Pressing concerns: Do you use a French press for tea?

I'm hunting a good French press again. Teaware doesn't last forever, and the glass beaker on my favorite large press cracked a while back. But it raises the question: Is a French press teaware?

I've always enjoyed having a French press (or cafetiere) on hand, even though technically it's designed for coffee. Claimed as an invention by both the French and the Italians, the press first started appearing in French cafes around the 1850s, eventually patented in 1929 with French manufactures coming first.

There are some teas — particularly my favorite white tea, with its large, dried leaves and stems — that seem to work best in a French press. The beaker of a press gives leaves like these plenty of room to float, swirl and steep. I've never liked tea balls or pots with strainer baskets, as they tend to compact the loose tea and prevent good water circulation during the brew. A press, meanwhile — as long as you don't actually press the plunger all the way down and thus squeeze bitter flavors from the tea — allows the free circulation with the benefit of perfect straining (when straining is needed).

Materials are good here, too: French press beakers are usually glass, which is both an excellent insulator and best for visuals (for practical and aesthetic reasons). I avoid plastic on French presses at all costs: glass container, metal parts and fittings.

As long as you keep a press clean — as noted in this good video discussion of French press tea making from Lainie Sips — and, duh, don't use the same press for tea and coffee, a good press should serve you tres bien.

Green tea snow ice cream and more

It's a weird winter when my native Oklahoma has had significantly more snow than my current Chicago home. But we're finally due a big dump tonight, and my kettle's at the ready. Forget snowmen: it's time to get out there and make a snow pot!

Actually, if the snow on your outdoor tabletops or lawn is clean enough, make some snow ice cream. There are hundreds of different ways to do this. This is the one we've tried that actually gets some decent results (though you'll need to eat it quickly, as the snow melts easily): Beat a pint of whipping cream till it firms up, then stir in a can of condensed milk, a spoon or two of vanilla extract and sugar to taste (1/4-1/2 cup?). This being a tea blog, of course, when I tried this out last winter I added a scoop of matcha green tea powder. Fold in fresh snow — until it achieves a thick, creamier consistency. Voila!

About those tabletops, we might recommend catching freshly fallen stuff instead. Before or during le deluge, set out a nice big mixing bowl or a wide pan.

If you want to make actual ice cream flavored with green tea, well, then this is yet another gleeful opportunity to link to this bizarre video in which a dog explains how to do just that.

Or simply heap some snow in your cup or kettle and make tea. Arctic naturalists and Himalayan hikers do it all the time. Here's an outdoorsy video demonstration (chopping your own wood is, thankfully, optional...):

The winter season was ideal for making tea. With snow easily accessible, a hearty scoop with a stone pot placed atop a fire would melt the snow, and then boil the water up to the proper temperature. Snow water had a very pure and crisp taste, so Mithos & Tuna wanted to enjoy it as much as they could. This was possibly their last day together for some time, so they felt that she could be a little generous with their tea consumption.
— from Fire Emblem: The Rune of Shadows

Of note: Snow tea is an actual tisane once common in China. It's not actual tea but a rare herb, heralded for lowering blood pressure. But the snow tea herb, it seems, is endangered due to overharvesting. This "red snow tea" certainly looks absolutely delicious (now that's why you keep some glass teaware in the cubby!), but let's wait and see if this delicacy comes back before contributing to its decline.

Instead, try Teavana's Snow Geisha white tea — white tea blended with sour cherries and cranberries. Delish.

Also, dig these "snow tea cups"! Nice shape, and the glaze looks like they were fashioned from new-fallen snow. (With matching pot.)

First tastes of the Chicago Tea Garden

Right around resolution time early this month, several friends mentioned their desire to explore tea a bit more. Mind you, these are each hardcore coffee addicts. One of these was my friend and gym buddy Kevin, so I invited him and his partner over for a tea tasting to see if we could find something that appealed to his bean-stained palette.

On a lovely afternoon-evening, we poured through eight teas, keeping to the blacks and whites he's thus far found to his liking. (Green tea is a hard first step for many folks. More on that in a later discussion perhaps.) Successful blacks included a favorite Dian Hong (love me some China breakfast!) and my old stand-by, TG's basic Keemun. Kevin also took to another pillar in my cabinet, TG's South India White. Richard, to my delight, even fell in love with the acquired taste of pu-erh, which I wasn't expecting from a newbie.

But the "oh my Gods" were uttered after sipping two new teas — teas that were half of my urge to host a tasting, just to have a formal excuse to steep them. I've mentioned earlier the upcoming venture of fellow Chicago tea blogger Tony Gebely, who's about to launch his own tea company, the Chicago Tea Garden (the site's not quite ready yet, but mark that link). He sent out some samples as an official "here I come" — they came in plain brown boxes with a wonderful stamp on the outside reading, "Your Tea Is Here!" — and they're, as expected, amazing teas. Both samples come from the collection of revered tea taster and buyer David Lee Hoffman (subject of "All in This Tea"). Gebely says Hoffman has been between assignments recently, during which time he's amassed his own stockpile of his favorite stuff. It's this treasure trove Gebely and his partner, Erin Murphy, are plumbing for much of the Chicago Tea Garden's offerings.

We tasted the Golden Li Buo, a Yunnan black tea that's one of the prettiest I've seen. Golden is no catchy name; the tea in the canister looks like rolled squash blossoms, tight spirals of dusty yellow and brown. The resulting brew deserves a string of superlatives. It's creamy, for certain, but with a brisk closure to it. There's a lot of vanilla. I had made some lemon scones as part of our tasting spread, and the tea made the otherwise subtle lemon absolutely explode in the mouth. The color is golden, too, lightening from dark amber to butterscotch as it's resteeped. Ab fab, and I will be pestering my banker and poor Tony to keep me supplied.

Also sampled was CTG's "competition grade" Tie Guan Yin, a particularly fine version of the fabled oolong. On first short steeps, this was a remarkably subtle but engaging tea. A clear, light-green liquor tastes exactly like honeysuckle. Talk about tasting summer in the middle of winter! I scribbled "buttery" as a note, too, but my memory chastises me for that somehow. Very floral, and those notes only expand as the tea resteeps and as it cools. A knockout in any competition, no doubt.

Good luck, Tony! Though with teas like these, you won't need it.

Beg your pardon: Hawaii tea promises a rose garden

At the end of a very busy, weary week, I arrived home to find some new samples in the mail from Eva Lee at Tea Hawaii. A cup of tea can revive you, sure, but the promise of tasting a new tea can accomplish about as much.

This morning, I opened the Forest White: "Forest grown under a canopy of Ohia trees and Hapuu ferns and processed in Volcano Village at 4000' elevation." Snipping the bag caused a rush of sense memories for me ... of grandma. My father's mother wore tea rose perfume all the time; the mere whiff of it now delivers me immediately to her immaculate home and the kitchen table where she'd beat me at gin rummy. The tea rose hybrids themselves were named for a strain of the species that allegedly smelled like tea; now here's a tea that reeks of roses. A firm bouquet, too. Eva reports: "The white tea is not scented, pure organic tea grown in the forest. I believe most of the scent is due to our location as other white teas on the island are different and not as sweet." (I wonder if the nearby Ohia trees, with their Pele legend, somehow contribute to the scent in the tea...?) I'm continually amazed by the variety of scents and flavors that come from this single plant.

The leaf of this tea is whole, with dry semi-blackened buds largely intact (like the photo above, a perfect budset). Dry it smells of roses, steeped it smells of roses. The flavor, fortunately, is light on the rosy, with a hint of non-oaked chardonnay. Plus there's that faint earthy underpinning that I so love in Hawaii teas so far — a flavor of loamy soil I haven't encountered in other teas, maybe because of the new territory, or the unique volcanic signature of this island.

It produces a not-altogether-pretty grey color in the cup (try it in cups without white interiors), quite light, and it infuses repeatedly with some strength. I poured a pot with my breakfast, which was a bad move. The floral strength and lightness of this tea would be considerably better in the afternoon with a sweeter and less substantial snack, or perfectly fine on its own.

Contact Eva to procure some (her Makai Black is poised to become one of my fall-back teas, too). She is one groovy tea master, as you can see in this video, and this one, and this one. (Samovar, please allow embeds!)

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.