A fine idea!

(via and for sale thru society6)

Tuesday tea tune: Y'all

Some down-home, easygoing strumming — coupled with beautiful images of summertime and sun-ripe tomatoes, for those shivering timbers this winter — from the Elms, in a song called "Bring Me Your Tea":

New campus, new teas

No doubt you're like me — the first order of business upon relocating to a new workplace or school is to evaluate the available and nearby tea options. It took some doing, to my surprise, upon relocating to UC-San Diego. My previous campus, the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, had a decent coffee stand next door to my office building, with loose-leaf tea options. It wasn't great quality, but it was at least loose-leaf and served with a modicum of care.

Now at UCSD I finally found (among the campus's plethora of coffee stands, noodle shacks, and even bars) the Muir Woods Coffee House. Basement location: awesome. Prices: lowest on campus (just a buck for a tall tea if you bring your own reusable mug). Loose-leaf teas: pretty great. Their main supplier is a tea joint in downtown SD, Cafe Virtuoso, with a fair stock of estate-grown picks. The English Breakfast is superb, with a fresh floral note that contributes to one's waking. Life-saving and life-enriching on beautiful SoCal winter mornings like this one ...

Tuesday tea tune: Young love

I've no idea who these high school kids are, but from the notes on the YouTube link and the performance cues the scenario here seems to be this: Sniffly cameragirl had a bad day, and boyfriend-of-the-year candidate attempts to cheer her up by singing about green tea. It's sweet, it's stupid, it's all of that, even the part about burned kitties ...

Gimme a break!

Perk No. 734 to my new Amazon Prime, free-shipping account: Matcha Kit Kats, delivered!!

Look for the yellow label

Just a cool vintage Lipton ad, circa 1935 ...

(via Klappersacks)

Tuesday tea TV: A smart kettle!

Nice! Finally, a tea-related app that actually does something super-useful — turns on (or keeps warm) the kettle!

The iKettle calls itself the "world's first wifi kettle," an unsurprising boast. You can program it to put itself to boil in the a.m., and it'll send you the only wake-up text you really want. When you get home — and your phone hits your network — the iKettle asks you if you want it to start up again. Effing genius! Just don't forget to refill it after each use ...

I really should have seen this before Christmas.

Tea relative blooming in January

My apologies for rubbing it in, to all you Midwestern folks shivering in wind chills and buried in snow, but I had to share the January view from my study window. That large, blooming tree is a camellia — not sure what variety, but a relative of the tea plant. I wasn't sure about that identification until its soft-pink, carnation-like blossoms started popping out early in December. A winter bloomer, here in beautiful SoCal!

Meanwhile, I'm engaged in my favorite wintertime activity: planning the garden. We've got a long, sunny terrace level at this new house, which I'm plotting full of herbs and veggies — and a tea plant or two, if I can (a) find an appropriate one and (b) keep it alive. We shall see.

Something different: Himalayan wine tea

Months ago, I acquired some of the intriguing Himalayan Wine Tea from Darjeeling TeaXpress — part of their occasional "exotic" offerings — and it was certainly worth seeking out and raving about. This being January, they're out of stock now, of course, but the seller says they'll order more after this year's second flush. Nonetheless, the tale ...

The Himalayan Wine Tea came with this explanation: "A very unusual tea – which is best served with wine. Mellow yet bold with a strong after taste, it provides a melody of hints in your palate that can only be manufactured in Darjeeling. If Darjeeling is considered to be the champagne of teas, then this is the true champagne of Darjeeling. The Reddish/coppery cup that is generally associated with autumn flush Darjeeling creates a complex taste in your mouth. This variety is highly recommended for wine lovers."

The tea itself brewed up exceptionally strong — my kinda tea — and alarmingly hearty, dark, and yeasty. Dry, it reeked of dark chocolate. In the cup, it smelled like the tea you make while traveling — in the hotel-room coffee maker that, try as you might, you can't wash the coffee taste out of. But not as bad as that sounds. It was high in tannins, and closed with a bold but not appalling bitterness couched within a surprisingly smooth, chocolatey rush. It really wouldn't be bad on its own. In fact, this might actually be a tea to pair with tira misu, or make it with!

Initially, I wasn't sure what to make of the "served with wine" instruction. I had to know more, and I wrote the company for details. The response: "This tea is originally produced by Goomtee plantation - aimed for their Japanese customers who pair it with wine. The flavour/taste profile of it makes it an excellent companion. But not everyone would like this combination, I have been warned by our tasters - so I would highly encourage you to try that. The Japanese drink it with their traditional Japanese wine, most prominent among them is Yamanashi red wine. I personally have not tasted that wine yet, but a mild red wine would pair well."

I first tasted the tea paired with a medium-bodied Louis Jadot beaujolais. Alternating the slightly chilled red with the warm-to-hot tea was an oddity on the tongue, but once a rhythm was found between tea, wine, and nosh, a cocoa-y undertone seemed to establish itself and enhance certain foods (veggies, no; meats, oh yes). I tried another pot later with a stronger wine, am Australian shiraz, which seemed to fare even better — the chocolate tones embracing each other instead of dueling, and bringing out each other's best qualities (muskiness in the tea, an aged quality in the wine).

For kicks, on the first tasting, I tried going one further: I poured the remaining cool tea directly into my half-full glass of beaujolais. The aroma was extraordinary — baking currants, sage, cumin, as if a dessert recipe had been made savory — though the taste was less exciting — thin, of course, and a slight balsalmic flavor, maybe even lime and/or mint, like a wine mojito. Bizarre.

We like Siamese tea if you please

Here's a delightful and warm scene for your wintry blues — made by an illustrator named Francesca Buchko, who describes her inspiration here as being the two tea-drinking cats at the Verdant Tea shop in Minneapolis. A lovely story there, and the more I gaze at this piece the more I love it.

Dig her site with loads of similarly charming work.

Tuesday tea tune: Righting all wrongs

Tea solves all life's problems, right? That's the idea behind this new promotional video from Yorkshire Tea — they of the nifty slogan, or as Rufus Wainwright calls them "the crystal meth of tea." Come for the nifty theme, stay for the impressive single-take tracking shot. (There's even a behind-the-scenes video about the making of.)

Spiking the spiced tea

If you're not a new reader here, you know this is not a teetotaling tea blog. Many's the post singing the praises of whiskey and black tea — great highballs, even my homemade chai liqueur — and over the holidays I found myself repeating a simple routine that returned much happiness.

Ahead of the season, I'd ordered the Christmas Tea blend from TG. I don't do blends much anymore (one of my few tea-snobbish allowances) but I thought some visitors might enjoy it during the seasonal merriment. It being a decent blend — black teas mixed with vanilla pieces, citrus peels, cloves a hint of nutmeg — I started making some afternoon pots around the house. Inevitably, I wouldn't get too far through the pot before it went cold. So as the cocktail hour approached one evening, I dropped a slug of whiskey into a cold cup of the Christmas Tea. Pow! The flavors popped, putting on a united front in a way they hadn't before. I started purposely pouring and ignoring the pots. I've done this with chais and other similar, spicy teas, to similar effect, but not with the zing this particular blend delivered. Forget the name, this will be a seasonal warmer through the equinox.

Tuesday tea tune: Funkadelic new year

A cool, funky soul groove for your New Year's party — out and about, or snug at home — from French producer Chris Joss, "Drink Me Hot":

Christmas tea tune: Jesus drank tea

Merry Christmas, tea folk!

As Christmas Eve falls on this lovely Tuesday, be sure to check out today's Tuesday tea tune: "Baby Jesus" by a fine Brit band, Kula Shaker. A sweet slice of early Moody Blues-ish, narrated psychedelia, the chorus of this track sings the praises of Jesus as "a real cool man" who not only showed up to parties and turned the water into wine but was a man of true character because "he probably drank tea"!

Click here to listen, or right/control-click to download. (Read more)

Tasting Thailand teas

The increasing popularity of tea is propagating the plant in more and more places, and one of the latest areas to nurture and expand a tea industry is Thailand. (Not to be confused with "Thai tea," a sweetened, sometimes spiced, drink usually made from Ceylon teas.)

At a recent local tea event, I was given several samples from Daokrajai, a company producing organic tea on a 550-acre estate in northern Thailand. Two of their blends are worth noting.

First, their red tea is really red. It's 85 percent red (black) tea, 15 percent rosella, a variety of hibiscus common in Thailand. When I opt for herbal teas, I most often look to something with hibiscus in it, as I find it adds a heft often missing from typically dainty herbals. I've actually suspected that a mixture of hibiscus and regular tea might work; after drinking this oddity I can say, it actually does. The tangy fruit flavor of the hibiscus, the razor's edge of bitter and tannin in the tea — it's like mixing berries with chocolate. There's a balance, but it's kind of a tough combo to crack. Even the Daokrajai site admits it's "a confusing combination for the tongue to decipher, making you concentrate on the flavours more intently." The hibiscus came on strong in my sample, as if the ratio was greater than 15 percent, and the hibiscus left a tell-tale red ring at the rim of my cup. This would be a great foil for a mild dessert.

The second sample I'm still trying to get my head around — an herbal called Jiao Gu Lan (Gynostemma pentaphyllum). This plant — a trailing vine — is a common folk remedy in Asia, allegedly with some serious antioxidants. It's one of the strangest flavors I've encountered. The liquor in the cup (a ghastly jaundiced grey) has a soapy odor, and the brewed leaves are large with jagged edges, looking remarkably like real tea. The taste is sharp and surprising, at once bitter but with a sweet edge, as if it was a cup of bitter tea from the bottom of the pot newly sweetened with, say, some stevia. The bitterness camps out right on the tip of the tongue, doing battle between hints of banana, tin, and grass. Folk medicine is the only context in which I could imagine this.

Another heralded Thailand tea estate is Suwirun; see some stunning photos from that plantation here.

Read more about tea in Thailand here (pdf).

Color correction

For those who take their tea with milk, how carefully do you measure the tea and dairy? Are you eyeballing the ratio of the second ingredient (don't reignite the milk-first debate here, please) and getting inconsistent cups?

Here's a helpful tool for getting the proportions just right: the My Cuppa Tea mug, a white mug with color bands printed on the inside of the rim corresponding to various strengths of milky tea. Pour in the milk until the color of the brew matches the Pantone-like shade of your choice, and you'll have a relatively uniform cup each time.

Tuesday tea tunes: Hellish

From another folksy Lilith, Melissa Warner, here's a song putting forth the preposterous notion that "there's no tea in heaven." Dahling — tea is heaven!

Nothing embeddable, so click here to have a listen.

Monthly clubs, and Tea Horse

Years ago I joined a wine club (through a then-trendy magazine that, go figure, still exists), a monthly subscription service that delivered two choice bottles of California reds to my doorstep in a particularly dry Midwest wine desert. I thus learned about wine in the best way possible — by drinking varieties I otherwise would not find or think to buy. The same lesson applies to tea, and may be even more applicable. If you're going to sample teas, you want to sample good teas, smartly selected. A monthly club can be just the ticket.

Many good clubs are out there — Golden Moon runs a good one, with special attention to seasonal flavors; Teavana has a few, depending on whether you love or scorn Teavana; 52 Teas used to run a weekly service for comparable pricing, though it often included ridiculous flavored blends like chocolate-and-bacon pu-erh; or I've heard praise of the top-drawer Teance clubs.

Recently, I was sent some samples from a new subscription service, Tea Horse. The British company, named for the famed overland route through Asia, ships monthly taster boxes containing four teas. The kicker: many of the teas are selected with guidance from Tim Clifton, a longtime tea expert in the UK and a regular leader of tea classes alongside Jane Pettigrew.

The samples I received were pretty good; I'll zero in on two. The first-flush Darjeeling, from the remote Jungpana estate, remains an impressive traditional tea. I tasted this some weeks ago when it was still fresh (apologies for the writing delay), and it's remarkable how strong the aroma comes on in the cup — a surprise for such an early tea. The musky taste barrels on, too, with the confidence and strength of a second-flush. The packet suggests a nuttiness, which I didn't get; the floral notes, though, yes, very — rosy, but not (ironically) a tea rose or something similarly sweet. The floral notes really mellowed in the pot, too, so that the last couple of cups were like sipping from the rim of a honeysuckle blossom. A fine tea.

Readers here may know I'm a fool for Keemun, so the Tea Horse Mao Feng merely faced a tough tongue to impress. Its flavor is strong but hollow, lacking the subtle wisps of smoke and/or spice I'm used to. But it's a definite two-stage rocket — a Darjeeling musk at the end, tying off some initial hints of cocoa and fruit (not citrus, but something fleshy, like a peach or a mango). Handsome enough.

Drink to me

Paul McCartney has a new record out this week, simply titled "New." Mark Guarino, a great critic who took my post at the Chicago Sun-Times, says the new tunes reinforce Paul's sometimes unheralded tradition as an artist who "has quietly pushed the boundaries one would not expect from rock royalty who might otherwise opt for reeling in the years."

Really, I'd just been looking for an excuse to post this photo of Macca mugging with a sad mug of road tea.

Tea vs. adventures

via teacoffeebooks