Blogging seriously about tea
Taiwan produces black tea today, but much of the stock of assamica varietal trees in Taiwan actually were imported during the 1920s and 30s by the Japanese authorities. Back then, the hope was to create a Taiwanese black tea industry that could compete with the rest of the world. Up until that point, Taiwan mainly [ ]
About four years ago there was this TV show in Taiwan called Gold Leaf. Some of you have probably heard of it, as it became somewhat popular for a while. The story revolves around a fictionalized character based on the tea producer Khiong A-sin (I m romanizing it this way because that s what my sources called [ ]
So a few days ago I talked about how I was a little shocked by how bad a tea I know well has turned out because my water changed. I moved a few hours away to another city, but the local water is still quite heavy on minerals same appearance of heavy sediments when [ ]
I m currently on the road. The place where I m at boasts that their tap water is great. Ok, lovely. I can taste the minerals in the water. It s heavy. Boiling it in the kettle at the hotel, the water leaves a lot of minerals after even one boil. When I brew a lighter oolong with [ ]
A bit of a history lesson from an old tea drinker here. Back when I first started drinking tea in earnest, around 1998 or so, I mostly hung out with older tea people here in Hong Kong at the Best Tea House. The crowd was mostly an older generation who grew up drinking dim sum [ ]
Just about a dozen years ago I wrote a post about the dangers of green tea puerh. In short, young puerh that has been processed at too high a temperature that drinks well immediately but will age poorly. The same way if you drink old longjing it s just . bitter and gross. Well, a few weeks [ ]
Old timers on this blog will remember the Longjing rule, in which I stated that one should not go to Hangzhou to buy Longjing because the best tea has already left town. Recently, as I m going around Taiwan talking to folks and doing research on my project, I have once again reaffirmed this rule. [ ]
While I m in Taiwan I ve been having tea a few times with Alex from Taiwan Tea Odyssey. In our conversations over random teas, obviously one of the topics that would come up is vendors. I haven t really looked at any online vendors for quite some time well, online vendors that are Western facing, anyway, [ ]
Over the years I ve had some changes in what I believed in. I googled blending on this blog and it seems like last time I talked about it extensively was some (many) years ago. It s probably time to update that view. I think I was wrong. Traditionally, and still very much practiced today, is the [ ]
This is the 19th year this blog has been in existence, which, frankly, is a long time, even if the past few years it s more of a ghoul and less of an active blog. The reason I still pay for hosting to keep all this up is because, every so often, people would tell me [ ]
Yes, I m still alive. Not sure how many of you will see this though. Today I went to a tea producer s house to chat with him here in Taiwan. He showed me a bunch of teas he made while we talked about the state of the industry, etc. Aside from drinking some pretty interesting teas, [ ]
A couple years ago I posted about an outing with a friend to go to the local Dayi store to drink new 7542s (I think I deleted the image by accident). The tl;dr is that they re very average and way too expensive. Now, two and half years later, we have this: This is a screencap [ ]