Phoenix Tea Sindano Fedha (Silver Needle): Kenya

"Mr. Knoerr, may I have some more?" The tallest boy in the school, good at sports, loud and energetic, wants a second tiny cup of Kenyan white tea. The room is unusually quiet today, because Caleb's friends have somehow convinced him to stay mostly silent—a feat I find astonishing and which I could repeat. He wrote his request on a piece of paper and handed it to me before accepting a refill.

Throughout my adult life, I've resigned myself to being alone in my interests, listening to 20th-century classical music, and reading books no one has read and no one has any interest in reading. So it comes as a continual surprise that my students want to share in (and demand, in fact) the most esoteric of my interests, tea.

Earlier in my blog, I wrote many times that the reason Americans don't drink tea is that they don't know what they're missing. We Americans, like everyone else on the planet, like the good stuff in life, when we know it exists and that it's worth the effort. Back in the '70s, when I was growing up, TV commercials (remember those?) sold Folgers coffee with flavor crystals, which brand my parents had in big canisters in the fridge. It was predictable, and it was better than whatever sludge came before, I guess.



But then the '90s happened, and Starbucks and microbreweries changed the way we drank. Coffee went from a cup of Joe to a double-mocha Venti Josephus; and Stroh's went by the wayside for Hop Zombie I.P.A. When we take some time and observe, we can really enjoy things once in a while.

(Here's a quick report on a Kenyan Silver Needle tea from Phoenix Tea. I had it awhile back, and I'm only now completing this write-up. Pardon, everyone who ever lived, for being so tardy!)


Steep 1
Pale, transparent gold
5 min steep, for fun
bright, sharp-edged at this extreme end of taste; light and floral with less
lactonic, milky hint under the brightness

Steep 2
Almost a chocolate first note, milky, white chocolate, a bit floral, vanilla, strong. "Yeah, it's different." "It smells like girls." High note of lilac, perhaps. Drying,

High-quality white tea, buds perfect,





Students line up for a white tea from Kenya, coming back for seconds.

Twigs and Leaves: 2015 Hojicha, Phoenix Tea

{ Sticks Framing a Lake, Andy Goldsworthy }  

"Tastes like bark."

"No, tastes like water."

Yesterday I wrote on Facebook, "Watching my Valeo students, who are my new 39 Steeps Tea Club, rush up for high-end ‪#‎tea‬ from Phoenix Tea is akin to witnessing a cow being eaten by piranhas. They're enjoying themselves, learning to drink the good stuff, and being alarming, all at the same time."

My students, who are Young in the Ways of Tea, are meandering toward the observation that the Hojicha carried by Phoenix Tea (and which is happily affordable) makes them think of a life connected to nature—like a walk outside, like the smell the forest air takes on after a rain. Or maybe just before a rain? Well, something to do with a rain, anyway.

Hojicha, as my more attentive students now know, is made from the stems of the tea plants whose leaves have already been plucked. The Japanese, who don't have endless land upon which to grow their tea, have developed a frugal system in which they don't waste anything they can brew.

What little I could get of the tea—after the tea sharks had had their way with it—was an easy pleasure. It's been awhile since I've made tea for my students, so I'm rusty, and this tea was a good one to start with. Woodsy, surprisingly smooth, and good for teenagers who had no idea what they were tasting. I chose this tea because, being affordable, I wasn't as anxious about screwing it up while I get my tea chops under me again.

I'm trying to relax as I write this, focusing on those few tea friends I know who would read this, like I did when I first started writing tea reviews. Somehow the knowledge that strangers have read this blog close to a quarter million times is a trifle intimidating. So back to basics. I'll pretend I'm back in the Facebook group, discussing what I think about this or that.

{ Miss Twiggy }

I'd buy the twiggy hojicha again. It's inexpensive enough that it's easy to experiment and play around with, while being sufficiently highbrow to feel like I'm giving the students and my fellow teachers something interesting to dig into.

When I'm sharing tea, you see, I'm not just providing a service; I'm trying to wake myself up—and not with the caffeine alone. Because I tend toward pretty serious depression, I value that which will make me aware that I'm alive, pull me out of my funk, get me past the listlessness, and let me have some enjoyment in the moment I happen to be in. Good music does this. (Today I was listening to a combination of Ralph Vaughan Williams and medieval stuff from Spain.) So does time talking to some very few of my friends. So does spending time with my lovely Suzanne. Surprisingly, so does teaching English literature. When I can dig in, delve into my interests and share them with someone else, I feel like I'm touching a live wire. And if a cup of golden-brown leaf juice can help me do that—well, fantastic.

{ The 39 Steeps tea blog's stately progression }  

Hi, all!

It's been awhile since last I wrote here, and awhile before that, and so on. I'm regularly irregular, it seems.

I've been teaching at Valeo Academy, and over the last year my students—including, surprisingly, a number of high school boys—have taken an interest in the tea I have been drinking.

So last term, they drank, and drank, and drank my tea, sampling and discovering why the Good Stuff is, in fact, the good stuff. And they drank my tea until I completely ran through my dragon's hoard of Camellia sinensis leaves. Fie!

And a few of the students came up with the wise idea to actually cough up some money to help me buy more tea. Thus, The 39 Steeps Tea Club is born. Though anyone at Valeo can sample the tea, the kids who added some money to the till get bragging rights as founding members, and they get to drink anything I have, until I run out of tea again.

Our first tranche of tea has been generously provided for us by Cinnabar (Virginia Wright), the author of Gongfu Girl and numerous other writing outlets; and Brett Boynton of Black Dragon Tea Bar blog. Together they are the proprietors of Phoenix Tea Shop, which has been around for about five years at this writing, since 2010. When I contacted Cinnabar via Facebook, I told her my budget and asked her to come up with an unflavored tea care package for my students. And wow, did she and Brett provide.

In the days to come, I'll begin showcasing tea again on the blog, hurray and heaven be praised! I know I take a circuitous route to writing here, so we'll see how this goes. Thank you for your patronage. And thank you, Phoenix Tea Shop, for providing my students and me some delicious teas.

Nightmarish Teabag Adverts Are Stalking Me

I am being stalked by Google's advertising preferences with heinous ads like the following:

{ Now, that's just wrong. }

It's the peril of blogging. I use an an image of ugly teabags in the previous post, "Just Slow Down Already," and now every page is covered in stomach-turning caricatures of the royal family.

Note to everyone: I am from the United States. I am a damned Yankee. I do not follow the daily meanderings of the British aristocracy. I also do not use teabags unless I'm under duress. I'm certainly not willing to shell out $14.99 on joke teabags celebrating (or burying) the current silly batch of royals so I can stare at them while I drink their undoubtedly horrible tea.

Google Adwords apparently does not understand irony nor sarcasm. If I mention or take a picture of, say, Kim Kardashian or Lady Gaga, should I expect to see them on every web page I browse for the next few months?

Dear readers, please, PLEASE do not send me these tea bags as a joke gift. Because then I will be forced to send them to "Cinnabar Gongfu" over at Phoenix Tea, like a fruitcake no one knows what to do with. (I would venture to say, however, that it's somewhat unlikely that they have a full set of British Royals teabags in stock, so maybe I'll be helping them meet a demographic that has been ill served.)

I won't even break the seal on the packaging. No, I mean it.