How Do You Drink Your Tea?

[RiverNotch]

Part two of a four part series on HOT DRINKS.

As I mentioned before, some days I drink coffee, other days I drink tea. Both, I prepare rather fussily, but the fussiness of coffee is more technical, whereas all the methods of tea preparation I know involve few hard numbers. I would describe how I prepare my coffee as a process, but for tea -- or, at least, for the tea we currently have -- what I perform is more like a ritual or a ceremony. Coffee involves science; tea is an art.

The tea we currently have labels itself as "Young Hyson", though I'm not experienced enough to confirm this. For instruments, aside from those involved in measuring or in heating, I keep a pot and at least two cups. The leaves are steeped multiple times, with one cup used exclusively to measure and, if necessary, cool the water by swirling. Both coffee and tea take about fifteen minutes to prepare, but with coffee, I have to do much of that standing up, intently watching over all that I do; with tea, so long as I have some sort of timekeeping device, I can sit down and just....do something else. I can think.

Coffee seems to embody the active life, while tea well-made embodies the contemplative. This is reflected even in their tastes, with the darkest of pu'erhs punching softer than the lightest of roasts. And, when prepared as a craft -- that is, when I make them with ingredients other than grounds/leaves and water, or through methods other than percolating/infusing -- I typically have an easier time with tea.

Easiest of all the "craft" preparations I know is cold-brewing, which can be performed with either tea or coffee, but cold-brewed coffee tends to be more nondescript than its regularly-brewed counterparts, while green tea retains complexity with either method. "Young Hyson" specifically is a green tea, and the only other "craft" preparation I know for it is preparing it the Moroccan way, where the leaves are practically boiled in the water for a relatively absurd amount of time, then copious amounts of mint and sugar are added to the brew. I genuinely enjoy this, but if my thesis of tea being the more contemplative drink is to be advanced, then the sort of contemplation this method engenders is less aesthetic (or even mystical!) than it is, say, social.

I suppose the same is true for the "craft" preparations I enjoy whenever we have black/red tea. Teh tarik is a method which I began to play around with shortly after a visit to Singapore: concentrated black tea is mixed with condensed milk then poured back and forth between two containers until one gets a reasonably foamy head. Another Southeast Asian method I'm familiar with is teh telur, which is basically eggnog tea. Finally, you have masala chai, where you boil tea in milk with a bunch of spices, and I believe you can "pull" this like one does when making teh tarik.

For more "commercial" tea: I mean, is Nestle or Lipton Iced Tea really "tea"? Or even the flavoured milk of your average boba place? I dunno -- we can't afford an espresso machine, so coffeehouses are in this sense essential, while the tea-making method I most often practice deeply intertwines the brewing with the drinking. If ever our so-called teahouses started to really focus on their tea, rather than on what they served with or even through it....

P.S. There's a really fascinating old book on tea culture in China and Japan (but mainly in Japan, and a Chinese friend notes how some passages are a bit iffy, what with this book having been written in the early 1900s) that I recommend y'all check out: The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura If I'd already figured out the "difference" between coffee and tea I elaborated on in this post before I'd found this book, then this book at least helped me with my articulation.​

 

[RiverNotch]

P.P.S. Tea is commonly understood to include most any herbal infusion, but I don't think this should be the case. English, at least, has a distinct term for it -- tisane -- while you wouldn't exactly confuse tea leaves with those of, say, mint. I'd prefer to deal with those sorts of drinks in another thread xP

 

[firejay1]

Haha. I think it's a little silly to insist that herbal infusions/tisanes and tea be kept separate, since they operate on much the and principle outside of the fact that tea specifically refers to drinks made of a specific type of plant leaves. No one would understand if I started saying I drank barley tisane growing up, or we have chrysanthemum tisane at home, and at the end of the day language exists so we can understand one another.

I also vastly enjoy milk tea, and if anything it's just as much tea as the other thing you've described, but I won't pretend my tastes are especially sophisticated.

I personally drink a cup of matcha in the morning which don't worry, I understand if anything isn't tea, that isn't, because it's a suspension not an infusion at all, but I find it a pretty active process. In large part because I find treating it as an art is silly and a waste of time, so I use a milk frother to suspend it in 2 minutes instead of a bamboo whisk for like 2 hours.

 

[Monbon]

By pouring it down the sink





Jokes aside, I can stand chamomile with a lot of sugar and nothing else. Keeping it basic.

 

[RiverNotch]

I personally drink a cup of matcha in the morning which don't worry, I understand if anything isn't tea, that isn't, because it's a suspension not an infusion at all, but I find it a pretty active process. In large part because I find treating it as an art is silly and a waste of time, so I use a milk frother to suspend it in 2 minutes instead of a bamboo whisk for like 2 hours.

Just to be clear, since I don't think you fully understood my PPS: I'm saying that I prefer the term "tea" to always involve Camellia sinensis, which matcha most definitely does. One of the "craft" methods I describe is actually not an infusion but a decoction. If we just went by "principle" then "coffee" could be tea, since French Press'd coffee is coffee made in the same way (infusion) one makes, say, a fennel tisane. The point is tongue-in-cheek, of course -- English, as a living language, has every right to its semantic ambiguities, just as I often refer to cups of chamomile or rosehip as "tea" rather than "tisanes" -- but that doesn't make it unreasonable. Indeed, I have a suspicion that tisanes are distinguished from teas in the languages of the relatively less privileged cultures where the beverage initially predominated, like China or Japan, and as far as I can tell even the Italian and French languages also actively distinguish between "tè" and, say, "infusi": it seems to be only in English where terms are so readily confused, despite the existence of such terms as not only "tisane" but also "infusion" or "cup/pot of x".

Also, gonna be honest, the "whisking matcha for two hours" joke just doesn't feel right. I think the principal difference between that joke and the comments I made about bubble tea and commercial iced tea (which, don't get me wrong, I still enjoy, and I certainly don't mean to decry anyone for the same enjoyment) is that I'm gently mocking commercial products with no particular cultural significance, whereas matcha is, afaik, treated with some genuine seriousness in its place of origin. There's nothing wrong with playing around with matcha in one's food and drink, especially as there are varieties of matcha that are specifically produced for such purposes, but....I mean, using the bamboo whisk in the traditional way, or even a regular whisk in a semi-regular way, takes the same amount of time, or maybe even less. Not only does the joke not feel right, it just *isn't* right xP

Which leads me to my last criticism. Every field of art can be reasonably viewed as "silly and a waste of time". We're literally at a forum roleplaying website, while tea has existed as a cultural item for at least two thousand years. If anything, how many of us treat it as a mere "picker-upper" is the real aberration....

 

[RiverNotch]

By pouring it down the sink





Jokes aside, I can stand chamomile with a lot of sugar and nothing else. Keeping it basic.

A good drink to drinking teas and tisanes plain is to just think of them as flavored water xD

Though also, and this applies to both tea and coffee, preparing such drinks *well* really is the key. I mention in my coffee thread how light roasted coffees can taste sour or even sweet, while tea that isn't steeped for an absurd amount of time -- my first steeps of our looseleaf green tea typically last 40 seconds, while red/black teas can be steeped in under 30 -- may likewise lack unpleasantness. I do like my sugary drinks, with all but one of the "craft" preparations I listed above being rather sweet, but they're not very sustainable.

 

[Monbon]

A good drink to drinking teas and tisanes plain is to just think of them as flavored water xD

Though also, and this applies to both tea and coffee, preparing such drinks *well* really is the key. I mention in my coffee thread how light roasted coffees can taste sour or even sweet, while tea that isn't steeped for an absurd amount of time -- my first steeps of our looseleaf green tea typically last 40 seconds, while red/black teas can be steeped in under 30 -- may likewise lack unpleasantness. I do like my sugary drinks, with all but one of the "craft" preparations I listed above being rather sweet, but they're not very sustainable.

That's true too. I tell myself I just haven't had a good cup yet.

So correction: Chamomile is the only one that tastes good making it in the microwave*

 

[rissa]

i dump it in the harbor

 

[Astoria]

I'm not picky about my tea. I like a lot of different varieties and flavors, and whatever seasonal mood strikes me for a certain variety. Lately it's been sencha.

I'm fairly basic about how I prepare it. Until my fancier teapot broke a few months ago I would just toss some green tea leaves into the metal strainer and pour in some slightly cooled boiling water, eyeball the time and color and bam. Now I'm just back to being lazy and brewing green tea in a mug...

I really like drinking HK style milk tea as well, but I don't make it that often. It's got too much sugar, and I get anxious about having to use up all the condensed milk in a week because that stuff goes bad quick once opened in the fridge lol.