Tea for Me Please Quarterly - Volume 12 by Tea for Me Please

Volume 12

what's inside 03

Editor's Note

A Tea Renaissance Is Underway In The San Francisco Bay Area Anna Mariani

How Is Tamaryokucha Different from Straight-leaf Sencha? Paul Kotta

Matcha Pumpkin Pie Nazanin Yousefnejad

Tea, By Any Other Name Nicole Martin

From the Blog

editor's note

Hi there, tea lovers! Tea for Me Please Quarterly is a major passion project of mine, a very challenging and time consuming one at that. All of the positive feedback and support that I've received from readers over the years makes it all worth it. That being said, recent career changes have put a big dent in my available free time and I almost threw in the towel. I was holding myself to an impossible deadline and felt like I had let you all down when I couldn't make it happen. Luckily there are always members of the tea community that I can count on where I need them. Everyone who contributed to this issue is a true lifesaver and I'm so grateful for their contributions, patience, and help. As always, this journal is reader driven. I'd love to hear your questions and feedback. Submissions for future issues are welcome from everyone. Whether you are a tea enthusiast or seasoned vendor, we all have something to share that others can learn from. Going forward I'm going to try my best to keep issues coming but they may not be on as regular of a schedule. Thank you all for sticking with me!

Nicole Martin

A TEA RENAISSANCE IS UNDERWAY IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA By Anna Mariani, The Tea Evidently, a “tea renaissance” is Imperial Tea Court has been Squirrel I’ve lived in San Francisco for over a year now and I’ve always been curious about what makes the tea scene here in the Bay Area so unique. I’ve been gathering input from local tea professionals, who kindly shared their thoughts and perspective with me. While this article does not represent the whole picture, it brings me (and hopefully you too) a step closer to better understanding some of the facets of the local tea scene.

underway. “The audience has grown. The first tea festival in San Francisco was 6 years ago. At the first edition, we had 4 500 people. Last year we had over 2000 and look at all the other tea festivals! People are excited, there are a lot more avenues to get closer to tea and there’s no shortage of people who travel to Asia to procure tea”, Roy Fong tells me when I join him for tea at Imperial Tea Court at the iconic San Francisco Ferry Building.

around since 1993 and it’s “the first traditional, completely teaoriented tea house in the area. We are the first tea house to come out and tell people that not all tea is created equal” Roy adds. Jody Beavers, co-owner of San Francisco-based online retail store and wholesale business Tap Twice Tea, agrees that the local tea scene is buzzing. “San Francisco seems pretty vibrant when it comes to people who like tea and enjoy loose-leaf tea and gong fu cha and puer.”

Tap Twice Tea almost started out as a tea buyers' club and is now an Instagram sensation, whose signature is drinking tea outdoors while hiking and backpacking. Ali Roth of Blue Willow Tea in Berkeley has no doubt about the local tea renaissance: “Look at the concentration of tea shops, importers, wholesalers, high-end tea shops and so on.” Ali has owned and operated Blue Willow Tea, which is primarily a wholesale business, since 2012. Last year she opened a tea house, the Teaspot, where she performs the Japanese tea ceremony in a tea house within the tea house and hosts regular events. I cannot help but wonder, why here? The answer lies in the geographical position of the Bay Area but also in the mindset of people. “San Francisco is the gateway to the Pacific, immigrants from the Pacific regions are coming in and bringing their culture, not only tea culture. Local tea lovers are from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties, educated, but most importantly openminded and San Francisco makes you so. This is such a melting pot. This city allows you to meet people that don’t look like you and eat different food and it makes you want to try their food … and their tea. A Chinese can learn about grapes and wine and an American can learn about gong fu tea. Nothing spectacular about it, it’s absolutely cool here. Because of the ties of immigrants and cross-cultural pollination”. Everybody brings something to the table. What’s not to like? I’m curious about what draws people to tea. Are they interested in its health benefits, its social dimension or the cultural aspects attached to it? Is it because of its flavor? Are they looking for an alternative to coffee or alcoholic beverages? I’m in Jody’s living room, in the heart of the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco. Once a month 15 to 20 people gather here to share tea and talk about tea.

Roy Fong Imperial Tea Court

Ali Roth Blue Willow Tea

Jody Beavers Tap Twice Tea 5

According to Jody, it’s a combination of many factors but mainly health benefits and social aspects. “A lot of people here in SF are interested in the social aspect, the community around it, a deeper human connection as a way to slow down from their busy lives and to connect in a genuine way. Tea is a healthy beverage, boosts your mood and elevates you to almost a positively altered state of being. The conversation flourishes really well.” Ali points out that tea has a unifying power: “It’s a unifying substance, think of people drinking tea together, it’s energizing. It’s unifying across borders, where it comes from, how it’s made, it’s almost like a spider web which follows the tea from where it’s grown across oceans and continents”. According to Roy, it’s all of those elements and more. It’s definitely a multi-faceted phenomenon. As far as tea drinking habits, I’ve discovered that puer is really popular here. “Tea experts and newbies alike love puer and in particular shou cha for its health benefits but also because it’s an interesting type of tea, it’s delicious and has a unique flavor. Hong cha and Yunnan red teas are really popular too, as well as oolong and of course matcha” Ali says. I’m surprised. I feel like puer needs some sort of “tea education” for a tea lover to get into and most importantly proper storage in a controlled environment if you want to age it. Somehow aging puer is not that different than aging wine, so in an area where wine is produced and appreciated, it should come as no surprise that people accept the same method even when applied to another beverage. It’s interesting that the rest of the country seems to prefer other types of tea. “Green teas and Japanese green teas are pretty popular and maybe there has been more scientific articles on the health benefits of green tea. Maybe also through the popularity of matcha.” Jody tells me. I’m eager to discover what makes the San Francisco Bay Area tea scene unique. According to Roy, it’s the diversity that is easily obtainable here and a higher level of acceptance. “Here you can explain something completely foreign to someone and that is received as completely normal because that is how San Franciscans are, willing to accept new things, they give you the opportunity to be yourself, that makes it unique”. “Here there are many different influences in the way everyone perceives and drinks tea. Why limit yourself?” Ali adds. We take what speaks to us the most and incorporate it into our lives, alongside other rituals and practices. Take yoga and gong fu tea, for example. Jody points out that Northern California is really into yoga (which as we all know, originated in India) and many people who practice yoga are also into gong fu cha (a Chinese cultural ritual). My final question is whether we can refer to the San Francisco Bay Area tea scene as a tea culture. It’s the question I’ve been the most hesitant about, but I had to ask it. The word “culture” can have more than one meaning. Luckily, Roy is not intimidated by my question: “Before the second World War, Americans were drinking more tea on average than we do today. Tea is widely accepted in American life, you just don’t know it. You know what it is? It’s the Lipton tea bag. It’s in everybody’s cupboard. Across America, you wouldn’t find restaurants that do not serve tea, even 20 years ago. The acceptance level is already there, it’s the level of awareness that is not there yet.

Tea has always been there, it’s like that cousin you have, you know him but you just see him once a year, you don’t think of him but he’s there. What makes it a culture is if it’s allowed to continue and grow. Every culture continues to grow or it ceases to exist. From the tea bag to puer and attention to water temperature, if that’s not growth and awareness I don’t know what is. To me, that tells me it’s a culture”. Within this tea culture, there are definitely many subcultures or subgroups: the trendy boba milk tea (“the shallow end of the tea pool”, as Ali described it) might even be one of them. It has quite a following and it could become the starting point to dive deeper into the world of tea. Another tea subculture is festivals, as Jody tells me. “A big part of tea culture in Northern California is represented by festivals and puer is served there. People at these festivals are interested in spirituality and interesting creative music and art and talks about improving our lives and different planes of existence. I feel like tea speaks to that. Tea awakens the mind in a peaceful way, prepares you more for creativity and creating new things and I feel like these are the things that festival goers are interested in. At a festival you have a booth, you have a tent, people are sitting there for hours, having shou puer, you can steep shou puer for 20 - 30 steeps, it’s really conducive to serving tea to a lot of people for a long time, it’s a practical thing.” All these aspects of the same phenomenon are really striking, especially when you consider that right now in China millennials are switching to coffee, which is considered a trendy Western beverage, choosing it instead of tea when they meet friends or take a break from work. (*) I’ll be keeping an eye out for further tea-related developments, in San Francisco and beyond. (*) Source: Bloomberg, August 8, 2017 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-0808/china-millennials- swap-tea- for-coffee- as-starbucks- pushes-east

Anna Mariani is the author of The Tea Squirrel. The Tea Squirrel wants to transform authentic tea into an approachable, fun and sophisticated experience. She loves tea and gourmet food pairings and she's fascinated by the great potential tea has in bringing people together and bridging cultures. You can find out more at: http://www.teasquirrel.com

How Is Tamaryokucha Different from Straight-leaf Sencha? by Paul Kotta, Mellow Monk Green Tea Human beings love to categorize things. For an example, look no further than the music you are listening to. The proliferation of genres for metal music—just how is it that Viking metal and pirate metal are in different categories—is at the point where I wonder if some categories depend on what kind of cough drops the lead singer uses. Tea is no exception. Witness the Chinese teas, which is vying neck-and-neck with French cheeses for sheet number of types. In Japanese greens, one division is between straight-leaf sencha—that is, the sencha most tea aficionados know—and tamaryokucha (literally “curly/coiled green tea”), also known as guricha (which also means “curly tea”). Fortunately, how the two differ is easy to explain. From a production standpoint, the only difference is that tamaryokucha skips a final leafrolling step known as seijuu (精揉), or “fine rolling” or “fine kneading.” Leaves that go through the final rolling/kneading step end up straight in shape and are packaged as sencha; those that skip the step become tamaryokucha. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

A tamaryokucha (“curly green tea”) from Kumamoto, Japan, exhibiting the characteristic curly leaves, in contrast to the straight leaves of conventional sencha.

There is no special tamaryokucha cultivar of sencha; it is widely made from the same Yabukita plants that accounts for something like 70 percent of all Japanese sencha. From what my growers tell me, there is no special way of growing or tending to the plants or harvesting leaves for tamaryokucha—no secret fertilizer; no patented equipment for finessing the leaves. One rolling step. That’s it. At this point I can already hear the tea experts objecting, chiming in about how there is so much more to it, differences involving pan frying versus steaming. (Just as with straight sencha, most tamaryokucha is steamed, although pan-fried tamaryokucha is available.) But really, honestly, that’s all there is to it. This comes straight from the growers whose wonderful green tea I am fortunate enough to be able to share with the tea world. (Excuse the plug.) Wikipedia states that tamaryokucha is known for having a “milder and less astringent” flavor than typical Japanese greens, but this may have more to do with the artisan who creates the tea than with the processing. (More on that in a minute.)

Tamaryokucha is made from the same Yabukita cultivar of the tea plant that is used in most Japanese straight-leaf senchas.

Incidentally, the “tama” in “tamaryokucha” is from magatama, the name of a commashaped bead that was a common type of jewelry in ancient Japan. Tamaryokucha is a regional tea, preferred primarily in Kyushu and other parts of western Japan. What is unclear is why tea growers there made the switch to curly sencha. Or was that the original shape of sencha? Did upstarts up north switch to straight-leaf, while growers in and around Kyushu declared “This shall not pass”? Still, it’s not that tea artisans in Kyushu make only tamaryokucha; they also make straightleaf sencha for certain customers or occasions. It’s just that such artisans sell most of their tea to local folks and local tea shops, as opposed to shipping it far and wide throughout Japan, and that is what those customers want most of all—magatama-shaped leaves.

The name “tamaryokucha” comes from the finished tea leaves’ resemblance to magatama, a type of carved bead popular in ancient Japan. (Image from Wikipedia)

Back to the issue of flavor: Omitting the final rolling step could be responsible for tamaryokucha’s allegedly distinct flavor, by further crushing the leaves and releasing flavor components locked deep therein. However, my grower–artisans insist that something else is at work in those tea leaves: It’s all about the grower, not the process. What is key is not how many rolling steps the tea goes through, but how carefully the grower tends to the plants, harvests the leaves at just the right time, steams them quickly after harvest to lock in those polyphenols, packages the tea by the end of that day’s processing, carefully cleans the machinery before starting all over the next day, and, before sending the tea out to customers, stores the tea at the right temperature and humidity and gives it a final heating before sealing it in individual packets. In other words, it’s all about love, TLC, diligence—however you want to put it. Quality is more important than category. That is the primary flavor determinant in both tamaryokucha and straight-leaf sencha. In other words, that differentiation just isn’t that important. Now if someone would just explain the difference between indie surf pop and garage rock.

Paul Kotta is cofounder, with his wife Akimi, of Mellow Monk Green Tea (mellowmonk.com), which sources green tea directly from independent artisans located in Kumamoto Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. Paul and Akimi started Mellow Monk after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area from Kyushu and finding that the tea they had enjoyed so much in Kyushu was woefully underrepresented among teas available in the States.

Matcha Pumpkin Pie by Nazanine Yousefnejad

I'm in full fall mode. I'm already thinking about the leaves changing, what costume to wear for Halloween and going to the pumpkin patch! This means that I'm also brainstorming about all the fall recipes! I want to start baking a bunch of pies and naturally, I decided to start with pumpkin. This pumpkin pie has 2 twists. First, there isn't a regular crust! The crust is made from crushed up Biscoff cookies and held together with melted butter...mmmm. The second twist is, AH it's green! This is kinda perfect for Halloween too don't ya think?! So why is a pumpkin pie green you might ask? Matcha matcha matcha!!! I recently restocked my Matchaeologist matcha with their culinary grade Midori. I got a huge tin so that I can bake all fall and winter.

I love the taste of matcha and I think it goes well with a lot of things but I'll be honest, I wasn't sure how this would come out. Pumpkin is a strong flavor and is pumpkin pie really a pumpkin pie if it isn't that beautiful deep orange color? Oh well, this is a tea blog and we will bake with tea! NOMADIC

I figured if all else fails, the Biscoff crust would totally save the entire pie because they are so incredibly delicious! A quick note about the crust, I don't have a food processor currently so I crushed them up by hand and they were a little chunky. If you have a food processor I would use that so that they can get crushed well. That will make it easier for the butter to hold them together! This pie has the same texture and consistency as pumpkin pie but it's green! As far as flavor, it is true to the spices you taste in a pumpkin pie but the flavor of matcha is definitely present! You can also control how green the pie gets. What I did was mix the condensed milk and pumpkin together and then added the tablespoons of matcha one at a time. One tablespoon of matcha still makes the pie green but not as green as it is here. I hadn't added the eggs yet at this point, you can also taste the pie to see if there is enough matcha flavor in it yet.Â Something I learned about baking time: Make sure that the pie is set all the way through! When the top of the pie set and there was no wiggling left I thought this was done. I'm not sure if the matcha had anything to do with it but I think there was a false sense of the pie being done so make sure to use a toothpick and check the middle of the pie as well. Â I think the matcha adds a nice rich and bold flavor to the pumpkin that will make a great addition to a fall party!Â

Nazanin is the tea lover and maker behind Tea Thoughts, based in DC. Tea Thoughts is one part blog and one part product shop. The blog is where she takes her love for tea and transforms it into information and recipes so that you can easily incorporate tea into your daily life. The shop is where she turns her love for creating into whimsical products for tea lovers. Check out what's cooking over at www.teathoughts.com.Â

Tea, By Any Other Name by Nicole Martin

Tea, or some variation of it, is the word used to describe a beverage made from the leaves of Camellia Sinensis in many languages. In other parts of the world cha and chai are used instead. Have you ever wondered why that is? Chá, or

茶, is the word for tea in both Mandarin and Cantonese. Where it

evolved from there had a lot to do with where we got our tea from.

The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to purchase tea in bulk from China. They primarily traded from the Cantonese-speaking port of Macao. They held the island as a colony until it was returned to China in 1999. Tibet, Mongolia, and Russia first encountered tea through caravans over land and so acquired the word chá in much the same fashion. This then evolved into chây or chai in many other languages spoken around the world. The Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza is often credited with popularizing tea drinking among England’s upper class after she married King Charles II.

“Macao, View of Two Bays, ca. 1830” Unknown Chinese artist Peabody Essex Museum

Dutch traders, on the other hand, most likely encountered the word tê directly through merchants in Fujian Province. The port of Amoy (modern-day Xiamen) would have spoken the Amoy dialect of Southern Minnan Chinese at the time. It was the Dutch who first brought tea to England and even as far away as New Amsterdam, the colonial settlement that would eventually become New York. For this reason, the Min derivative was retained even when England later began trading directly with Canton (modern-day Guangzhou).

View of Table Bay with ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), c. 1683.

Of course, there are always outliers that don't seem to follow the same path as most other languages. The word for tea in Polish is herbata. It is believed to be derived from a combination of the Latin herba (herb) and Chinese chá. Interestingly, the Polish word for tea kettle is czajnik. The pronunciation is actually quite similar to chai, though! In Burma, the word laphet represents both tea that is drunk as well as tea leaves that are pickled and then eaten. The Chippewa, or Okibwe, word for tea is the seemingly completely unrelated aniibiishaaboo.

A note about chai: It does, in fact, mean tea. When we order a chai tea at Starbucks, we’re technically asking for tea tea. In North America, it has become synonymous with black tea that is blended with masala spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves.

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