Tea plantings at San Diego Japanese Garden

San Diego's Japanese Friendship Garden hosted its annual Cherry Blossom Festival this weekend. It's been a long drought here in California, with only two measurable rains this winter, and while the trees struggled to put on their show it was still fairly breathtaing. The garden's coming alive again, though — not only are the plants growing and rejuvenating, but the garden itself is expanding. A significant construction project at the bottom of the canyon will result next year in a grand new tea house (the foundation is kinda huge!), a kitchen, meeting spaces, and an amphitheater.

That means extra plantings, too — including a tea garden!

Along the southeastern slope of the JFG's canyon, in the heart of Balboa Park, more than 1,500 tea plants have been planted. Like the cherry trees, these are special hybrids developed to survive in San Diego's drier climate. Here are some photos taken during my last couple of volunteer shifts at the garden ...

If the tea does well, the garden actually plans to table the bushes, then pluck and process the tea, for use during the garden's monthly Japanese tea ceremonies (usually the first Saturday each month; see the calendar).

Tatezome new year's tea ceremony returns

Hey, locals: Each January, Urasenke Chicago presents a New Year's tea ceremony (Tatezome) and hosts a nice luncheon afterward at the Japan Information Center. I attended and wrote about it a few years ago, enjoyed a rewarding afternoon and met some lovely folks.

The next one is scheduled for Jan. 26, and here's a video of last year's ceremony ...

Earth Day: Grab your travel mug for tea on the go

It's Earth Day, that quaint 24-hour period given over to the planet and the marketers who love it. For the tea world, it's a good reminder to ditch the plastic, styrofoam, even paper cups from your favorite to-go steeping shop. In my experience, most places have no problem filling up your travel mug.

Today, in fact, Starbucks will do it for free! Bring in your earth-conscious, reusable travel mug and get a free tea (from Tazo) or coffee.

I have two travel mugs I like for different reasons. One is blue, has a good-grip rubbery handle and is remarkably well-insulated; sometimes I've filled it with chai, gone for a walk, and returned home before the tea was cool enough to drink without boiling my tongue. The other is pink, has no handle and is just plain cute.

Of course, these are just insulated mugs that could contain anything; they're not specifically built for tea. There are, however, a lot of good travel mugs now especially designed with tea in mind. I've tried a few. Planetary Design makes a nifty French press mug, which is handy and fashionable — but a wee bit leaky on the go (great for an office desk, though). Bodum also makes a line of travel presses.

A new one I've just been trying out is the Libre tea glass, a portable insulated glass (glass inside, plastic outside, cool to carry) with a filter on top for brewing loose-leaf tea. You can actually brew two ways — with tea directly in the glass using the filter to screen the leaves as you drink, or with tea in the filter for brewing. I was a moron, not sure if it was designed for one application only, until I saw this video ...



Good Housekeeping has this good comparison of 27 different tea/coffee travel mugs. That first one, the Thermos tea tumbler, is similar to the Libre glass without, of course, the glass and thus no doubt a tad more rugged out and about.

Watch the 'Tea Mavericks' panel discussion

I finally caught up with this interesting tea event, a discussion with five "tea mavericks," held last week at Samovar in San Francisco. The folks are Rishi Tea CEO Joshua Kaiser, noted tea writer James Norwood Pratt, Numi Tea CEO Ahmed Rahim, the leader of info-sharing website Digg, Kevin Rose, and tea source expert David Lee Hoffman, with Samovar founder Jesse Jacobs. It's about an hour, and you can watch here ...

Tea Mavericks of America from jesse jacobs on Vimeo.

Lollapalooza, Lady Gaga and cans of quenching tea

A month away, welcome back, all. What have I been doing in the meantime? Sweating and hiking through Lollapalooza, for one.

I bring this up here only because the biggest performer at last weekend's annual concert festival here in Chicago's beautiful Grant Park was tea-lover extraordinaire, Lady Gaga. (Of course, we keep calling her a famous tea lover — but the tea cups she carries around as apparent fashion accessories are always empty.) I did my utmost to lurk backstage, hoping to spot our lady taking tea. Alas, nothing. Here's my review of her performance, though, plus all our other Lolla coverage, if anyone's interested.

In other Lady Gaga news, rumors abounded a couple of weeks ago that the pop star was the focus of a bidding war between tea companies vying for her spokeswomanship. This report and others suggested she was going to sign with Twinings, and there's talk of a special Gaga blend. Little Monsters Matcha, anyone?

Another Lollapalooza note: One of the sponsors again this year was Sweet Leaf Tea (their Lollapalooza blog is here). Weather was just not-hot enough that I didn't feel I had to constantly be chugging water all three days, so I was able to enjoy several of their bottled teas to stay hydrated. The cans — cans! — of green tea with citrus, and some with mint, were pretty great. I always say this, but getting the sweetness just right in bottled teas always seems to be a challenge. These Sweet Leaf varieties aren't too sweet; they're nicely balanced and really quaffable. Superb on a very noisy summer day, anyway.

Chado in the Loop

I enjoyed another demonstration of the Japanese tea ceremony today at a special new year's event (OK, a few weeks late, big whoop) by Urasenke Chicago at the Japanese Information Center. The local Urasenke chapter is a loose gathering of tea teachers, folks (mostly women, it seems) who teach willing students the meticulous but beautiful method of chado.

This demo was much like the one I first experienced in Honolulu, though there the audience consisted of me and one other couple. Here, the crowd was a couple dozen gathered around the teahouse at the JIC, so we couldn't be in the structure itself. Three women (in some gorgeous kimonos, I must say) shuffled through the ceremony, one of them serving the other two as guests. The teahouse is pretty cool, a surprising sight built as it is right in the middle of the JIC's carpeted offices on the 10th floor of a downtown skyscraper. It's authentic and quite lovely, even though it's lit from above by panes of fluorescent light. The alcove was stocked with items addressing the new-year ritual — an about-to-burst camellia bud in a bamboo vase, a tall and flowing willow branch, plus a scroll featuring a hopeful wintertime message: "The beautiful phoenix dances in the scarlet dawn light." The teaware included some beautiful blue-and-white porcelain featuring depictions of new year's treasures.

The sweet offered before the matcha tea was extraordinary, and homemade by some UC members. A traditional new year's sweet, it featured a white rice flour disc folded over a pink one, with lightly sweetened bean paste and miso in the middle, plus two strips of burdock root (!) that I think might have been pickled. Reminded me of this shop in NYC.

Thanks to the UC folks for a fun afternoon (and a great lunch)!

Making my fortune with John D. Harney

I've always wanted to have my tea leaves read. Lord knows I've had plenty of opportunity — plenty of leaf-strewn cups, anyway. I just always expected that when the moment of prognostication arrived, the person on the other side of the table would be swarthy and wrapped in silks and named Madame Zelda. Not a sweet old man in an elephant tie.

John D. Harney, founder of Harney & Sons, was in Chicago last weekend for a frou-frou Sunday tea dance at the Drake. I enjoyed a nice long chat with him in cozy armchairs over tea. He's quite a guy, the kind of guy who says things like this: "I was just in Boston, on the wharf, where they threw the stuff over. Of course, the English at that time were a pain in the ass."

Harney started his tea business in 1983. "Tea wasn't an important thing then," he said. "It wasn't until ’85 that it started to really grow. There were a few articles that came out then about tea's health benefits, and it started to catch on." What began as a family operation in a Connecticut basement is now a big business with a New York factory and 80-plus employees.

Harney & Sons specializes in blending. "You can take two teas, or three or four, and simply make them better," Harney said. The Harney version of Earl Grey is a blend, he said, of four teas, plus the bergamot. Their English Breakfast, on the other hand, bucks trends the other way: instead of being a blend of assams and such, it's 100 percent keemun.

But at the Drake on Sunday, Harney wasn't present to talk about tea as much as he was there to stare at the dregs. Harney was reading tea leaves and hawking a new, privately published book: Tea Leaf Reading. It's a book with a curious backstory: The owners of a B&B in Norfolk, Conn., were cleaning their attic and discovered a book about reading tea leaves, attributed only to "a Highland Seer." They gave the book to Harney, the tea guy they knew. He investigated its source and could find no copyright for it. So he's had the book reprinted in its entirety, plus a new introduction by James Norwood Pratt.

Women were waiting in line for Harney to find their fortunes in a teacup. "I treat it as a fun thing," he said. "You talk to a person for three or four minutes, you know something about them and what they want." For each reading, he'd scoop two spoonfuls of tea leaves out of a pot and into a cup, followed by just a smidge of liquid. He swung the cup back and forth in the air three times, then up-ended it on the saucer. The tea leaves remaining in the cup were the "ink blots" he examined.

"Oh my God, look at that face!" he exclaimed for a woman named Sharon. "Or it could be a lion." Sharon was skeptical at first, but soon she was caught up and showing the cup to me: "Look, you can see the eyes," she said. OK, sure ...

Harney ID'd shapes and figures in the cups, then looked them up in part of the book. It's like a dream dictionary — look up your object, read what it symbolizes. "Hawk: an enemy." "Ladder: a sign of travel." We could all open up our fortune-telling boutique tomorrow. Harney might stake us. "Anything that makes more people pay attention to tea," he said. "I'm all for."

Waiter, waiter, percolator

Today, according to the calendar of the utterly trivial, is National Coffee Day. We are not beveragists here at t2. We do not think java is all jive. So celebrate, experience the contrast, enjoy a cuppa joe. Make it a good one, though, if this is truly the only day each year in which you indulge.

Many shops and restaurants are offering deals all over the country, and Stardrecks is launching its new instant coffee today. (Instant coffee? Lord. What is this, 1973?) One site even has a java-themed writing contest.

Then, enjoy reading this ol' chestnut: Malcolm Gladwell's excellent 2001 piece in the New Yorker, "Java Man." It includes a claim that the modern world was built on a foundation of caffeine, plus an amusing discussion of the dichotomy between the "coffee aspect" and the "tea aspect." It's like a horoscope of beverages, complete with chart. If you're reading this blog, I know which side you're on. Here's to being "decorous," "romantic" and "pure"!

Tea at the pub

Fellow Chicago tea lovers: Just back from afternoon tea on this autumnal August afternoon (60s? really?) with the Chicago Area Tea Lovers Meetup group. The Celtic Knot Public House in Evanston puts out a fairly nice spread. The tea's average — though I liked the stout Irish Barry's — with sandwiches, scones and sweets. A fine respite for chat with (hopefully) new friends.

Fellow anywhere tea lovers: This particular meetup is organized by Lainie Petersen, the queen bee tea blogger around here. Lainie writes her own blog and regular tea reports for the Exmainer. Both are great sources of information, as well as reviews by a seasoned palate.

Tea Extravaganza 2009

(Photos by John H. White/Sun-Times)

Not a shabby way to start the week. Yesterday morning — for me, not only a Monday but one after working long days all weekend — I enjoyed the company of fellow tea lovers around a table in the opulent Palm Court of Chicago’s grand dame Drake Hotel. The event was a curious little gathering called Tea Extravaganza 2009, a title that sounds more like a convention center expo than the intimate gathering of 12 tea lovers that it was. And the agenda was simple: taste some of the finest teas around.

The event was organized by Chas Kroll, a tea master as certified by the very organization he created, the American Tea Masters Association. A former techie and tea company owner, the San Diego-based Kroll now trains budding and aspiring tea masters, three of whom were in attendance yesterday. Soft-spoken, warm and lovingly addled, Kroll led the group (most of whom paid $120 a day for the pleasure) through Chinese-style tastings from a menu of 14 of his favorite teas.

It’s not as if these were teas that are inordinately difficult to come by. (He did originally have on the menu a 1949 cave-aged pu-erh direct from the cellar where they’ve been sleeping for 56 years; however, he removed it from the menu at the last minute citing “ethical problems” with its supplier. Pu-erhs are dicey commodities, don’t cha know.) There were a few from Tea Gschwendner, a couple from Keiko, several from PeLi. But it was refreshing to attend a tasting that had no overall agenda. There were no sales pitches, no commercial constraints. Just tea lovers coming together to ooh and ahh.

In four chatty hours, we got through only six teas — just greens and whites. (Alas, I could not return today for the yellow and the oolongs.) The ones that danced across my tongue:

Keiko’s Kabuse Genmaicha — It’s your basic brown rice tea with a twist: the rice kernels are dusted with “virgin” matcha powder before blending. The result is a fantastic green color in the cup, albeit slightly cloudy. The toasty, starchy taste is even, with a determined sweetness underneath. I was wishing for tempura.

PeLi’s Super King White Peony (Bai Mu Dan) — I’m a white guy who loves his white teas, and this beauty is so fresh and breezy I felt as if I was in a fabric softener commercial. An aroma of sweet flowers and cinnamon precedes one of the most delightful mouthfeels I’ve experienced: silky smooth, a sensation like but not actually oily. Delicate floral flavor. Yummy.

PeLi’s Top Melon Slice (Liu Gua Pian) — If you look at my notes from this one, you’d think I hated it. I scratched down horrible words — “metallic,” “dusty,” “body odor” — struggling and stretching to match the language to the sensation. I still can’t describe how intriguing this was. It smelled like sandalwood. It looked like dew. It tasted of salt and wood and smoke and orchids. It was wondrous and confusing. As Woody Allen said, “I can’t stand the tension. I hope it lasts.”

Thanks for the entré, Chas. Nice to meet all o' y’all.

Make tea videos, go to college

It's OK, dude. You're adorable, we're glad you're on our side now.

This is one of many entries already posted at YouTube for the Calm-a-Sutra scholarhsip competition, courtesy of the Tea Council. You make a short video — in which you somehow slip in a fact or two about tea's health benefits — and the winning pick gets $15,000 for school. The deadline's been extended until Aug. 2 (and you know what extended contest deadlines mean ... not enough entries!), so flick out the Flip cam and brew up some funny.

Tasting a hibernating tea

I'm always game for tasting anything that's been aged in a cave for half a century — intentionally. So I'm excited about the recently announced Tea Extravaganza 2009 event here at Chicago's Drake Hotel next month. It's two days of tea tastings, including a great green (Cha Wang Tai Ping Hou Kui / Tea King Monkey Chief), an intriguing oolong (Dong Fang Mei Ren) and a rare, collectible pu-erh: a 1949 Cave-Aged Private Reserve Pu-erh that sells for $400 an ounce. Two-day tickets for the event are just half that.

There's lunch the first day (Aug. 10) and afternoon tea the second (Aug. 11), so come rub elbows with the camellierati.

'The Art of Tea' exhibit in L.A.

ABC News tonight reported that airlines are having big sales right now to try and fill their empty planes during the recession. It's a good time for a trip, and here's one I'd like to take: The Fowler Museum at UCLA has scheduled an exhibit called "Steeped in History: The Art of Tea," starting Aug. 16 and running through Nov. 29. The exhibit summary:

"Explore the cultural and historical significance of tea- after water, the world's most consumed beverage-through a magnificent and wide-ranging survey of visual art. Chinese paintings; Japanese screens, ceramics, and prints; rare English and Colonial American paintings; photographs and historical documents; tea-serving paraphernalia from around the globe; and much more, all tell the fascinating history of tea drinking. The subjects of the exhibition range from tea's mythic origins in the hills of South China through its enormous significance in Japan, its introduction in Europe by Dutch traders around 1610, its role in colonial American life beyond the clichés of the Boston Tea Party, and finally to its expanding importance as a global commodity at the height of the British Empire"

Race ya!

Gotcha, matcha! World Tea Expo ’09 news

News is dribbling in from the annual World Tea Expo held earlier this month in Las Vegas. (I'm a little appalled by the lack of live news from the Expo. Where were the bloggers, news sites, etc.? I'm going next year, and will fill this void!)

The big trend this year appears to have been matcha tea powder, which was showcased in its original use — whisked into a traditional Japanese tea — but much more as an ingredident in numerous bottled beverages, as well as everything from snacks to cosmetics.

The following is a pretty good video — well, it's a slide show with live audio, from Celebrity Chef Connection via YouTube — sampling some of the exhibitors and their tastes and trends at this year's expo. You'll hear at least one matcha moment here, with one exhibitor saying, rightly, "If everybody had a matcha moment, we'd have a much happier planet."



I'm always intrigued by the annual winners of the World Tea Championship. The complete list of 2009 winners is here, and I'd love to hear from any readers who've sampled these teas previously or do so in the future. I've got the list bookmarked and plan to funnel the occasional disposable income in that direction.

I can speak to one winner: Tea Gschwendner's Earl Grey (No. 69), which is the most knock-you-over fragrant Earl Grey you'll ever encounter. The taste, however, is not so bold; rather, it's simply strong, confident and colorful. I recommend. (TG is capitalizing on the company's fine showing by offering a sampler of all their teas that won or placed in the championship.) Rishi Tea absolutely dominated the championship, with 28 total awards, 11 of those being winners. (They have a sampler for sale, too!)

The winning tea cocktail sounds bracing and refreshing: the Genevrier Verte (Green Juniper) by Max Solano of Emeril's Table 10. Here's the recipe, which I love for two chief reasons: (1) he uses Hendrick's gin, which is my favorite, and (2) he uses an egg white, which is a delicious throwback to classic cocktail couture ...

Genevrier Verte
1 1/2 oz. China Mist Pure Blackberry Jasmine Iced Green Tea with Lemonade
1 1/2 oz. Hendrick’s gin
3/4 oz. Agwa Coca Leaf Liqueur
3/4 oz. vanilla/clove syrup (see here)
1/2 oz. fresh lime juice
1 egg white
Shake over ice, strain, and pour into a chilled glass.

Here's a YouTube video of the contest at the ’09 expo. The event makes imbibing look about as much fun as painting baseboards, but hey ...



(That's the World Tea Expo, but here's another tea expo on the other side of the world: last month's China West Lake International Tea Culture Expo featured opening ceremonies, a Longjing tea exhibition, even reading of tea poetry.)

NU ceremony showcases old art

Aw shucks: missed a tea event practically in my own back yard. The Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program up at Northwestern University sponsored a tea ceremony on Sunday, demonstrating the Japanese art and offering tastings of maccha tea.

From the student paper:

Visiting professor Shozo Sato hosted the event to celebrate the arrival of spring and make the traditional tea ceremony accessible to Western audiences who do not have access to traditional tea houses, said Sato. Sato, a Zen arts master, has received the highest honor in Japanese art from the emperor of Japan.

About 75 Northwestern students and community members attended the two-hour event, sponsored by the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program, to sample what Sato called the "espresso of green teas."

Did you go? Do tell!