July 2011 Archives

My latest home tea adventure was a box of eleven astoundingly delicious samples from the Jing Tea Shop, in China.  (Apparently the Canton Tea Co. is their reseller in the UK, so you may have tasted some of their teas without knowing it.)

I'm sure I'll be raving about the individual teas from time to time, as posts go by.  However!  What I want to talk about (and hopefully get some feedback on) today, is that at the bottom of every white, yellow, or, in this example, green tea's page, they post this tip:

When you brew Chinese green tea in a gaiwan, always leave a little bit of tea in the gaiwan between each infusion. This is call [sic.] “the root” and will allow you to get the best of the green tea.

I'm no expert, but I've been around a few tea blocks, and have never heard mention of "the root" before.  I plugged Google's fourteen different Chinese translations of the English word "root" into Babelcarp, searched for "root" on the Tea Geek Wiki, and on Wikipedia, read several broadly and specifically related articles, and searched the Internet en général, all to no avail.

The tea world's track record on issues of disseminating accurate information, making firm delineations between history and legend, and refraining from just straight up fabricating something because it makes a good story, has been pretty well documented to be far from spotless.  But this relatively inconsequential — though quite useful — fact strikes me as more the kind of thing that is just such a part of the scenery of common practice that people who know it wouldn't often think to mention it.

I kind of hope so; I love finding out about that kind of thing, either in the mundane realm, or in terms of the deepest assumptions informing people's lives and world-views.  It's sometimes shocking, and always fascinating.  If it weren't for my partner, for example, I might never have really appreciated how, for an introvert like her, interacting with a group of people is usually draining and exhausting; to an extrovert like myself, it's energizing and exciting — sometimes to the point where I get so hopped-up on people I can't sleep.  If it weren't for my friend who's family belongs to a conservative religious sect, I wouldn't have known that they have almost the exact same paranoid fantasies about liberals as we liberals have about conservatives — just reverse the names and there you go!

Anyway, coming back to tea.  I actually noticed the efficacy of this "root" trick long before I realized tea doesn't have to come in a bag.  When I would drink a cup of tea down to the last drop, or press out the bag, the second steeping of the bag would produce very weak tea indeed.  (I can almost hear you tea people cringing!)  But, if I allowed the bag to remain wet, even in a very small amount of liquid, the second cup would be much more satisfactory.

I guess this must rely on the same physical principle that causes a totally dry sponge to be almost incapable of absorbing water at low pressure.  A damp sponge, on the other hand — probably due to some sort of capillary-based wicking effect — can absorb even the tiniest of dribbles.  Makes sense if that holds true for tea leaves, as well.

So, have you heard of the root?  Or, heard of the same concept, but under a different name?  If so, I'd love it if you'd share the proverbial wealth of knowledge in the comments!

"I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement.  "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade."

"A very worthy aim," I replied, thinking carefully about how I could apply queuing theory in this instance.  "Excuse the impertinence, but wouldn't it be better to reverse the queuing order so that the oldest papers were last marked?  It would allow pupils to know their results sooner, and as far as I can see, would not be against the Rules, since queue direction is not specified."

She stared at me oddly, then smiled kindly after having given the matter no thought at all.

I, on the other hand, have been giving a lot of thought to the matter of why I'm keeping this log of my tea experiences.  I've even gone so far as to bounce some ideas around with my Life Coach, Christina.  I leapt into tea blogging with the idea that, so doing, I could provide a unique (ha!) and useful tool for others: a forum in which people could discover new teas, a resource full of new tea-related information, and — if I got it right — even a point around which a community could coalesce.

(fast forward twelve minutes)

Well, I couldn't help but notice that my tea blog is one of approximately three brazilian, and that my tea knowledge is (happily) vastly outstripped by many other members of my new, already well-coalesced community.  So, I'm less and less convinced it will be you, my dear reader, to whom this blog is useful.  If there is someone to whom it will be useful, I believe that someone will be me.

And that, in itself, is a good thing — the blogging equivalent of "Live the Change."  (Or something.)  My problem, rather, is one of outlook: I have trouble believing that "useful to me" is sufficient justification to undertake a project.  (We won't even get into the value proposition of "fun for me"...)

This attitude has stoked my perfectionism, which, in turn, has brought my procrastination to a rolling boil.  That is to say, I have a huge backlog of entries floating around, and it's time for me to pour the juice out before it stews bitter and undrinkable in the old noggin, to extend a metaphor perhaps several steps too far.

So, this is where I'm at.  This is my pencil-lead line on Grandma's kitchen door jamb.  I'm sure future me is already impressed at how much I've grown.

With all that in mind, present-day me is putting the non-metaphorical kettle on the hob, firing up the laptop, and getting ready to walk the well worn path of the ancients: thinking about, writing about, drinking... tea.

To myself I say, "Enjoy!"