Europe: Sir Robert's Blend

I bought a lot of tea in Europe. Had to lug a separate carry-on on the plane home full of tea and teaware. The shincha from Copenhagen, the Goalpara from Amsterdam — my tea cabinet overfloweth. But the first tea I will be reordering, because I'm going through it like mad, is one I chanced upon in, of all places, Helsinki, Finland.

Robert's Coffee is a shop that started in Helsinki in 1987; now it's a chain across Scandinavia. (Sound familiar? The logo's even hunter green.) On our beautiful afternoon in Helsinki — possibly our favorite stop on this trip — we wandered into a shop just off the city's Esplanade boulevard. They offer a fine range of teas from around the world, and I bought a signature product, the Sir Robert's Blend. It's a mix of Chinese and Indian teas, with a heavy dose of Keemun. If you've read the blog this far, you know I'm a sucker for Keemun. This blend, with the Keemun spiciness and some other, rounder flavors — it's fantabulous. My favorite afternoon tea at present.

Coffee and teaware on display at the Design Museum in Helsinki.

Europe: Tea in Amsterdam's Red Light District

Before we took off for our recent vacation in northern Europe, I made a note of some tea shops worth tracking down. I'd read a little something about the Geels & Co. coffee and tea shop. What I failed to realize is that it's smack dab in the middle of Amsterdam's infamous Red Light District.

And I wasn't even looking for it the afternoon we stumbled through that perfectly tame neighborhood of quaint sins. Suddenly, after sex shops and prostitutes and "coffee" houses (which, I discovered, also serve tea — marijuana steeped in hot milk), there was my own primary vice: a crusty-looking tea shop. Geels & Co. has been run by the Geels family for 150 years. The tea canisters stacked behind the counter look about that old ...



This being The Netherlands, with a long history of trade with (and colonies in) Indonesia and Malaysia, I inquired about the teas available from those places. They had two black teas from Java, hardy-looking stuff in big plastic bags of a few hundred grams. At the shopkeeper's recommendation, I went with a black tea from Goalpara, a tea garden in Sukabumi, West Java. I've been enjoying it since. It doesn't leap out of the cup or dance on my tongue, but it's a sturdy, reliable and even in brief brews a strong black tea. Sometimes you need that.

The other reason to drop by Geels & Co., maybe the chief reason, is because on the second floor is the Coffee and Tea Museum. I'd like to describe for you the wonders contained therein, but we were there on Tuesday and the museum — run as it by volunteers — is only open for two and a half hours on Saturday afternoons. Believe me, I tried to convince the clerk to let me at least peek inside. She was having none of it. The notes I had say it's a "collection of old coffee trade artifacts, like coffee grinders, tins, burners and traditional appliances has been arranged by passionate coffee and tea lovers." I had to settle for a glimpse at the upstairs window ...



A couple of other intriguing tea options for the Amsterdam visitor:

• Seeing a rock show at De Melkweg? This famous venue has several extra intriguing rooms, including a movie theater and the Tea Room, full of couches and hookahs.
• You're in Amsterdam, you'll take a canal cruise. Don't argue, it's worth it. There's a tea option for these, too: the English High Tea Cruise, which you can board at Rederij Lovers near the train station. It's not cheap: starts at 38 euro.

My patient traveling companions,
waiting for me outside Geels & Co.

My desire crescendos for Tea Forté

On our recent travels, I finally had the chance to try a brand of tea that was a treat for the tongue. On a cruise, there's always free coffee and tea available in the buffet. But it's crap coffee and crap tea. No doubt recognizing the other side of this market, our Celebrity cruise was equipped with an elegant, Italian-style coffee shop, Cafe al Bacio. You could order something to sip, something to nibble and sit in the comfy wing-back chairs and watch the water go by. To my delight, this spot served a line of really fine teas: Tea Forté.

Tea Forté servings come in pyramid-shaped bags. They're super-sturdy, and maybe actually packed a bit too tightly. But this cafe had purchased pots especially for them; on the end of the bag's string is a tiny plastic tea leaf, which they pulled through a steam hole in the lid, so it stuck out. Nice presentation.



More importantly, the teas I sampled — as after discovering the cafe I returned there almost every afternoon to read and write — were pretty great. They've an Earl Grey that might be the tastiest bergamot I've ever had, perhaps because of a tinge of orange. The English Breakfast is OK. It's a "gourmet" tea brand, so they're heavy on the flavored stuff, and the Orchid Vanilla — with added coconut — is pretty sumptuous. The whole line seems fancy, perfect for restaurants. But, hey, Oprah loves it, singling them out for an endorsement years ago in O magazine, so by all means rush out and snatch 'em up.

'Boston harbor a tea-pot to-night!'

From The Yankee Tea-Party, Or, Boston in 1773, a stylized account of the Big Brew, written by Henry C. Watson and published in 1852:

It was the fourth of July in Boston. Throughout the city which cradled the Revolution, the anniversary of the birth of the free and happy United States of America was celebrated with rejoicings unknown to the shackled people of monarchical countries. Meetings were held in various parts of the city, patriotic and democratic speeches made, bells rung, cannons fired, pistols, crackers, and fireworks of all descriptions discharged, toasts drank, and festivities of all kinds indulged. ... But a more unusual and far more interesting meeting occurred in Boston, about a quarter of a mile from the wharf known ever since the commencement of the Revolution as Griffin's Wharf.

In the upper room of an old and somewhat dilapidated tavern were assembled a party of old and young men—the representatives of two generations. Three of the old men were the remaining members of the famous Lebanon Club; the first liberty club formed in the colonies, and the one which designed and executed the project of destroying the tea at Boston. They had come from various parts of the country, upon agreement, to meet once more in the house where the disguised members of the club had met on the evening of the sixteenth of December, 1773.

... "Well, the seventeen men of our club determined, whether we were aided or not, to destroy the tea which the East India Company had sent to Boston. The plan was soon formed, as it always is when men are determined to do a thing. We wanted no captain—each man could command for himself. We resolved to disguise ourselves in Mohawk dresses, and carry such arms as would enable us to sell our lives pretty dearly; we also pledged ourselves never to reveal the names of any of the party while there was danger in it. We expected to have a fight anyhow, and the first man who faltered was to be thrown overboard with the tea. We came to Boston and found the people ripe for the deed. A great meeting was to be held at the old South Meeting-house, and we concluded to wait and see what would be done there. We lodged at this tavern, and held our councils up in this room. Well, there was a tremendous meeting at the Old South, and most of us were there to help to keep up the excitement, and to push our plan if a chance appeared. Young Quincy made a speech that stirred the people, and made them ready for anything which would show their spirit. The people voted with one voice that the tea should not be landed. We saw how things were going, came back to the tavern, put on our Mohawk dresses, and returned to the meeting. Pitts succeeded in getting into the church just about dusk and raising the war-whoop. We answered outside. Then Pitts cried out, 'Boston harbor a tea-pot to-night!'"

I pi-tea the fool!

Oh, good grief ...



Should've been marketed to boost the new "A-Team" movie.

(Thanks, Lah-Tea-Dah!)

How (environmentally) green is your tea?

Over the years of my affair with tea, I have contemplated the environmental impact of this romance. Here I am demanding a product from the other side of the globe, having it shipped via sea or air, then trucked to my mailbox or market. That's a lot of carbon-spewing transportation. Add in certain processing procedures and packaging, and suddenly tea of any type doesn't seem very green.

Nigel Melican, one of the tea techies at Teacraft, last year studied the carbon footprint of tea, as cited in an article by Jennifer Leigh Sauer (she writes a great ecological-minded tea blog called Bon Teavant). Melican's research actually quantifies the carbon output produced by a cup of several different beverages, and finds that tea isn't so bad, after all:

Sauer sums up, saying that "tea's carbon footprint (measured by the number of grams of carbon dioxide per cup) can vary greatly from over 200g CO2 per cup to -6g CO2 per cup, depending on how the tea is grown, processed, shipped, packaged, brewed, and discarded. On average, a loose tea which you drink at a tea lounge has about 20g CO2 per cup. As a reference point, the carbon footprint of a cup of beer is 374g, a can of Coca Cola is 129g and a cup of cow's milk is about 225g. As such, loose tea is a far better choice environmentally than any of these."

Want to make your tea experience extra-green? Take into account several other factors, she adds:

• Drink loose-leaf tea instead of bag tea. Packing tea into boxes and bags, adding nylon strings, plastic wrap and printing is fairly carbon-intensive. Loose tea usually comes in less packaging.
• Recycle your tea. Quality oolongs, especially, can be resteeped several times without significant loss of flavor. When you're done, compost it or fertilize certain plants with it. Find other post-brew uses for the leaves, such as deodorizing your fridge. One of my favorite methods: Throw the leaves in some eggs the next morning.
• Use gas heat to fire your kettle. I've always preferred gas stoves to electric, simply because it makes for quicker, more even cooking. I'd never thought about this breakdown before: "According to Melican, 'Gas is best as there is only one conversion loss from burning the fossil fuel to produce heat energy to raise the water temperature in the kettle. With electricity, you get five separate losses: 1. turning fossil fuel into steam, 2. steam into electricity, 3. grid losses along the wires (voltage drop), 4. transformer losses as voltage is stepped up and down, and 5. in heating the water in the kettle.'" Plus, hey, the extra heat from a gas burner helps keep your kitchen warm.

This discussion was revived last week when more, similar information cropped up in some articles in the UK press, such as this one claiming: "If you drink four mugs of black tea per day, boiling only as much water as you need, that works out as just 30kg of CO2e each year – the same as a 40-mile drive in an average car. Three large lattes per day, by contrast, and you're looking at almost twenty times as much carbon, equivalent to flying half way across Europe."

The real shock for Britons was the extra bit of information that if you add milk to tea, you're increasing the carbon footprint of your cuppa by about three times. That's not only because of the processing and transportation of the dairy, but because cows belch and otherwise emit a great deal of methane into the atmosphere.

Further study and more detailed figures on tea's energy consumption are here.

Europe: Lomonosov poreclain

Like I wasn't going to buy one. As our ship nestled the dock in St. Petersburg a couple of weeks ago, I succumbed to a lifelong urge to buy a Lomonosov teapot. If it was good for Peter the Great, by czar, it's good enough for tea cabinet.

Among Peter's many projects designed to lift Russia out of the Middle Ages and make it a European country was his desire to create original Russian porcelain. In 1744, his daughter, Queen Yelizaveta, realized that dream by establishing the Imperial Porcelain Factory "to serve the cause of national industry and art." The Russian china produced was — and remains — very high quality.

This cobalt net design with hand-painted gold leaf is their trademark pattern. I'm thrilled to add this pot and some cups to my stash, and I've already christened it with some Kusmi Russian Morning ...

Europe: Tea shops in Copenhagen

We recently returned from more than two weeks in northern Europe, cruising through the ports of the Baltic Sea: Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Tallinn (Estonia) and Warnemunde (Germany). The journey started with a few days in Amsterdam, where the Dutch consolidated such trading power in the 1600s and foisted China's favorite herb on us. While there was some fine tea to be had in Amsterdam, it paled in comparison to the inventive shops I visited in Copenhagen, Denmark.

There is, of course, A.C. Perch's, the oldest operating tea shop on the continent. (If you include England, the oldest tea seller is London's Fortnum & Mason.) Still crammed into its original tiny space in central Copenhagen, the warm little nook has a thriving business with locals and tourists alike. With room for about a half dozen customers at a time, the tea sellers are whisking canisters under noses and measuring tea with deft, speedy movements.




I wound up chatting with a fellow at Perch's about their new Bolivian tea, grown in former coca fields (cocaine and tea both like their altitude, er, high), which I sampled and then promptly bought a few hundred grams of. It's a mix of two different green teas, one of which is steamed, and it is, as the ladies used to sing, fine and mellow.


On the west side of the city center is a somewhat new place called The a la Menthe — a cozy Moroccan-themed spot with sunny windows, colorful tables and a variety of mint tea preparations. I hit this place first but wish I'd saved it till later in the day. It's a bright take on tea, and the food holds equal footing — north African fruits, chicken salads and curries, plus samosa and falafel. To complement the chow is a small but focused menu of teas, from the house mint specialty (a handful of mint leaves with green tea, and surprisingly not too sweet) and a curious orange tea to basic green and Earl Grey. The staff I encountered was pretty rude, but I was asking a lot of questions in the middle of what seemed like a lunch rush. Can't help it.


The most exciting discovery, however, was Sing Tehus, a Japanese tea house not far off the main pedestrian mall running through Copenhagen's center. Run by a woman who clearly knows her chado, Sing Tehus specializes in Japanese green and white teas, plus a few extras (I bought a vivacious Vietnamese oolong). A kind woman named Marie filled me in while pouring me a taste of new shincha — so fresh and plucky, it was as if the calendar rewound a couple of months to the dawn of spring. The corner shop is a half story above the street (unlike the other ground- and below-level shops) with big windows wrapping around, letting the rare patches of sun illuminate the racks of fine teaware — from basic porcelain and iron pots to a serious, massive old kettle and brazier. It's the kind of place I wish I lived nearby, and with any real luck someday I will.



Alas, I never had a Danish in Denmark to go with my tea. I wouldn't have anyway, I guess, since the Danish refer to danishes as Viennese.

Iced tea with lemon — or limoncello

Sam at Chicago's Tea Gschwendner was right. He suggested this during a tasting last summer, but I'm only now taking him up on it. With lilies and perspiration beads blooming around here, I have turned my tea consumption from the stove and more toward the icebox. And I remembered his tip: TG's North Indian Manjhee Valley makes an excellent iced tea. Ain't no lie. Brew a concentration of it, add to a pitcher was ice and an equal volume or two of water, chill. Top with a slightly muddled lemon slice, and that's good summer tea drinkin', folks.

If you really want to get your iced tea 'n' lemon on, make it an adult beverage. Top a tumbler of iced tea not just with fresh lemon but a jigger or two of limoncello (which is easy to make at home). It's an idea from the Stellina Cafe in St. Louis.

One moment, please

I've been on another European tea excursion, gallivanting through the ports of the Baltic Sea. (The previous few posts have been a cleverly pre-scheduled ruse.) By the time you read this, I'll be making more room in the tea cubby for whatever I've picked up in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg and more. Some strong stuff, no doubt. Details to come shortly ...

Afternoon tea break

Just sharing my tea break with you,
with a cup of Argo green by the Chicago River.

How do you hold a moonbeam in your cup?

When I was a house dweller, as opposed to my current condo life, I gardened more extensively. At some point I noticed the lunar planting tables in the Farmer's Almanac. Hokum, surely — but I tried it. I didn't keep detailed records (I'm more a scatter-and-cocktail kind of planter), but the year I planted and harvested according to the moon cycles was noticeably more bountiful than the year before.

I mention this only because I've begun seeing this kind of discussion revived in the world of wine. The UK Guardian, for instance, recently had this story about whether the phases of the moon affect not just how a vine will grow but how the wine itself will taste on certain days. According to a lunar calendar devised by Maria Thun, there are so-called "fruit" days and "root" days – those days in the lunar calendar when water and saps rise or fall.

"I was sceptical at first, but then had a eureka moment," says Jo Aherne, winemaker at Marks & Spencer. "Our wines showed beautifully at a press tasting one day and far less well the next. We couldn't understand it. The wines were all favourites of ours and the bottles were all from the same case. Someone checked the calendar and we found that the first day had been a fruit day, when the wines were expressive, exuberant and aromatic, and the second a root day, when they were closed, tannic and earthy. Further rather unscientific tests have confirmed our view."

I've hunted for information about other beverages, including tea, and come up short. Is there a tide in the cup?

Tea before Glastonbury?

Given all the twists on afternoon tea I recently explored in London, it figures I was too early for a new one — although this sounds a bit cutesy for even my rock ’n’ roll tastes.

The Metropolitan there has a new themed tea: Fes-Tea-Val De-Light. The dreadful PR copy promises a way "to experience the famous summer festivals in London without getting stuck in the bloody English rain (and mud)" ... by having tea at their hotel. What makes it so rockin', I hear you cry? "Glastonbury mud pies," "healthy cookies shaped like Wellies and umbrellas" and "cupcakes adorned with guitars and tents." Not to be outdone by the gin tea or the whiskey tea, the Metro throws in a little tequila here, too.

British summer music festival season starts soon: Glastonbury is June 23-27.

Waking up with you in my cup

Holy cow, I just read this poem and was knocked over ...

"Green Tea" by Dale Ritterbusch

There is this tea
I have sometimes,
Pan Long Ying Hao,
so tightly curled
it looks like tiny roots
gnarled, a greenish-gray.
When it steeps, it opens
the way you woke this morning,
stretching, your hands behind
your head, back arched,
toes pointing, a smile steeped
in ceremony, a celebration,
the reaching of your arms.

Now that's what some tea masters mean when they rinse the first steep and call it "waking up the tea"!

Doilies for dudes

One word in tea culture strikes fear in the hearts of many: doilies.

But here's an artist who's trying to butch them up a bit. Dig Nathan Vincent's manly doilies ...







... and see more here.

I want a little cayenne in my bowl

Just finished reading a biography of the late singer Nina Simone, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, which was tumultuous indeed. No one could crawl inside a song the way Nina could and stretch it out into something new and arresting. The book chronicles her rise, coast and slow crumbling, with her barking at the audience all along. Good read.

Near the end, this anecdote about a curious preparation of tea:

Michael ... worried that a difficult moment was getting worse. "Then I started gushing about how much I loved her music over the years and what a great honor it would be to make music with her." Michael knew he had rescued himself when Nina offered him some of her tea. He graciously took it and immediately choked. Nina had a special concoction that called for lemon and cayenne pepper. "Oh, please, cayenne that could kill us — enough cayenne that if you took a sip you really couldn't breathe for a few minutes. I was sweating, my head was on fire, and I thought I'm going to die from drinking tea."

Big Jones is kind of a big deal

Photo from Grub St.

I had a wonderful photo of my own to go here, of a gorgeous cup of Iron Goddess of Mercy tea next to a plate of beautiful beignets. Alas, my iPhone-to-iPhoto transfers sometimes freeze up and eat my photos. Macs never crash, but the software does. Grrrr.

The purpose of the photo was to entice you, fellow Chicagoans or summer tourists, to visit the Big Jones restaurant in Andersonville. The coastal Southern cooking is scrumptious — their Tuesday night fried chicken special earned it high praise in Bon Appetit — and the red velvet cake made with beets and cocoa is absolutely stunning. We visited for brunch last weekend, and I was once again bowled over by the chow. Catfish for breakfast? Hey, I tried it, on a bed of cheese grits with eggs to order. In a word: momma!

But why I mention them here is because they have a great tea menu (actually, that link is old, the selection we just saw at the restaurant is better). Their sign and advertising includes "tea time" next to "brunch," "dinner" and "cocktails" (hit those four bases and it's a home run, eh?), and there are a dozen excellent teas, from the previously mentioned Iron Goddess to a surprising pu-erh, supplied by Numi. Really, how many basic, genre restaurants have pu-erh on the menu?! Originally, one of the managers said during our brunch, the place hoped to use tea as a late-afternoon attraction — not as an official afternoon tea, but just something to join a late-day, pre-cocktail nosh. It's a Southern place, so the teas can be made iced, of course.

(Also, given the oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf, according to this story even Big Jones' seafood supply has been affected.)

Tuesday tea tunes: Press 'pause'

As I will be (a) a wee bit busy in the next couple of weeks and (b) looking for a decent new embeddable music service, if they still exist, the weekly Tuesday Tea Tunes feature will press the pause button for the month of June. Have no fear, it'll be back, in one form or another.

Tea and tobacco — smokin'!

(awesome pic by Tony)

It really is a lot like tea. I keep mine in a hardwood box handed down to me by my father. It's got a nice jar I put the leaves in to keep them fresh. Like tea, the more the whole leaf is cut and dried, the less flavorful and more bitter it becomes. And I prefer the flavor of the plain leaf — no added aromatics required.

I'm speaking of tobacco, specifically for pipes. I was a cigarette smoker as a youth, but let it go easily. Cigars make me queasy. Good quality pipe tobacco, though, ideally paired with a comfy chair and a glass of port (gawd, I am such an old man) is a heavenly moment.

Recently, one of our fellow Chicago-based tea bloggers wrote to us: "I was drinking some pu-erh the other day, and noticed that, again, I had likened a pu-erh to tobacco. It occurred to me that it might be fun to have a tobacconist taste pu-erh and tell us what he or she thought." Last Saturday, three of us met at Iwan Ries tobacco shop, the oldest family business in Chicago, hunkered down in a conference room with certified tobacconist Ron Carroll and swapped pu-erhs and pipes.

The pu-erh came from Tony Gebely of the Chicago Tea Garden, big bell-shaped discs of old and recent tea, one of which was called "camouflage" pu-erh because the two shades of green whorled around the cake looked like camo gear.

Ron was game: He and his wife had discovered real tea years ago during some extensive travel in China. "I've often joked that when they outlaw tobacco, I'll pursue the 'other leaf.'" he said. Ron also supplied a tin of great tobacco — from the Chicagoland Pipe Collectors Club Selection, a variety appropriately called Samovar. The label describes it saying, "Warm, spiritually satisfying, this dark, full Oriental Mixture is redolent with exotic Syrian Latakia. Soothing a sa cup of rich Russian tea."

And it was. Once we got a few pipes smoldering, the pu-erhs had to sweat to compete with the flavors and scents. But the coupling was not bad, especially with the final aged tea (I think it was a 1990), which really opened up and waltzed around the tongue with the hardcore smoke taste. A great afternoon, and a very butch tea party.

Tony (left), the tea guy smokes a pipe,
and Ron (right), the tobacconist pinches some tea.

Tuesday tea tunes: Dream about tea

The rendez-vous described in Blondie's "Dreaming" begins with a cuppa:

You asked me what's my pleasure, a movie or a measure?
I'll have a cup of tea and tell you of my dreaming ...