food for thought:

What are some of your recent milestones in tea?