Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival

I recently picked up an accordion-bound copy of Zhang Zeduan’s famous Song dynasty painting of a scene during the Qingming festival. The painting is so famous that a New York Times article described it this way:  “Like the Mona Lisa, ‘Qingming Festival’ is to some extent famous for being famous.”  It has been copied, reinterpreted, and converted into different media.  (In fact, my earliest memory of it is recognizing the famous bridge as the same as the semi-3D wooden model hanging from the wall of a Chinese restaurant I used to go to.)  The reproduction that I bought has some variations from the original, but from what I can tell those differences are only on the ends and in an additional top margin area.  However, it’s possible that I’ve got a reproduction of a fairly, though not completely, faithful copy.  As of this writing, the Wikipedia article on the painting is pretty interesting, including information about the city supposedly represented, various translations of the title into English, and so forth.

Detail of Along the River During the Qingming Festival

I bought it mainly because the Qingming festival is so important, at least traditionally, to the tea industry in China.  This festival, occurring in the first week of April, represents something like the start of the “regular” spring season. Teas harvested before the Qingming festival (called “mingqian” teas) are considered to be exceptional.  These teas are the ones that are expected to have the most concentrated flavor compounds because the tea plants have been building up their nutrient reserves over the winter.  Teas made after Qingming traditionally decreased in value as the date of harvest got further and further from the festival, for much the same reason.  Later-picked spring teas would be second, third, fourth pickings from the same bushes and would, therefore, be ever so slightly less full of the stuff needed for a truly amazing cup of tea.

This traditional picture of Chinese tea is changing, however, probably due to global climate change.  Increasingly, more and more tea can be produced before Qingming because the growing season is lengthening.  Thus, second or even third pluckings from a given bush are becoming possible before the festival, meaning that “mingqian” no longer virtually guarantees a first-pluck-of-the-year status to the teas.  This doesn’t stop mingqian teas from being sought after, but it does suggest that the mingqian tea you may get today is not nearly as good as all the traditional stories might lead you to suppose.

My personal take-away, though, is that it’s another reason to do your part reducing climate change, like driving less, using sustainably produced products, eating smaller amounts of non-poultry meats, using energy efficient lighting and appliances, and so forth.

Also, Tea Geek Business Members can check out my reproduction of this famous painting through the Tea Geek Library Service.

Advanced Tea Classes at the NW Tea Festival 2009

Tea Geek at the NW Tea Festival 2008Last year at the Northwest Tea Festival, we got feedback that some of the attendees would like more advanced classes.  This year, I have the honor of being the exclusive presenter of advanced classes.  I’m hoping that they fill quickly and show the world that American tea drinkers are serious about tea and interested in more than introductory-style tea education.

The classes will be offered in two pairs of topics.  Each topic has a beginner level (free) for those who are newer to the topic and as orientation for the advanced class.  The advanced level (with registration fee) will take the topic further, looking at the real story behind the often oversimplified claims used to sell tea.

The first pair of classes will be called The Teamaker’s Art and both will shed light upon how the leaves you take home from your local tea shop are grown and processed.  My goal is to have you leave not only knowing what goes on at major points in tea processing, but also have a deeper understanding of the complex skills and artistry required to make a truly good tea.  Teamaker’s Art 1 (Saturday, Oct 3rd) will look at the various choices made by a teamaker from soil to finished tea.  Teamaker’s Art 2 (Sunday, Oct 4th) will dig even deeper into the subject and explore how selected processing steps and the choices made by the teamaker affect the internal chemistry of the leaf and, consequently, the experience of the tea drinker who brews it.

The other pair is Tea and Caffeine, although both classes will touch a bit on plants other than Camellia sinensis and a few molecules besides just caffeine.  Here my goal is to shed some light on the complexity of caffeine, especially when the source is the tea plant.  Tea and Caffeine 1 will mainly look at what caffeine is, what it isn’t, and dispel several of the most pernicious tea myths in circulation.  Jump then to Tea and Caffeine 2 to learn how caffeine works its magic in the brain, how it combines with other compounds in tea to cause sometimes unexpected effects, as well as look at some recent research into the health risks and benefits of caffeine.

Anyone can take either (or both) levels.  If you jump into the advanced one without taking the first one, it will be more challenging, but don’t let that keep you away!

Seating at the free level-1 classes is first come first served, so get there early!  To register and reserve your seat in advance for the level-2 classes, you can either call the Perennial Tea Room at 888-448-4054 or click below to pay online:

Hope to see you there!

What’s Up With Tea Geek?

Tea Library ServiceHey, everyone…I’ve been a little uncommunicative recently and wanted to let folks know what’s up:

First, I’ve upped the security in the Tea Geek Store and installed regular credit card processing, so now you can sign up for classes and buy the tea for your daily cup (or special-occasion cup) quickly and with more confidence.

Perhaps more importantly, I’ve added another membership level that you can join:  Business Members.  Designed with the training and reference needs of people in the tea industry in mind, it ties my original purpose in founding Tea Geek to the results of all my study over 15 years learning about tea and launches the Tea Library Service.

After studying tea for many years and working in several tea businesses, I realized that there was just too much misinformation circulating about tea. And the tea industry in the US (a) didn’t care, (b) didn’t know what they didn’t know, and/or (c) were being somewhat careless with “facts” in order to move more product. So I founded Tea Geek with the intention of providing accurate, well-cited information about tea, primarily through tea education classes.

As of this posting, Individual Members get:

  • A membership card
  • Your own discount code for 15% off everything offered by Tea Geek–classes, tea, teaware…everything!
  • Exclusive, unique, MEMBERS ONLY tea selections
  • Quarterly tea samples
  • Access to the ever-expanding Tea Geek Wiki for your tea reference needs
  • And a FREE online class! Tea 101: Everything You Need to Know

More information on the Individual Membership

Now, Business Members get:

  • A membership card
  • Your own unique discount code for 20% off everything offered by Tea Geek–classes, tea, teaware, research…everything!
  • Your employees can become Individual Members for only $25 each (a $35 value per person). Great for an inexpensive employee benefit or training program.
  • Exclusive, unique, MEMBERS ONLY tea selections
  • Quarterly tea samples; try something new!
  • Quarterly tea report on various aspects of tea. Topics may include trends in the tea industry, tea history, processing, geography, chemistry, health studies, and more!
  • Access to the ever-expanding Tea Geek Wiki for your tea reference needs
  • Access to Tea Geek’s Tea Library. Select tea-related resources and have them shipped to you to review or use as reference!
  • And a FREE online class! Tea 101: Everything You Need to Know will get your new hires up to speed quickly on the absolute essentials to get started in the tea industry.

More information on the Business Membership

In addition, we’re scheming up new benefits for our members and have several knowledgeable tea people designing new online courses (some will be free to members, and the rest will be 15% or 20% off the non-member price).

With the creation of classes, research for the Tea Geek Wiki, putting together the Tea Library Service, updating the website security, and adding credit card processing, it’s been a busy couple of weeks.  Remember that the money from your memberships will be used primarily for expanding the Tea Library and, soon, original scientific research into tea.

Hope you enjoy it all!

Hot+Cold=Perfect

For those of you who have determined the precise temperature at which your favorite tea gives off your favorite aromas and flavors, but want to get to the perfect temperature more quickly than allowing the water to cool off the boil naturally, I’ve got a refresher course for you from high school chemistry.  Now, don’t run–it’s pretty easy.  Well, it’s easy mainly because we’re talking about adding water to water (so there’s no worrying about different thermal properties of two different liquids).  We’ll also ignore for the moment the effects of surface area on cooling and the heat transfer coefficients of different materials you might hold your water in.

See?  We’re ignoring all the confusing stuff and making it simple.

Let’s say you’ve got some amount of boiling water (212F) and another amount of room-temperature water (68F) and you’re going to add the cold water to the hot water to make this perfect tea-brewing temperature.  Now, 194 isn’t much below 212, so we probably don’t need to add too much of the colder water.  We can use an equation to figure out the resulting temperature based on the amounts of each of the two waters we combine.

Here’s the equation.  Don’t be scared.

Tx= Vc*Tc + Vh*Th

Where T=temperature, and V=volume of water, expressed as a decimal percentage of the combined total.  The “x” refers to the combined water, and “c” is “cold” while “h” is “hot.”

For the moment, let’s pretend we’ve got a teapot or cup or gaiwan or whatever that holds 8 fluid ounces.  And to make the math easy, we’re going to measure in 1-ounce increments.  Since we only need a little cool water, let’s do 1 ounce cold, and 7 ounces hot.  What temperature would that make?

Let’s plug in our numbers, remembering that “V” is the percentage of the total.  One ounce is 12.5% of 8 ounces, and 7 is 87.5%.  Converted into decimals, that’s .125 of cold, and .875 of hot:

Tx = .125*68F + .875*212F

So doing the multiplication first:  Tx = 8.5F + 185.5F

Or Tx = 194F

Ta da!  If you were to add 1 fluid ounce of room temperature (68F) water to 7 fluid ounces of boiling water (212F), they’d mix to make a lovely 194F.  By the way, for those that are more scientifically minded or live outside of the US, all this works in Celsius as well.  Tx = .125*20C + .875*100C = 2.5C + 87.5C = 90C.  And 90C=194F

Once you’ve used this equation to figure the right proportions, you can make the right temperature all the time without resorting to the use of lots of thermometers or devices that heat water and shut off at preset temperatures or whatever.  If 194F is your ideal, you just need to remember that if your cold water is really at 68F, it’s a precise ratio of 1 part cold, 7 parts boiling.

Clearly, you can also adjust based on whatever the situation is.  If you keep bottled water in the fridge and the fridge stays at a more constant temperature than “room temp” you can use that number for your cold and find your new perfect ratio.

If you want to get more complicated, recognize that different materials absorb heat at different rates.  However, the closer the water vessel used to combine your two temperatures is to the final temperature, the less the effect will be.  So your calculations will be more accurate by pre-warming your vessels.  Or if you’re geeky about temperatures even beyond what I’ve given you here, you can research the thermal properties of whatever material your teaware is made of.

Of course, I usually use boiling water for everything, and drastically lower brewing time if it’s a “low temperature” tea.  But that’s just my personal method.  Do tea the way it tastes best to you, and experiment with other ways to see if you can improve on what you already like.

Enjoy!

Teaching about Tea

So riddle me this:

I’ve been doing tea education for at least part of my income since 2003.  I’ve encountered a number of challenges along the way and I’m curious if the tea people here would have any good ideas.

First, I’ve found that one of the main barriers to being a teacher in the field of tea is that the vast majority of English speakers don’t even know enough about it to realize that you CAN learn something about tea.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked what I do and said, “I’m a tea educator” or “I’m a tea teacher.”

The other person looks at me blankly and says, “A what?  What do you mean?”

“I teach classes about tea.”

“Tea?  Like the drink?  What do you mean you teach classes about it?”

It’s hard to get people to sign up for a class that they can’t even comprehend what it is, let alone why they might want to take it.

Second, it seems that many people in the tea industry (again, my bias is the English speaking world, primarily USA) just don’t care about accuracy.  It seems to me that the typical tea business person is very nice and very well meaning, but essentially read a few of the popular tea books such as Norwood’s New Tea Lover’s Treasury, realize how much more they know about tea than the average person, and then rely on their suppliers to tell them anything else they need to know.  The end.  Very few try to verify what they’re told.  Very few actually seek out additional tea information.  And so half-truths, mistakes (original, inherited, or amplified), little white marketing lies, and other forms of misinformation get circulated over and over again and become orthodoxy.  That leaves an army of nice, well-meaning people who consider themselves experts out there,  spreading lots of believable-but-incorrect information about tea.

How does one responsibly educate about tea?  How can tea people tip the balance towards accuracy?  What can tea educators do to more effectively move people along the path so many of us have been on–from grocery store teabags to more quality teas, and finally to a place where we realize that there’s a ton of interesting stuff to learn about tea…and that it’s enjoyable to do it?    Is good, accurate information something that the industry as a whole needs to work on providing, or is it something that tea customers need to demand?  Or does it even matter if “experts” are teaching (and customers believing) stuff that just isn’t so?

I have my own ideas on some of these, but I’m curious what others think.  Leave a comment and let me know your opinion!

An Update on the Boys

In a post from February, I noted that I’d become a proud father of two tea plants.  At that time I promised an update sometime in the future.  Well, now that the li’l tykes are 6 months old (and because there’s been some talk on Twitter and various tea-related forums about tea propagation), it’s time for that update!

As a reminder, here’s what they looked like in February 2009:
The Boys, February 2009

And now, in August 2009:
The Boys, August 2009

I’ve decided to call them Laurel and Hardy…for the obvious reasons.  And these guys are a great example of two things in the tea industry.

First, they show why so many cultivated tea plants are taken from cuttings rather than seed.  Since good old L&H here were both from seeds of the same plant, you’d think they’d be more similar.  However, Camellia sinensis is one of those plants that has a lot of variation when there is sexual reproduction, and one that can’t effectively self-pollinate.  Now, I don’t know who the father is (or “fathers are”).  I’ve got another tea plant but I don’t think it bloomed that year; I’ve got a Camellia japonica in the front yard, but I’m not sure if cross-species pollination can occur within the genus Camellia.  If it works like horses and donkeys, my two kids could be mules…and possibly sterile.  But I’m not yet clear on how the genetics works with the tea plant.

With two clearly different plants coming from seed of the same mother plant, you can see why tea farmers would want to plant cuttings rather than seeds if they find a plant that does what they want.  If the farmer plants seeds, who knows what they’ll get?  But if they plant cuttings, they’re making a clone of the parent bush…ensuring a consistent and predictable crop.

The other thing this illustrates is how new cultivars come about.  While cuttings result in the predictability of clones, sexual reproduction produces lots of variation—like Laurel and Hardy.  If one of the freaky, doesn’t-look-like-Mom kids has some new quality that benefits the farmer—like producing a sweeter-tasting tea, or resisting pesky bugs, or more easily surviving bad weather—then the kid may get cloned, or selectively cross-pollinated with other plants.  Eventually, when the genetics settle down, you’ve got a new cultivar (short for “cultivated variety”).

For now, I’ll just let ’em have their childhood until they grow up and get to work producing leaves for me.  But maybe I’ll be able to develop my own Tea Geek cultivar in the next 10 years or so.

New Feature: Try This At Home

If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably noticed something of a theme in my writing–I’m something of a stickler for accuracy when it comes to information about tea.  As a result, I do a lot of head-butting with the received wisdom of nearly five thousand years of product marketing and other forms of not-quite-accurate information.

In the hopes of getting people to engage more fully with their tea, to question their assumptions, and to stimulate conversation, I’m launching a new occasional feature of the Tea Geek blog.  I’m calling it Try This At Home.  While I enjoy getting orders at the Tea Geek store, these experiments will be ones you can do with teas and equipment that you may already have–or can easily find online or at your local specialty tea shop.

Each Try This At Home will be like a mini science experiment–equipment, procedure, and so forth.   I want you to have some fun, play with your tea, and do the experiment.  You’re welcome to send me the results or not as you see fit.  I will collect the information that people send, which may turn into future blog posts.

I’m starting with an experiment I’ve done myself a number of times that came up at a recent tea class I taught.  It takes aim at the idea that you need to brew certain teas at a certain water temperature.  Here’s what I want you to try at home:

Equipment:

  1. Two identical brewing vessels.  These can be anything you want–English teapots, gaiwans, cupping sets, whatever.  Shape isn’t too important, but material and capacity should be the same.
  2. Tea–specifically high-end, unflavored, green or white tea.  Enough to make the same tea in both vessels.
  3. Water and something to boil it in
  4. A timer
  5. A scale, as accurate as you can find

Procedure

  1. Weigh out two equal quantities of tea, appropriate for the size of vessel you’re brewing in.  If you need a guideline, try about 4.5 grams per US cup (236 ml).
  2. Put a measure of tea into each brewing vessel.
  3. Bring the water to a boil; while you’re waiting, set the timer to 15 seconds
  4. When the water boils, fill the first brewing vessel and start the timer.
  5. Strain the tea as soon as the timer goes off.
  6. Wait two minutes; meanwhile, reset the timer to five minutes
  7. Use the water that has now cooled slightly more than two minutes to fill the second teapot and start the timer.
  8. When the timer goes off, strain the second pot
  9. Compare the two tea liquor samples you’ve made.   Note differences in color, fragrance, mouthfeel, flavor, astringency, and bitterness.

Questions for Discussion

What qualities did the first sample have that were absent or reduced in the second sample?  What qualities did #2 have that #1 didn’t?  Try to describe inherent qualities of  the tea, differentiating them from whether or not you like/dislike them.

Given these differences, what conclusions can you draw about brewing the type of tea you used?

It is often said that green or white tea should never be brewed with boiling water because it will ruin the tea.  Given the differences you’ve noted, what do you think of that advice?

And if you decide to report your findings to me, please include the name and source of the tea you chose to use.  Thanks!

TG Interview: Sherri Miller

There are always lots of exciting things going on in the world of tea.  One of the developing areas is the increasing production of tea in Hawaii.  I had the good fortune to meet several Hawaiian tea farmers a couple of months ago at the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas.  Among those I met was Sherri Miller of Moonrise Tea Garden, who is experimenting with cultivars from Japan, Taiwan, and India (Darjeeling) to see what grows best in the soils and climate of the 50th state.

TG:  What’s your favorite tea?

Sherri Miller of Moonrise Tea GardenSM: Currently, and this is subject to change, is the white tea I have been producing.  A close second would be Onomea Tea’s orthodox black tea. (And yet I need to reserve a spot for an oolong too, but which one? and if I had to include a green it would be a gyokuro, which we learned how to make from a Japanese master.)

TG:  How did you start on the path to tea geekdom?  Briefly describe your history of tea exploration.

SM:  As a child, my grandmother would always make me tea whenever I did not feel well, so I have always associated tea with comfort and health.  Fast forward many years.

I was living on agricultural land, and had been researching for several years which crop(s) would best fit the land and my life.  I saw a meeting at the ag complex about tea.  The University of Hawaii had done research on specialty tea as a new crop for Hawaii.  I went to the meeting and realized that tea was the perfect fit.  I like to tell people I didn’t find tea; tea found me.  Now I live with comfort and health.

TG:  What aspect of tea do you find most fascinating?

SM:  The processing.  It’s amazing that the leaves make such widely varying tea.  It is affected by weather, temperature, by wind and humidity, by the containers and elements it comes in contact with, by human hands.  It starts out as the same basic leaf, but can become a subtle, honeyed white tea, a robust black, a fragrant oolong, or a pungent green tea….all from the same leaf.  And little variations during processing can make a big difference in the result.  Simply amazing. [Editor’s note: keep an eye out for Tea Geek classes about some of these variations, both online at the Tea Geek Store, and also at the upcoming Northwest Tea Festival in Seattle, in a class-in-development called “The Teamaker’s Art”]

TG:  Who have you learned the most from?

SM:  I have learned the most from the tea itself.  It is a wise and patient teacher.

TG:  What tea resource (book, website, person, etc.) would you recommend for a tea novice?

SM:  James Norwood Pratt’s New Tea Lover’s Treasury for the basics of tea, or, The Ultimate Tea Diet by Mark Ukra, not for dieting, but how to incorporate tea into your life for health and enjoyment.  A great resource for explanations of the chemical components of tea and how they benefit health.

I would also recommend just plain experimentation.  Try different teas, different brewing methods, vessels, temperatures, time, etc.  Learn what you like and what you don’t like.  And realize that not all teas with the same name taste the same.  Keep trying and experimenting.  Others can give recommendations, but no one can tell you what you like.  That is personal.

TG:  And what’s your own favorite tea resource, potentially for more advanced tea geeks?

SM:  The books I would recommend would be for growers.  For the average, potentially more advanced tea geek, I would recommend STI.  The classes, the resources, and the people involved cover a wealth of knowledge.

TG:  What does tea mean to you?

SM:  Tea is a way of life.

TG:  Name your biggest pet peeve in the realm of tea and tea drinking.

SM:  Misinformation about the healthiest type of tea, the levels of caffeine etc. and how the myths are perpetuated by so-called experts.  [Editor’s note:  Amen and Hallelujah!]

TG:  If you could let everyone in the world know or understand one thing about tea, what would it be?

SM:  Really good tea is not as expensive as it seems.  Look at the price per cup and not the price per pound (like coffee).  Yes you can afford good whole leaf tea, even on a budget.  You do not have to drink old dust in a musty tea bag.  (And brewing whole leaf tea isn’t complicated either)

TG:  What’s the craziest/weirdest/most obsessive thing you’ve ever done in pursuit of your love of tea?

SM:  I hosted a party just to name a tea drink, and worked with the guests and others, some thousands of miles away–for days–just for a name.   Might not sound that crazy, but for days I was absolutely obsessed and thought of nothing else.  Just ask my kids!  I wouldn’t even cook.

TG:  Thank you!

Sun Tea Winner (Plus a Rant About Information Drift)

Okay, the entries are in and I’ve picked a winner!  There were some very informative entries to the contest from my Don’t Make Iced Tea post, both posted as comments and sent to me as email.  So interesting, in fact, that I’m going to do a slight rant about the media and information about tea.

But first, the winner of the $15 shopping spree is Chris Giddings of www.Tea-Guy.com In addition, for their providing of what appear to be the first two articles of the chain reaction I’ll talk about soon, I’m giving an extra $5 “runner-up” credit each to Jason Witt and Kenneth.

Chris’ entry won because it actually included a copy of an email from a CDC employee, sent from a CDC.gov address.  This email stated that to his knowledge, there was no “official guidance” on sun tea.  It was the only entry that wasn’t someone else reporting on the CDC.

And that’s where it starts sliding into the rant about the media.  Most of the other entries were reports of what was said by the CDC, mixed with information from the Tea Association of the USA.  Combining everything from all of the entries, it seems that the articles are a combination of data summaries from the CDC’s Foodborn Outbreak Surveillance System, unpublished information from the Tea Association of the USA, and a non-sourced story about people getting sick.

The CDC information basically said that they had no reported outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness clearly tied to iced tea; and that some tests had occasionally shown high levels of “indicator organisms.”  In other words, there is theoretical danger, but no evidence that the risk has shown itself in the real world.  They stated that the risk was more likely to come from poor food handling practices than from the tea itself.

The Tea Association basically riffed off of this and it was they who suggested not to make sun tea.  They also provided the most likely food handling errors that would cause problems.

Now, notice how these two different bits of information, from two distinct sources (a government agency and an industry association), were handled.  Hang on for a strange and bumpy ride.

It appears that in February, 1996, Dr. Robert V. Tauxe and Dr. Mitchell L. Cohen, both of the CDC, compiled the information mentioned above in an article for Virginia Epidemiology Bulletin, the earliest place the CDC info and Tea Association info seem to have set foot in the same article.  The March/April 2009 issue of Foods and Nutrition Digest from the Cooperative Extension Service of Kansas State Univeristy picked up the story, slightly condensing and summarizing some of the information.

In June 1996, Pat Kendall wrote an article for the Fort Collins Coloradoan called “Bacteria-filled iced tea can cause illness”.  I haven’t been able to find a copy of the article, so I can tell neither how the author cited sources nor how faithfully the information was portrayed.  However, this article was adapted by the Colorado State University Extension FoodSafe Network in 1999 with a disclaimer.

The Las Vegas Sun runs a story in 2001 referencing both the Coloradoan and the FoodSafe Network.  The FoodSafe article was referenced by the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service in June 2003.  In the May/June 2004 issue of Yale Health Care: News from the Yale health plan also refers to the FoodSafe adaptation of Kendall’s article in the Coloradoan.  The Yale article is referenced by the Hawaii Tea Factory website.

In fact, it seems like everyone started quoting everyone else around this point.   Somewhere along the way, the information got added that one of the microbes that might show up in your sun tea to cause problems is alcaligenes viscolactis.  I have no idea where that information originally came from, since it was not mentioned in either of the two earliest articles.  As far as I can tell it’s accurate insofar as that it’s a common bacteria found in water and can multiply in just the environment found in sun tea.  But the CDC doesn’t appear to have a warning about it, either.

Even the typically reliable Snopes.com decided to weigh in on the topic in 2006.  It claims the health dangers were warned against by the CDC, and mentions our friend alcaligenes viscolactis.  They cite four newspaper articles, none of which I can find online–even searching on the quoted article title and/or author on the individual newspaper websites.  Snopes did not cite the CDC.  But that didn’t stop at least one blogger from claiming that Snopes had indeed contacted the CDC to confirm the warning.  (A side note about the infuriating circular experience about tracking all this information down:  the only places I could find references to the Snopes source articles were other people referencing the Snopes article referencing the newspaper articles.)

And there you have it.  We started with the CDC saying that there are no recorded tea-born illnesses, but that there’s a theoretical risk in cases of poor food handling.  We end with a wildfire of articles all claiming that the CDC is warning that it’s dangerous to make iced tea.

So a word to the wise:  While little tea factoids can be interesting and enlightening, it’s always important to track down the sources of that information.  Sometimes through multiple layers of sources.  You might find that the real story is nothing like what “tea experts” are telling you.

Note:  That includes me, too.  I used links where I could so you could verify that what I’m saying is so.  If you ever find I’ve said something that’s factually incorrect, I want you to call me on it.  Tea Geek was founded on the desire to combat the rampant misinformation about tea, regardless of how (or by whom) it is disseminated.  Don’t trust me.  Don’t trust your local tea shop owner.  Don’t trust the lovely tea book with the pretty tea pictures.  Verify!

Why We Shouldn’t Describe Tea

When you read descriptions of teas that you’re thinking of buying, or are told in a tea-tasting class that you should record your impressions in a tea journal, or read those blogs that are little more than a public tea journal in the guise of tea reviews, something vital is being lost: the experience of having tea.

In one study, researchers showed volunteers a color swatch of the sort one might pick up in the paint aisle of the local hardware store and allowed them to study it for five seconds.  Some volunteers then spent thirty seconds describing the color (describers), while other volunteers did not describe it (nondescribers).  All volunteers were then shown a lineup of six color swatches, one of which was the color they had seen thirty seconds earlier, and were asked to pick out the original swatch.  The first interesting finding was that only 73 percent of the nondescribers were able to identify it accurately.  In other words, fewer than three quarters of these folks could tell if this experience of yellow was the same as the experience of yellow they had had just a half-minute before.  The second interesting finding was that describing the color impaired rather than improved performance on the identification task.  Only 33 percent of the describers were able to accurately identify the original color.  Apparently, the describers’ verbal descriptions of their experiences “overwrote” their memories of the experiences themselves, and they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they had experienced.  And what they had said was not clear and precise enough to help them recognize it when they saw it again thirty seconds later.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Let’s apply this to tea tasting for a moment.  First, a color is pretty simple–it’s a particular wavelength of light.  From a scientific standpoint, the color watches could be described with a single number ranging from roughly 380 nm to 750 nm (the spectrum of wavelengths in light that humans can perceive).  Granted, there may be a few exceptions–like if the color swatch had some color variations, etc.

However, compare that to how complex an experience tea is.  There are tactile senses, olfactory sensations, gustatory sensations…and each of those is more complex than seeing color.  Let’s simplify things and ignore everything but taste.  You taste with your taste buds.  But there are five types of taste buds which sense through both protein receptors and ion receptors.   So let’s further simplify and say we’re only talking about the ion receptors.  We’ve still got choices, because the ion channels can sense sodium ions (“saltiness”) or hydrogen ions (“sourness”).  So let’s simplify further.  We’ll only look at acids activating the ion channels of a single taste bud.  Different concentrations of acidity will cause different levels of charge in the underlying nerves that take the sensation to the brain.

Oh, but it’s even more complicated than that because some “sour” flavors are caused by potassium ions, not hydrogen ones, and potassium ions follow a different channel.

In short, the taste of a tea is WAY more complex than a color.  And if humans can’t even remember a color accurately for 30 seconds, and their ability drops by more than half if they try to describe that color because the description falls so far short of the experience as to render it useless, we shouldn’t bother with something so complex as a flavor or a scent.  After all, the people who didn’t describe the color did more than twice as well at identifying the same experience 30 seconds later.

Will that do away with tea reviews, descriptions on cannisters and websites, or discussions at tea tastings?  No.  Clearly, we need to communicate some information about flavor when choosing a new tea or evaluating a sample.  But we should keep in mind that any description is about as accurate as if I tried to point to New York from here in Seattle: it’s more useful than no directions at all, but it’s doubtful that you’d get there with only that information.

What I recommend, though, is that when you’re tasting your tea, or cupping samples, or engaged in some other tea experience, SHUT UP.  Instead of trying to put it into words, or discovering exactly which fruit that particular flavor note reminds you of, stop and taste the tea.  Savor the experience without language (aloud or in the mind) if possible.  You’ll develop a more accurate taste memory than the people who spend their time trying to put words to their experience.