Blind Oolong Tea Tasting with Evan, Brandon, and Others

I recently had the pleasure of attending a blind tea tasting, hosted by Evan Draper, who runs the not-so-active blog Pluck Tea. Incidentally, Brandon of Wrong Fu Cha also attended.

Pictured here is the setup at the very end of the tasting:

In addition to the tea, there were bowls of figs and concord grapes to snack on.

There were seven of us, and Evan proceeded to brew up 7 teas, each of which had been packaged with a mystery label that we opened after the fact. We drank four infusions of each tea. We each took note of all the teas while drinking them, and discussed them before revealing their identity. I took separate notes on each infusion.

I think this sort of setup is a great exercise, because it forces us to pay attention to the tea itself, without allowing us to bring preconceptions based on the tea's origin. We knew nothing about the brands or types of teas, although it was quickly evident that they were all oolongs. Evan used a gaiwan for brewing, rather than an Yixing teapot, which allowed for a purer experience of each tea, rather than having it be influenced by the seasoning of the pot.

Brewing for richness of experience instead of consistency:

One thing I liked about how Evan approached the brewing in this gathering was that the way he brewed these teas brought out different characteristics of the tea in each infusion, which I think helped greatly in the blind tasting setup. By contrast, some people (Evan has done this before) often carry out Gong Fu brewing in such a way that the tea keeps a more consistent character through each infusion. Although this can be pleasant for enjoying the tea, I found the approach Evan used here was more fruitful for actually understanding the tea.

The difference between these two approaches? I'm no expert at Gong Fu brewing but I tried to pay attention to what Evan was doing, and from comparing to my own experience, using a briefer second infusion, and a slightly longer first infusion, often seems to result in a more consistent character, whereas keeping the first two infusions closer in length seems to result in more of a difference between the two cups. The difference usually manifests in the first cup being more aromatic but the second being more flavorful, which I find helps to separate these two characteristics of the tea. However, it also can bring out different qualities of aroma between the first two cups.

Brandon's knowledge impresses:

If you are a die-hard tea enthusiast living within driving distance of Wilmington, Delaware, and have not yet had the opportunity to meet up with Brandon, I would recommend doing so. His knowledge and expertise of teas is uncannily impressive...it reminds me of my Ornithology professor, Greg Shriver, who can walk out in a salt marsh and hear a tiny, brief buzz noise, so quiet or distant that most people in the group did not even hear it, and he would immediately identify the sparrow to species level, long before anyone was able to actually see the bird.

Brandon not only pinned down the variety, county of origin, and style of production of most of these teas merely by sampling them, but was also able to identify the production date of the aged teas with a remarkable degree of accuracy. This level of tea identification skill not only shows that he has sampled a great number of teas, but that he pays attention to nuances of the tea's character enough to identify them with such specificity.

My thoughts on the teas:

I have not yet posted reviews of all the teas, but you can find my reviews of the first two, both from Seven Cups: Old Style Tie Guan Yin 2011, and Old Style Tie Guan Yin 2012. I liked the 2012 tea better, although I did not dislike the 2011 tea quite as much as the others present did, nor did I like the 2012 tea as much as the others seemed to.

The other teas were from the small company Floating Leaves, and I have yet to write up and post reviews.

To be honest, I was not wowed by any of the teas. The first two Tie Guan Yin's were in a similar style to a tea that I gave a 100/100 rating, Life in Teacup's Tie Guan Yin Traditional Roast Master Grade. That tea, granted, is pricier, but I thought it to show a world of difference. I've also had cheaper Tie Guan Yin's that I enjoyed more. The 2011 tea had too much sourness and too little flavor, and the 2012 tea had too much astringency, for my tastes.

There were a lot of oolongs from Muzha in Taiwan, which had been aged in various amounts, and one that was fresher, from 2011. None of these really impressed me. The only tea from Floating Leaves that I really liked was a Dong Ding Select, from Spring 2012. This tea had some interesting complexity, suggesting caramel in the aroma, but with a hint of mint in the finish, something I have never before encountered in a Dong Ding. But at $10 an ounce, it did not seem to compare with other teas in this price range.

The whole experience started to make me wonder if I perhaps have developed somewhat different tastes from the group gathered for this tasting. This morning I'm drinking a rather inexpensive Chinese green tea from Zhejiang province, Mountain Rose Herbs Dao Ren Tea, and I am enjoying it much more than I enjoyed any of the oolongs, in spite of Evan's greater skill at brewing (I've nearly always enjoyed a tea better when Evan brews it than when I prepare it myself).

How about you?

Have you ever participated in a blind tea tasting like the one described here? Have you tried teas from these two retailers? Have you experienced drinking tea with someone who has an insane level of tea identification skills? Have you noticed or thought about the distinction between brewing tea so as to retain consistency between different infusions, vs. brewing it so as to bring out different characters in each cup?

On Comparisons of Sandpiper Size and Tea Tasting: Lessons From Kaufman's Advanced Birding

My girlfriend Kelsey recently gave me a present, the newer edition of Kenn Kaufman's book "Advanced Birding". I'm finding this book has a lot of universal relevance to my life, including to the subject of tea tasting.

It's shorebird migration season, and the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge has been filling up with migrating shorebirds, including an abundance of Least sandpiper, Killdeer, and Lesser Yellowlegs, as well as smaller numbers of Semipalmated plover and a lone Pectoral sandpiper, which I have now seen twice. Identifying these birds is tough, and in many cases, size is an important clue.

One thing that Kaufman, widely respected as an expert birder, points out, is that without a size reference, it is impossible to accurately gauge size. Want an example? Look at this bird, which I photographed in the refuge recently:

How big is it? The photo alone gives no size reference. If I tell you that it is a Least sandpiper, and you know how big that is, then you have a reference. Let me give another example. How big is the same species, the least sandpiper (the smaller bird) in the following photo?

This photo was taken near Las Vegas, by Lip Kee Yap, and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The bigger bird on the left is a Killdeer, a bird, common across much of the US, which can be found both in open, grassy areas like lawns, gravelly areas like railroad beds, and on mudflats alongside sandpipers. Seeing the two birds side-by-side gives us a size reference.

Size is an important clue in bird identification, especially when comparing visually similar birds, like the greater and lesser yellowlegs, or pectoral sandpiper, which is visually similar to the least sandpipers pictured here. Just how similar, you ask? Look for yourself:

This photo is by Andreas Trepte, and is licensed under BY-SA 2.5.

Is this bird bigger than the first bird? Yes, it is significantly bigger, and if you saw them side-by-side, you'd be able to see this very clearly. But looking at one bird alone, with no familiar objects for comparison, the size is impossible to see. And without a size reference, anyone other than an expert would have a tough time knowing that this is even a different species from the sandpiper in the first two photos. Both species have essentially the same plumage pattern, and both have yellow legs, and very similar bill shapes and sizes, and body shapes as well.

But check out these photos of a pectoral sandpiper alongside a Killdeer, or two pectoral sandpipers near a least sandpiper, and you'll see that it's hard to confuse these two species of sandpiper when you see them with a clear size reference, such as side-by-side, or near another species of familiar size. The pectoral sandpiper is much larger!

Back to tea:

I've lost count of the number of times I've described a tea as being "more bitter than" or "sweeter than" another tea, or having more of this aroma or that aroma, when I was only tasting one tea, and comparing it to memory. Do I really know this for sure? In a coarse sense, yes. I can probably tell that a stronger-than-average Irish Breakfast tea is more bitter and robust tasting than a lighter-than-average Darjeeling First Flush, just how, in the field and without a size reference, I can probably tell that a turkey is larger than a sparrow, even if I am only seeing one bird.

But for subtle differences in taste, I'm not sure we can know these things with much certainty, without actually tasting teas side-by-side. I wrote about some time ago, about how mood affects how we perceive taste. When comparing to memory, there is the possibility of remembering things in a skewed fashion. Our memory of an earlier tea when we try a new tea and make a mental comparison may be clouded by our expectations of how we think the new tea is going to taste, and tainted by how favorably we feel about the companies selling both the tea we are drinking and the tea we are comparing it to in our mind.

I'm not convinced I have the ability to be particularly accurate when it comes to these sorts of things.

What do you think?

How much do you think you can tell about how a tea you are drinking compares to a tea in your memory? Do you think the subtle tastes and aromas of tea is easier to compare without direct reference than the size of a lone sandpiper on a distant mudflat? Or do you think we can sometimes be a little over-confident with our comparisons of a tea we are drinking to another tea in our memory?

When Everyone Agrees on a Tea - Or Not?

People have vastly different tastes in tea. This morning, a new review was posted to RateTea, which I happened to read, and this review was of Two Leaves and a Bud's Mountain High Chai. This tea now has five reviews on the site.

Interestingly, four of the five reviews seem to agree on one point: the tea has a strong spice aroma, but the base tea is on the weak side (or mellow/smooth, for people who prefer to phrase it positively). Some people seem to like this and others don't; one reviewer noted steeping the tea for 30 minutes!

I find this interesting, because it is rare that people seem to agree this much about a tea. In general, when I see four out of five reviewers agreeing about a certain characteristic of a tea, I'm likely to believe their reviews.

Checking Steepster, breaking the pattern:

Interestingly, I checked Steepster's records for the same tea and I'm not seeing the same pattern in reviews there. One of the reviewers noted bitter flavors dominating the cup if it is steeped too long.

No consensus on the aroma:

I also read Little Yellow Teacup's review of the same tea, and interestingly, I found that this review said that the aroma was dominated by cinnamon. I tend to strongly dislike masala chai blends that are dominated by cinnamon, and I've found that this one, in my perception, is dominated by clove (which I like more, although in this case I still thought it was a bit unbalanced). I've tried the tea many times over a long period of time too, so if the company changed their formulation, it produced only a subtle change that I did not notice.

I find this difference interesting, because it shows how people perceive aromas differently.

What do you think?

Have you tried this tea?

And do you have any idea why there seems to be clear agreement on RateTea's reviews whereas Steepster's don't seem to show the same pattern? Could the two sites perhaps be appealing to people with somewhat different tastes or different ways of perceiving tea? Or do you think it's just randomness? It is a small sample of reviews in both cases, after all.

And do you think that in general, people are more likely to perceive aromas differently and more likely to agree on flavor (i.e. bitterness, basic strength of a tea)? Or do you think that's just this specific case?

Acquired Tastes, and Biases Against Flavored Teas

I recently read a post by Courtney Powers on The Purrfect Cup, titled Say Goodbye, which highlights a tea purchased in the closing sale for Tony Gebely's Chicago Tea Garden. I first want to say (as I have on various social media sites but have yet to say here on this blog) that I am sad that Chicago Tea Garden is closing.

There was also something that resonated with me a lot about this post, when Courtney started talking about her experience brewing the tea:

I’m getting a light orange bit of sorts on the finish. Which I might have said months ago was just weird and wrong….actually months ago I would have NEVER thought of trying a pu-erh let along one like this. Sadly, my tiny cup and pot are empty…which means I need more!

This remark in particular resonated with me, in that I could relate to how my own experience with tea has changed and evolved over time. I've especially noticed that my tastes seem to broaden over time, and that I develop an ability to appreciate teas that I did not at first. For example, as I write this, I am drinking a green oolong, produced in Vietnam, and sold by Simpson and Vail.

Green oolongs are one category of tea that I often had trouble appreciating. Many of them tasted soapy, skunky, or highly vegetal, and many of them also just tasted bland to me. But now I love green oolongs. Another bias that I find myself confronting over and over again is a bias against flavored teas...I often expect myself to not like them, but then find myself pleasantly surprised when I try a well-executed one. My favorite example of this would be Rishi Tea's Vanilla Mint Pu-erh, but I recently tried a well-executed flavored oolong from Shanti Tea, their Citrus Punch.

How about you?

Which teas did you need to acquire a taste for? That is, are there teas which initially tasted uninteresting or possibly even unpleasant to you, but which you later came to love?

Grasping The Aesthetic Of A Tea Company

In the course of sampling teas and reviewing them, I often go through a process with a new or unfamiliar tea company, in which I move from having no familiarity with the company, to trying one, two, three, and then more teas. Eventually, I form an impression of the company. Besides reflecting on the business, customer service, pricing, and presentational aspects of the company, I also form an impression of what I'd like to call the aesthetic of the tea company's teas. This aesthetic represents what I think of how the company's teas tend to differ from other company's teas, or how they tend to deviate from average or "typical" examples of each type of tea.

The aesthetic of a tea company is a bit of a nebulous concept, like this Lagoon Nebula pictured below, but, like this nebula, it is still a real concept that can, in some cases, be described in words:



Aesthetic can take the form of teas being sweeter or more bitter than typical, or of teas performing better under western-style brewing or gong-fu-style brewing, of the leaf of teas having certain characteristics of color, shape, or form, or of certain aromas being more or less represented than typical.

When comparing similar teas, aesthetic is sometimes subtle. For the most part, if you try a bunch of the same type of tea (like dragon well green tea, or Keemun black tea) from different companies, you'll be trying similar teas. But you will also probably notice certain trends even in these cases, if you pay enough attention. And, when looking at a company's whole catalogue, you will notice much larger trends in terms of which teas they choose to stock.

Some examples of a company's aesthetic that I've noticed:

• Rare Tea Republic struck me as carrying a lot of smoother-than-average teas that had a moderately vegetal flavor, more vegetal than typical, especially for their black teas, but not overwhelmingly vegetal.
• Adagio Teas has seemed to me to carry teas which tend towards a sweeter flavor, with lighter aromas, although they certainly have some exceptions as well.
• TeaVivre's teas struck me as more aromatic than most Chinese teas for sale in the west. Each tea of a familiar style that I tried, conformed closely to the "typical" examples, with traditionally more bitter teas tasting more bitter and traditionally smoother teas tasting smoother.
• Rishi Tea seems to often have bold, edgy teas, with atypical aromas and strong flavors, often a little out of my comfort zone, but always making my tea-drinking experience enjoyable.
• Life in Teacup seems to have a decidedly non-western focus, with more teas that initially taste quite different to a western palate. The company also carries a lot of teas that are less well-known in the West. This company's teas are more likely to strike me as a bit strange, but I've found, they are also more likely to excite me, and I'm more likely to find teas I consider to be truly exceptional from Life in Teacup than from most other companies.
• Simpson and Vail, whose teas I've been sampling recently, seem to have dry leaf that is less aromatic than typical, but I find that their teas are much more pleasant to drink than I'd expect from the aroma of the dry leaf.

Some companies, like Upton, are so diverse that it's hard for me to describe an aesthetic of the company as a whole. And in most cases, I haven't formed enough of an impression to describe a company's aesthetic.

Forming an impression of aesthetic:

In order for me to form what I would consider to be a very solid impression of the company, I like to do the following things:

• Sample some teas that represent the company's strengths - I think that a company's strengths and areas of focus say more about the company than random teas. Even in cases where a company specializes in a type of tea I am less familiar with, I want to really delve into the specialized offerings. When a company offers me samples, I like to accept at least a few samples that the company wants me to try, and that I may initially be less enthusiastic about. Sometimes, like with Rishi Tea's Vanilla Mint Pu-erh, which I would have never chosen to sample on my own, I am pleasantly surprised.
• Sample some of the company's most unique offerings - A recent example of this would be sampling Shanti Tea's Los Andes tea from Guatemala (my review).
• Sample some teas of styles which I am very familiar with - If I try only unfamiliar teas, I don't have a great sense of how the company's teas compare with others, both in terms of quality, and character.

The aesthetic begins to take form:

Once I've begun to sample a sizeable portion of teas from a particular brand or company, I begin to form an impression in my head about what that company's aesthetic is. Every tea company that I have sampled teas from has had its own unique stamp, signature, or characteristic aesthetic, but in some cases, it has been more overt, whereas in other cases, it has been subtle. This aesthetic reflects the decisions of the company's staff in which teas they choose to stock and sell. It also reflects the company's audience, and it may also reflect the companies practices of packing and storing teas, as these influence the tea's flavor as well. For example, I suspect that TeaVivre's loose-leaf tea is so aromatic because it is packed and sealed closer to the source of production and not re-opened after being shipped to the US, in contrast to some companies which import tea and then re-package it.

What do you think?

Do you think that the "aesthetic of a tea company" is a useful concept? Have you formed any impressions about the aesthetics of any tea companies yourself, whether or not you call them by this name? If you've formed an impression of the tea companies I mention here, does your impression fit with mine, or do you have a different view of any of these companies?

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?

Whoops I Did It Again: Tea Does Not Go Well With Grapefruit

Back in December of 2010, I wrote about Grapefruit and Tea, describing how I found that grapefruit did not go well with tea. If you missed that post, there's some interesting material in there both about tea and grapefruit, and about grapefruit's strange drug interactions.

I like grapefruit a lot, and I like eating it in the morning, close to when I drink my tea. Grapefruits have also been in season for some time, although we're nearing the end of the US season and I've found the quality has declined (and price increased) in recent weeks. But when grapefruit is in season, I seem to have a problem, which is that I keep end up consuming tea and grapefruit together, even though I know that I don't like the results.

Photo by J. Smith, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

What happens?

I've recently sampled a lot of teas alongside grapefruit, as grapefruits are in season. I was particularly struck by the effect grapefruit had on TeaVivre's Xin Yang Mao Jian, a brisk green tea that I liked very much. I found the grapefruit took away all the bite from this tea...there was none of the pleasing bitterness that I find so appealing about this tea. But I also found that the aroma was also somehow lost.

I would really like to find a tea that goes well with grapefruit but I have yet to discover one, a year and a half (and two grapefruit seasons) after writing that original post. Any recommendations? Or is this just the way it is?

Interestingly, I never seem to have the same problem with oranges.

Hot Water: Wow, This Tea is Awesome!

Sylvia, who works with me on RateTea, shared an amusing story with me about her friend Abby in college. Abby was preparing to make some tea, but got distracted or sidetracked somehow, and poured a cup of hot water but forgot to actually put any tea in it, and somehow ended up with a mug full of hot water. She then proceeded to sip a cup of hot water, and had the reaction:

Wow, this tea is awesome! What is it?

I found this highly amusing.

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

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?

HELPS Wellness Teas: Taste and Quality of Herbs

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.

The Best Teas: Is It Just About The Caffeine?

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?

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?

Gyokuro: How Does It Make You Feel?

This morning I am drinking gyokuro, or to be more specific, Organic Gyokuro from Upton Tea, which is incidentally made in China. This tea is interesting for me on several levels. For one, it's a Japanese style of tea, made in China. I'm certainly no gyokuro expert, and I can't really testify to its authenticity or being true to the style, but I will say that I think this is a pretty good tea. But in this post, I don't want to focus on the way this tea tastes, or the question of whether China can produce high-quality gyokuro, but rather, the way this style of tea makes me feel.

How does it make you feel?

I actually love questions like "How does it make you feel?", and I have an amusing story about it. When I was at Oberlin college, I had a math professor, Robert Young, who taught Linear Algebra (a subject I initially found both hard and boring) and he somehow made it seem poetic and dramatic. It got better when I took Advanced Calculus from the same professor. He would write a theorem on the board, and then stop and ask, in a very loud voice: "So, how does this make you feel?" On some level, it was hilarious...some people approach mathematics as a dry subject, logical, precise, emotionless. But to many mathematicians, it is not like this...it is more like art, poetry, or music...full of passion and emotion. Some theorems seem strange, often utterly ridiculous. Others seem really cool or exciting. Often, the exciting ones are ones that outline deep or useful connections between seemingly disparate branches of math or mathematical structures, so in a sense, our emotions can guide us towards deeper discoveries and understanding.

In mathematics, I found that asking the question: "How does this make me feel?" allowed me to tap into this hidden mental ability of intuition that I had...allowing me to guide my logic. I started seeing the logic as superfluous, the icing on the cake, or perhaps just a path through a jungle of symbols and equations, whereas underlying everything was a core idea, a sort of spiritual truth or destination, and it was emotion and intuition that allowed me to distill the essence of the truth, and find that path through the jungle.

Back to tea:

So, in short, I find that asking how something makes me feel is often a path to insight or truth. Why is this important with tea? Tea is something that we drink, it's a mixture of chemicals that we put in our body, and it affects our mind and body both through its chemistry and through the mental processes set in motion by our experience of drinking it. And it's important for us to reflect on how tea makes us feel because it may make us feel better, and it may make us feel worse. This feeling may depend on what tea we are drinking, and what state our bodies and minds are in to begin with.

It is important to ask this question because asking it allows us to take care of our bodies by giving our bodies what they need and avoiding things that may be harmful or stressful.

On Gyokuro:

Gyokuro is an interesting style of tea because it is one that I did not particularly like at first. I initially found it to be too vegetal for my tastes. But I paid attention to the way I felt after drinking it and I realized that I enjoy the way it makes me feel. It just seems to make me feel good, in a sort of centering way, a little bit like meditation does. I think this slowly started making me like it a bit more. I think I now like it at least as much as other styles of green tea, if not slightly more. I think this process of tasting and sampling, followed by reflection on how we feel is actually part of the process of forming acquired tastes.

What affects how gyokuro makes one feel? I have read in numerous sources that gyokuro is high in caffeine among teas, although I have not found a single source I truly trust on this matter, so as far as I'm concerned, this observation is still speculative. I have seen reliable sources, however, which say that gyokuro has about twice as much L-theanine as typical for tea. Theanine is not well understood, but it is known to interact with caffeine as well as to play some role in promoting relaxation. Does this explain gyokuro's positive, centering effects? Possibly. But it's hard to say for sure. All I can say with certainty is that I can try individual teas and find which ones I enjoy more...both in terms of their flavor and their effect on my mind and body.

How about you?

Do you gain insight into your life by asking yourself how various things make you feel, physically, or emotionally? Do you like gyokuro...the way it tastes, or the way it makes you feel? What teas make you feel the best?

Tea as Slow Food: Fast Tea vs Slow Tea

Today I want to write about a social movement that, in my opinion, is directly related to the world of tea. This is the slow food movement. Slow food is a broad and far-reaching concept; it can be seen as an opposite or alternative to "fast food". The idea of slow food is to preserve and create new traditional local and regional cuisines, to enjoy food together with people, and to become more aware of where our food comes from. By promoting local food cultures, the movement encourages diversity, and by promoting local foods and raising awareness of how food is produced, the movement promotes sustainability. The huge number of tags I've classified this post with demonstrates that this movement is related to many different facets of the things I care about.

The logo of this movement is a snail, cutely symbolic of slowness:



Wikipedia has a great article about slow food, which I would recommend at least glancing at. If you want official information from the movement itself, you can visit the websites of Slow Food International or Slow Food USA. The slow food movement is something I strongly support, so I would urge you to check it out, and give some thought to what it advocates, beyond just reading this post.

How does slow food relate to tea?

Tea, like any food or beverage, can be viewed (and produced/consumed) in any number of different ways. Virtually everything about the slow food movement can be applied to tea, except possibly the "buy local" part (although one can still buy or grow local herbs for use in herbal teas, and one can certainly support local tea shops and tea houses). Using the concept of "fast food vs. slow food" as a continuum, we have two different "ends of the spectrum" so to speak.

Tea as fast food: "fast tea":

The ultimate manifestation of tea as fast food is ready-to-drink tea, which includes both bottled tea and tea in cans and other types of containers. This tea is brewed in a factory, packaged, and sold as-is. Ready-to-drink tea is fast food, in that it is quick and easy to purchase and then immediately drink, and that it is primarily an industrial product, produced in a factory, with minimal preparation on behalf of the person consuming it.

Tea as slow food: "slow tea":

At the opposing, "slowest" end of the spectrum, would be single-estate, single-harvest whole-leaf teas, processed by traditional methods, and brewed traditionally in loose-leaf form. Tea traditions are diverse, so I will not claim that "slow tea" needs to be brewed gong fu style in a gaiwan or Yixing tea pot. There are rich tea traditions in eastern and western Europe, in the middle east, and all across the globe, and they each have different practices of enjoying tea. But in order for it to be slow tea, it needs to be brewed at the point of drinking, and it needs to be brewed and drunk with care and thought.

Slow tea, like slow food, encompasses not just the production of the tea, but also the enjoyment of it. Slow tea is not just about the tea originating in a specific garden, but it is about the person drinking the tea knowing which garden it is from, and knowing when it was harvested, and knowing a bit about what makes this tea special. And slow tea involves paying attention to how the tea tastes, and enjoying the setting and process of drinking tea, whether it's a calm, meditative tea session alone, or sharing tea with friends or family.

Most tea is somewhere in the middle:

Relative to loose-leaf tea, tea bags certainly move much farther in the direction of "fast tea", but from the vantage point of bottled or ready-to-drink teas, they are more "slow".

In summary:

The slow food movement is a social movement which promotes greater awareness of and enjoyment of food, including awareness of where food comes from, enjoyment of food, and preservation and promotion of local food cultures. Slow food can easily be applied to tea, and pushes one in the direction of single-estate, single-harvest, loose-leaf teas, brewed with care and enjoyed mindfully either in a private reflective state, or shared with friends or family.

Slow tea and RateTea:

Personally, I want to support the slow food movement and what it advocates for. One of the main motivating factors behind creating RateTea is to get people to think more about tea, in the same sort of framework that the slow food movement works. I want people to rate teas not to discover which tea is "best" in some absolute sense, but just because I want them to start thinking about how their tea tastes...a key idea with RateTea is that the ratings and reviews are tied into a database that classifies each tea by style and by region, and in one click, a person can go from a page of a specific review, or a specific tea, to an article about that style of tea, or that tea-producing region. The idea is to draw casual tea drinkers in and open the world of high-quality loose tea to them, and in doing so, get them to think more about food and drink as a whole, and hopefully, move our society in the direction of greater sustainability in the process, so that we are all healthier, happier, and more able to appreciate all our food and drink, and where it comes from.

How about you?

Were you aware of the slow food movement before reading this post? Where do you think your own tea habits fall on the fast food / slow food spectrum? Does your interest in awareness of tea's production and enjoyment of artisan teas carry forward into your appreciation and awareness of food in general? Were you aware of my intentions of promoting "slow food" through RateTea or do you think this is something it would be good for me to emphasize more on the site?

Wintergreen Tones in Black Tea

One of my favorite tea blog posts of all time is Sir William of the Leaf's review of 2006 Haiwan "Purple Leaf"; in which he is astounded by the pork- and bacon-like qualities evident in this Pu-erh cake.

When a person has tried many teas, and they sample a pure tea and encounter an unusual aroma, it often grabs their attention. Today this happened to me for the second time, which sparked me to write about it. The aroma in this case was wintergreen. The first tea I sampled which exhibited wintergreen tones in the aroma was Upton Tea Imports' TC53: Uva Highlands Estate BOP. The second tea, which I sampled today, also from Upton, was TK18: Livingstonia Estate GFBOP. Both of these teas stand out in that I have never even detected more than the faintest suggestion of wintergreen in any tea, which is interesting because wintergreen is an aroma that is relatively common in various plant sources, and is distinct and easily recognizable to me as it is one of my favorite smells or flavors.

What is wintergreen?

Several evergreen leafy plants bear the name wintergreen. The wintergreen that I know, Gaultheria procumbens, is an evergreen leafy plant that grows in heavily-shaded areas of forests, especially those with poor soil and heavy accumulation of needle litter from pine, hemlock, and other dense evergreen trees. The plant, which tends to grow along the ground, has tiny, starchy red berries, and tough, but strongly aromatic leaves.



This public domain photograph was taken by Mike Serfas; original on wikimedia commons.

There is a lesson about tea here as well. The evergreen nature of wintergreen, just like the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, is primarily an adaptation to the low nutrient levels: by holding onto its leaves for multiple years, this plant conserves nutrients in an environment where nitrogen in particular is in short supply. Recall that tea plants are able to grow wild in areas, such as exposed rocks high in the Wuyi mountains, where there are very low nutrient levels.

The distinctive wintergreen aroma is actually due to a single chemical, methyl salicylate, which according to Wikipedia makes up 98% of the essential oil of the wintergreen plant. This chemical occurs in numerous other plants as well, including the bark of birch trees, and is responsible for the commonalities in aroma between wintergreen tea and birch beer, as well as some of the medicinal effects of plants containing this chemical, which is closely related to salicylic acid, the chemical in willow bark that originally spawned the development of aspirin. Methyl salicylate is also responsible for the "spark-in-the-dark" phenomenon that can be observed when crunching wintergreen Life Savers in between your teeth. The chemical is toxic in high doses.

I did some digging and found that pure black tea naturally contains methyl salicylate. I found this absolutely fascinating. So it was not just all in my head!

More about the teas:

I must say, I absolutely love the Livingstonia Estate GFBOP. This tea is from Tanzania. Upton points out that most tea produced in Tanzania is CTC (Crush-Tear-Curl), mechanically processed tea, and this tea, using orthodox production methods, is rather unusual. I found this tea to be delightfully complex, strong, but balanced. Another interesting tone besides wintergreen that I detected in the aroma of this tea was Queen Anne's lace, a distinctive-scented wildflower which is actually the wild version of the domestic carrot. ( my review )

The Uva Highlands Estate BOP was a tea that I was less excited about. I found that tea to be rather tannic, and easily became too bitter and astringent if brewed for more than a couple minutes. Its aroma was less complex; the main distinguishing feature I noticed about this tea was the wintergreen tones in the aroma, which were stronger and more well-defined than the Tanzanian tea. This alone made the tea interesting and worth trying. ( My review )

Have you ever noticed wintergreen in the aroma of any black tea, or any tea for that matter? It's in there, at least, somewhere, in some black teas!

The Common Cold Interferes with Taste and Smell

Apologies for the dearth of updates. I have recently moved from Delaware to Philadelphia, which has been time consuming, and I have not kept up with updating all my sites. I will write more about the move later, as there are some tea-related points to moving! But for now, I want to write about another thing which has slowed me down a bit from writing about tea: I came down with a cold last week. Colds are mainly an annoyance. But when it comes to tasting tea, they are more than an annoyance, they actually stop me from being able to experience a cup of tea the way I normally do.

People often complain that their sense of taste and smell is changed when they have a cold, and that in general, they cannot smell things as effectively. A cold is an infection of the upper respiratory tract, which includes the parts of the nose which are responsible for our senses of smell. I find that when I come down with a cold, my sense of smell is often among the last things to return to normal.

I have a bunch of tea samples sitting in my cupboard, waiting to be tasted, but I feel they would be wasted for me to drink them until I'm 100% better.

Teas I drink when I have a cold:

I do drink tea a lot when I have a cold, but my experience of it is rather different. When I am sick, it is primarily the hot fluid that I seek out. I find that I prefer strong-tasting teas, and I tend to not enjoy oolong or white tea as much. Often, when I am thinking of what tea to make, I'll reach for a usual favorite and then think: "No, I'll save that till when I'm well."

I often drink a lot of additional herbal tea in addition to the usual number of cups of black or green teas. Many herbal teas I find help with cold symptoms. Blends containing peppermint or eucalyptus can greatly clear out the sinuses, and I find those containing rooibos to help with breathing. There is also something pleasing about these strong aromas: even if my sense of smell is inhibited, these aromas are able to get through and I am able to experience a pleasingly aromatic hot drink. I also tend to seek out lemony herbs, and I tend to like to prepare them rather strongly. When I have access to a fresh supply of it, I will typically make teas from lemon balm, but here I have been drinking mostly lemon verbena (which I have found I enjoy more than lemongrass).

I also find that my sense of taste changes, in addition to smell. I tend to seek out salty foods, possibly because my body is losing more salt if I'm blowing my nose. I also notice that I often want to add honey to tea, especially when the cold is at its worst.

How does your tense of taste and smell change when you have a cold? And how does your experience of drinking tea change, and how do your choices of what teas to drink change?

Tea Companies: Diversify Your Offerings of Similar Teas

I recently read a post on Nicole's blog Tea For Me Please that provoked some thought; it was a single review of TeaGshwendner's Darjeeling Steinthal First Flush. At the end of the review, Nicole remarked:

This is the third Darjeeling that I have tried from TeaGshwendner and they have all been very different from each other.

I think that this comment highlights one key piece of advice for tea companies: diversify your offerings of similar teas (i.e. teas of the same style or from the same region). Diversification grabs the attention of variety-seekers. If someone samples three similar-looking teas from your company and they're radically different, they will be more motivated to try each one of your offerings. If, on the other hand, all three teas are similar, the person may assume that the rest are more similar, and may seek another company if they're truly looking to diversify.

Diversifying your offerings also increases the likelihood that you'll help a customer locate a tea that is an all-time favorite. Most of us have one or two teas that, even when we are itching to sample more new teas, we keep coming back to, the teas that we like to drink for comfort when we're having a bad day, the ones we buy in quantity, over and over again. This phenomenon provides yet another advantage to intelligent diversification.

What happens when your teas are too similar?

I'm going to pick on Upton Tea Imports because it's my favorite tea company. While I love Upton's huge catalog, its large size (over 420 different offerings) is definitely intimidating to newcomers. When your catalog is this big, you want to think carefully before adding a new tea: each tea should offer something genuinely different: either a unique flavor or aroma, a different price point, or something else compellingly different (like organic, fair trade, or biodynamic certification).

Upton usually is pretty good on the diversification, but, at least as far as I am concerned, they did fail to sufficiently diversify on one count: their offerings of the standard, dark-oxidized Formosa oolong. Upton's offerings in this realm range from the bargain-priced TT10, fannings, which is currently unavailable, through four progressively higher grades of tea of basically the same style, TT17 (80g for $7.80), before making a dramatic price jump to the next grade. The price differences of these teas are negligible from one grade to the next, and, having sampled all of them, although there are definitely subtle differences from one tea to the next, they're basically similar teas.

Upton's catalog, on the other hand, has holes as far as other teas are concerned; they still do not carry any medium-priced or inexpensive pouchong / bao zhong. As much as I love Upton, I've tended away from them for my oolongs. Life in Teacup is one company that I have been more impressed with in the realm of oolongs, both Chinese and Taiwanese. You can read my recent reviews of Life in Teacup Teas; I was particularly impressed by the diversify of their Se Chung oolongs, and I have some more oolong samples that I have yet to try.

Now that I've given Upton a hard time, I want to give them credit where credit is due. Upton does their diversification astonishingly well in the area of Darjeelings. This is pretty amazing given the sheer number of different teas they sell. But there are other companies that have also impressed me in this realm: Fresh Darjeeling Tea is one worth mentioning, even though their catalog is relatively small: I've only sampled a few teas from them but they've been radically different both from each other and from any other Darjeelings I've tried.

Do you have any favorite examples of companies doing a good job (or poor job) of diversifying their offerings of similar teas?

Do you review teas the first time you drink them?

Do you review teas after the first time you drink them? I rarely do. When I do, it's usually only when I have enough tea only for a single cup or single brewing session, such as as when I have a lone tea bag from a commercial brand, or a very small loose-leaf sample.

Sometimes I feel a bit negligent when I'm taking my time. For example, recently I received a package from Sacred Rose, a company that sells herbal tea blends. I have begun to sample their herbal teas, and I will say that I am impressed. However, the package arrived a couple weeks ago, and I have yet to write a single review.

I also still have not reviewed all the teas I bought from Wegmans. Today I published a review of their Tomo Sencha.

Stay tuned; I will review all these teas and more!

Why wait so long?

I see several benefits in waiting to review a tea:

• Sampling multiple times allows you to experiment with brewing method, both so that you can say something about how to brew the tea in your review, and so that you can arrive at what you see as the best brewing method to bring out the qualities of the tea you enjoy most.
• Since mood and environmental factors affect your perception of tea, sampling a tea on different days, at different times of day, and in different contexts helps you to get a sense of what about your experience is really about the tea itself, and what was more a function of your mood or environment.
• Many teas, especially unfamiliar ones, I do not fully enjoy the first time I try them. Tea is often an acquired taste, and I like to give myself an opportunity to acquire the taste of a new and unfamiliar tea before writing a review. There are some teas that I've outright disliked the first time I tried them, that I came to absolutely love in the end.

For me, this process sometimes works best if I space out my drinking of the teas over a couple oy weeks. How about you? How much do you wait and experiment before writing your tea reviews?

Aromas Inexplicably Popping Into Your Mind

A while back I wrote a post where do you notice that aroma?, in which I talk about priming and the recency effect, the phenomenon by which you are more likely to recognize sensations (including smells) that you've experienced recently: thus, if you ate a peach earlier in the day, you will be more likely to "find" a peach-like aroma in your tea.

Today, I'm writing about a closely related phenomenon: when you've tried something, and, rather than finding a similar-smelling aroma somewhere in your physical environment, you experience a vivid memory of that aroma, in the absence of any clear physical stimulus.

Why do I have a picture of the liberty bell?



I chose a bell to illustrate this phenomenon for the simple reason that, for me at least, a bell is a prime example of a sensory stimulus that remains vividly in memory. Bells are meant to have this effect: they are used to announce the passage of time, or the commencement of an event or gathering, and there is something about the ringing of the bell that makes a person stop and focus on it. I often am able to hear a bell ringing vividly in my mind well after it stops ringing, in contrast to other sounds which are more fleeting in my memory.

Yesterday, I experienced this phenomenon a while after drinking a cup of Rishi Tea's Jade Cloud, which is a green tea I enjoy very much. The tea had long since cleared my palate, and in fact, I had even drunk a cup of chamomile since then. And yet, staring out the window, the aroma of the Jade cloud inexplicably popped back into my mind, vividly, like I had just taken a sip. Why does this happen? I don't know. But I find it fascinating.

A theory about why this happens:

I've noticed that this phenomenon seems to have a limited time-window in which it occurs. It seems to happen most within a range of a few hours after drinking something, and rarely happens more than a day later. Is this an artifact of the way the brain forms memories? Or could there perhaps be a biological purpose for this phenomenon?

One thing that I think about a lot is the process of developing and changing our taste preferences based on our experiences with eating different foods and drinking different beverages. The natural environment that humans are adapted to live in is one in which there are many strange, poisonous substances. But being open to locate and identify new food sources, as well as helpful medicinal plants, would have a clear survival advantage. I have a theory that this phenomenon of aromas popping into our head is actually part of an innate mechanism which helps us to not only identify new food sources, but identify different medicinal plants, and to some degree, identify their function as well.

We often have a natural aversion to new tastes, but warm up to them slowly as we try new substances and feel good after eating them. Perhaps this phenomenon of aromas popping into the head is a way for the brain to check in and connect the aroma of the food or drink to the way we feel, forming an association between the outcome (the state of our body) and the possible cause (the new, unfamiliar substance we've recently consumed).

If we feel nauseous or out of balance, the brain will make a note and we may feel nauseous next time we encounter that aroma. If we feel any other way, such as peaceful, alert, thirsty, hungry, or some other way, the brain will note this as well. Then, when later presented with the substance, we would receive a signal from our brains about how we could expect to feel after eating or drinking it. As such, our brains would have the remarkable capacity to develop the ability for us to seek out food, drink, and substances that keep our body in balance.

This is just a theory. But it fits with everything I have experienced in my life, and with a lot of things that I know about science. What do you think? Is it too far-fetched? Or do you think there's something in this idea?

Does mood affect your tasting of tea?

I was inspired to think and write about this topic by Amy of a girl with tea, who recently wrote a post titled Bad Mood = Bad Tea?



When people brew the same tea twice and end up with a radical different experience drinking it, those who are scientifically and mechanically minded often tend to look for explanations in terms of more objective and more easily quantifiable factors, such as water temperature, amount of leaf used, steeping time, and for the more nuanced among us, finer details of water quality or the type of vessel used to brew the tea. Yet another level of subtlety is to consider the size and shape of the vessel we drink from, which influences our perception of aroma as it changes how the smells rise from the cup, and also our perception of flavor as it can influence the heterogeneous distribution of various chemicals in different layers in the cup (for example, I notice that when drinking from a tall mug, certain flavors sink to the bottom of the cup).

But are these factors the biggest factors influencing our tasting experience? There are some teas where subtle differences in brewing temperature or steeping times can lead to major changes in how the tea tastes, but for the most part, the changes in taste affected by changes in these objective, external factors are relatively subtle. But there are some other factors that influence taste, and to find these, we need to look within, and at phenomena that are tougher to measure or pinpoint:

How does the state of our mind and body influence taste?

I've noticed that my taste perception is highly dependent not only on mood but on other factors within my own body. What I've eaten recently (even if the taste has long cleared my palate) and whether or not I'm hungry both influence my perception of taste in profound ways. My mood definitely influences my perception of taste, sometimes, like Amy pointed out, to the extreme of making a tea I would otherwise enjoy taste unpleasant or strange, if I'm in a bad mood. My mood is influenced by my environment and context, and especially, the company of whomever I'm with. I also notice that different teas taste different at different times of day.

There is actually solid science behind these seemingly crazy concepts. The Economist published an article a while back about how hormones influence perception of sweetness. Another article about taste published in The Independent explores how taste is influenced by factors as diverse as mood, hormones, lighting, association with various experiences, age, and genetics (and those are just a few of the topics touched on in that article).

There are many internal factors which influence taste, as well as external factors independent of the chemistry of the tea itself.

So, next time you wonder why a certain tea seems to taste different from the last time you brewed it, don't assume that this difference can be attributed to a difference in brewing. It may be your mood, hormones, company, the lighting, or some other factor that you can't even imagine.