Tuesday tea tunes: The means in your possession

Vintage Police! Dig Sting's sci-fi outfit as he steps on the rhythm of "Tea in the Sahara" ...

Tuesday tea tunes: Just a cup of rain

Getting into the rainy season around here (hooray!), and I ran across this rainy-day tune. The band is called the Tea Party, and the song, paced by some patient guitar strumming, is "Watching What the Rain Blows In" ...

Ahhhhhhhfternoon

Radiation fears bedevil Japanese tea growers

Who woulda thunk the tea experience one day would include Geiger counters?

World Tea News reported this week that the Japanese government "is testing 100 tea processing factories and has halted shipments from the Warashina district of Shizuoka City." Four prefectures now are under scrutiny. (Also in the WSJ.)

In Japan, the miniscule amount of tea grown in the north is nearly all consumed locally. The green tea that's exported is primarily grown in the south and southern islands, far from any threat of radiation contamination following the March 11 offshore earthquake and resulting nuclear power plant disaster. (See a map of Japan's tea-producing regions in relation to the power plant here.) Still, governments everywhere are setting up testing protocols for Japanese tea to screen for any contamination.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I attended a green tea tasting at Tea Gschwendner. The company's master taster Thomas Holz mentioned that TG has been screening all its Japanese tea just to be safe, and has yet found nothing alarming.

Either way, with shipping halted and some harvests suspended — including this anguish voiced by a tea farmer forced to destroy his early harvest — Japan may suffer a tea shortage this year. There's still no reason to fear drinking Japanese tea, but expect prices to be meddling.

Turkish apple tea

A friend of mine has been gallivanting about Greece and Turkey in recent weeks. She sent this photo of "Turkish apple tea (read: hot apple cider. It was good though)":

(Thanks, Tanya!)

Tuesday Tea Tunes: Well, a Sunday tea tune ...

This is a Tuesday feature, but here's the great duo Peter & Gordon singing "Sunday for Tea" ...

Tuesday tea tunes: 'O tea of freedom!'

A reader passed along this link (thanks, Sue!) to a video allegedly from rebel celebrations in the Libyan city of Benghazi.



The YouTube post says the translation of this song begins with this:

O tea of freedom!
Ya la la la laa lee
O you that is dear to me!
Ya la la la laa lee
Your strength is 100/100!
Ya la la la laa lee
O tea of freedom!
Ya la la la laa lee

Eisai-ki

Today on the Japanese chado calendar is Eisai-ki, the festival of the Zen priest Eisai, who brought the first tea from China to Japan in 1191 and planted them on Mt. Seburi. He was one the first outside of China to extol tea's health benefits, writing, "Tea is a miraculous medicine for health and an elixir for long life."

On the memorial day of Esai, Higashiyama is awash
with the steam and aroma of tea.
— Seisei

I found this well-shot, silent demonstration of the Japanese tea ceremony recently ...

Such a little thing makes a big difference

Rejoice in everything,
even small things.
If you start rejoicing,
even a cup of tea
starts having a sacred significance.
— Osho

Tuesday tea tunes: When I say 'Assam,' you say 'Lovely!'

I tend to shy away from the homemade comedy songs about tea — and there are tons of them out there, mostly dreadful — but this one, "Cup of Brown Joy," is just spot-on, if only for the rap cliche: "When I say 'Earl Grey,' you say, 'Yes, please!'" ...



This same bunch of oddballs also produced this ditty about their favorite tea cup.

Ethiopian spice tea with dinner

Tea at an Ethiopian restaurant the other night — wonderfully light and naturally sweet.

Ethiopian tea is a spice infusion, usually a chai-like mixture with citrus peels, rose hips, cloves, sometimes herbs like chamomile, and this was strong with cinnamon. No actual black tea, just the spices. There's no sugar in the Ethiopian diet, though this being a restaurant in middle America the tea was served with the large bowl of white sugar in the foreground, which my friend and I wisely avoided.

It's really refreshing with food. Here's a recipe, which can be monkeyed with/amended, and I think I'll try some at home.

Tuesday tea tunes: Shoulda stayed in bed

Slackstring's "Tea." Morning breakup over tea. Bummer, dude.

Tea harvest calendar

What day is it on the tea calendar? Check out this interesting schedule of tea production and harvest, according to the 24 solar terms used for marking time. Today, for instance, is "Grain Full," (Xiao Man), time for "spring harvest on Da Yu Ling High Mountain Oolong is between now and Mang Zhong. Many official spring-season competitions of Taiwan oolong are held around this time." Nice to know what's going on and when, anyway.

The tea app we've been waiting for

I've written a few times about various tea-related mobile apps (here, here, and here), and I still use a couple of them on rare occasions. Most come with too-cute names and one or two main functions, a timer, a blender, what have you. But the latest app getting real press is simply called Tea, and it's elegant, simple and useful.

Tea for iPhone comes pre-loaded with 12 tea types and more than 200 teas. Select what you're making, and the app suggests brewing time and temperature. Enter how much of the tea you possess, the Tea app then stores this information and tracks your inventory, provided you enter the data each time you brew (very helpful for those of us who don't think to buy tea until the canister is empty). You can also file away your own tasting and brewing notes.



It's funny how most tea lovers seem to have that moment when we realize that to really enjoy this special beverage, there's a wee bit of work to be done. Guesstimates produce the occasional crap cup of tea. You have to measure, you have to be fairly strict about time and temperature. "I know it makes a difference, but it’s such a bother. I don’t have the patience," writes an L.A. Times blogger before realizing the Tea app could help. Even the app's creator, Samuel Iglesias, says — in this extensive and tech-savvy interview — the idea came to him as he crossed a similar threshold.

"I came up with the concept after being frustrated by my scattershot, do-whatever approach to making tea," Iglesias says. "Sometimes it would taste great, other times not so much, and I would never be exact about how long I steeped it, just sort of let it sit there until my intuition told me it was ready. After learning that good tea methods can’t be guessed at in any reasonable amount of time without systematically logging notes, I decided that something had to change. What I really needed was a smart note taking tool tailored for the different variables that go into brewing tea: water amount, tea amount, time, temperature, and some measure of how tasty it is."

Oprah's tea house is not a pee house

Chicago has been more Oprah-obsessed this week than usual. The daytime talk queen taped her final show yesterday at the United Center arena, featuring a motley cast of guests — Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Jerry Seinfeld, Josh Groban, Patti Labelle, Madonna, John Legend, Maria Shriver and more. The Sun-Times reported the whole affair, and tweeted it, even the star-studded after-party.

For our purposes here, one of Oprah's proteges, Nate Berkus, interviewed Ms. Winfrey for an episode of his own home-life-whatever show earlier this month. He did so at Oprah's palatial California estate, which includes an opulent tea house.

In this video segment inside the tea house, Oprah explains her design input for the space. "I wanted it to feel intimate," she says, adding, "like a hug." She also points out that there's no restroom — perhaps a glaring omission for a place where one serves a diuretic. They talk a lot about this, in fact ...

A matcha moment

Tuesday tea tunes: It's iced tea weather!

Well, it was here last week, anyway. Then the bottom dropped out. But I'm holding to it, and here's Shelby Lynne singing "Iced Tea," a moody metaphor — "You’re the cornbread and iced tea of life"...

Teaku No. 12

Reliable? Yes,
God, yes — more than some humans
My old red betty.

Aimlessness

There is a word in Buddhism that means "wishlessness" or "aimlessness." The idea is that you do not put something in front of you and run after it, because everything is already here, in yourself. While we practice walking meditation, we do not try to arrive anywhere. We only make peaceful, happy steps. If we keep thinking of the future, of what we want to realize, we will lose our steps. The same is true with sitting meditation. We sit just to enjoy our sitting; we do not sit in order to attain any goal. This is quite important. Each moment of sitting meditation brings us back to life, and we should sit in a way that we enjoy our sitting for the entire time we do it. Whether we are eating a tangerine, drinking a cup of tea, or walking in meditation, we should do it in a way that is "aimless."
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step

Tuesday tea tunes: The Monks of Doom

God bless the Interwebs. Somehow, I can find just about everything I love and need out there. Here's one of my favorite instrumental songs — "Lappish Tea Song" by the Monks of Doom, an offshoot of ’80s college-rock band (and now once again a going concern) Camper Van Beethoven — a track I thought I'd never be able to share here because it was too rare. But, nope, someone's uploaded the audio to YouTube. So beautiful ...