California Tea House Dian Hong: A Tea Short and Stout

Hello, all tea connoisseurs, appreciators, Tea Partiers who accidentally stumbled here looking for fiscal-conservative views, and true tea masters who would do better somewhere else!

As you can see, we've been in hiatus for a while. Honestly, I ran out of things to talk about, and spiffy images to accompany a blog about tea when brown leaf juice just doesn't seem that photogenic all the time. I had allowed drinking tea to become a bit of a chore, because everything I drank required an essay. And even for a person who types 90 words per minute (on a good day), there are only so many ways I can say, "Wow, this is great tea! Go buy some, and don't make me come back there!"

So I'll return, methinks, to the original idea of this blog: To help me keep track of the teas I'm drinking and to share discoveries with whomever is still out there, reading this little blog of mine.

AND I HAVE A SECRET PROJECT, which I'll let you know more about in the days ahead. It's tea-related, it's fun, and it'll only cost you your life savings. Or maybe some pocket change. TBD.

So today, I think I'll talk about Yunnan Golden Buds, also called dian hong, brought to you by California Tea House. I've had this sitting in my tea cabinet for a while, and with a new gaiwan to replace my broken one, I thought to break it in with something easy to prepare and simple for the palate to discern. This seemed just the thing.

This tea is hefty, hearty, rich, malty, with a thick mouthfeel and a pub attitude. I put in perhaps two teaspoons into the gaiwan and served gongfu style, meaning lots of leaf, short steeping times. But even with short times, this tea maintained quite a kick. I wouldn't call it a deeply subtle tea, but earthy and robust.

The closest thing analogy can think of is like taking a good Guinness stout and drinking it hot. (I know, it's a horrifying idea, hot Guinness, but no analogy is perfect.) If a tea could have a head on it, this would. I got through three steepings before I started to taste some of the subtler tones; the earlier ones tasted like hot chocolate, like malted milk, like thickness in a cup. Not your delicate, lady tea, this. No, it's the kind of thing to wipe away a gray Chicago afternoon, kick you in the teeth, and get you going.

I'm on my fourth steeping of this quite nice tea now, and an astringent, almost lemony flavor is starting to dominate as the malty notes recede into memory. This is much more to my liking, as I enjoy lighter, more subtle teas than bonk-you-on-the-head-and-take-your-wallet types of vintages. Though the flavor is more one-dimensional than it was at the start of the steeping series, the lightness and fruity quality are quite enjoyable.

California Tea House seems to be taking their teas pretty seriously, giving rather specific information about origin of the teas they're procuring for their customers. This is a good thing for any tea appreciator, because it allows us to understand what we're getting, so we can make informed choices later. Well done, CTH, and I look forward to more of your tea in the future.



Thank you, tea friends, for continuing to keep me in your thoughts as I slog through life and occasionally try to write something useful about this wonderful drink and the culture surrounding it. I'll drop in occasionally and write something, but I'll try to keep it light so I don't become oppressed by the requirement to write about everything, which seems to ruin it for and make me avoid the blog entirely. Oh, and by the way, I actually spent time making the above image of the tumbler of Guinness with a teacup handle, which took me longer than writing the tea review (such as it is). Please appreciate my mad Photoshop skillz! 

A Surprise of Crocuses and an Alchemy of Tea

{ A Surprise of Crocuses }  

When I was, oh, 10 or 11, Dad had a secret. During early Autumn sometime, he made my sister and me PROMISE not to tell Mom what we were up to. Like spies or ninjas, we went to the backyard with a TOP-SECRET bag, and we dug little holes, into which we put what I now know are called, corms. We had no idea what these were, and Dad wouldn't tell us. Winter came. Christmas with its usual abundance of toys, fun, exhaustion, energy. New Year came and went. Snow was still on the ground. Valentine's Day. Every day, now, Dad would (secretly) ask us to look in the backyard to see . . . what? We didn't know, the little holes we dug having been long forgotten.

Then one morning in early Spring, all over the still-snowy yard were an abundance of crocuses, purple and yellow and blue bundles of flowers, scattered everywhere. This was the surprise for Mom that we had waited for all Winter long. A delight of crocuses, and snowdrops, and who knows what else we had planted as a way of being welcomed by Spring and of saying, "I Love You," to Mom. I imagine she still remembers that wonderful Spring to this day.

and now to the tea

Ah, yes, you've been waiting for me to write about tea again, not about flowers. Well, I had a surprise waiting for me this month. I had made an order from Chicago Coffee and Tea Exchange, who provide decent-quality tea without much ado. They were the source of my first true tea education, and I am forever grateful. Kevin handles the orders over there, and he's always helpful in locating something special hidden among the bins for me to try out.

So amidst my order, he had sent me something called Imperial Gold Oolong. Not a terribly expensive tea--in fact, quite affordable. (Which is why I love Chicago Coffee and Tea Exchange. On my limited budget, I can afford to get enough tea to last a few weeks rather than a few days.)

Imperial Gold Oolong is the surprise crocus in my story. I didn't expect it to be anything special, but it was, quite. Highly fragrant, the aroma wafts from the carafe as I let it rest before drinking. The leaves are typical rolled bundles, which open up into perhaps 1/3-inch-long leaves.

This tea's source is unnamed, and neither is its plucking date listed on the website. Honestly, in Chicago--a coffee-drinking city if ever there was one--there's really not much of a tea culture, so fastidiously sourcing an oolong would be meaningless information for pretty much their entire clientele. Who are in there for the coffee, anyway.

I prepare the tea in gongfu style-- lots of leaf, high temperature, short steeping times. I place my preheated Yixing pot into a wide bowl of steaming, then boiling, water. This helps keep the temperature high as I steep. In gongfu style, you don't allow a long steep to mix all the flavors together. You break up the drinking experience into chapters, in a manner of speaking, which lets you catch the drink at different points in its development. First, the introduction. Then, the characters introduced, the plot is introduced. The storyline comes to its conclusion, and then there is a nice epilogue as the tea can be resteeped as many times as your patience and interest allow, until the tea is a mere wisp of aroma on the clear water.

The first steeping of this tea is particularly aromatic, bright, complex, floral and fruity at once, with a bit of wildness hiding behind the more conventional flavors. If a forest walk smelled like this, it would draw you down an unfamiliar path to an unknown destination.

{ Tea is part science, part magic }  

The second steeping is even better. I oversteeped it only slightly, so it has a somewhat sharp--but not bitter--edge to it at first. But the fragrance is so bright, I wish I could share it with you right now. As the tea sits in the pot for a few minutes, it oxidizes slightly; and the deep gold, transparent liquor mellows a bit, with that almost tartness dissipating. HINT FOR TEA DRINKERS: If, like myself, you've ever oversteeped that delicious oolong of yours, just let it sit for a few minutes. The heat + biomaterials will engage in some alchemy while it "rests" and you wait, causing the flavors to deepen and mellow. Try it sometime, rather than dumping the tea and starting over.

SO . . . I have no idea where this tea comes from--though, if I bothered to pick up the phone and call Kevin, I'm sure he'd be able to tell me something more about it. But the beauty of this is the surprise element. Don't know where it's from. Don't know when it was picked. Don't know anything other than that it's a joy, made doubly so because it's affordable.

Thanks, Kevin, for including this in the package you sent. My UPS guy always wondered why my coffee packages from Coffee and Tea Exchange would arrive without a coffee aroma, and he never had any time for me to make him a cup to show him what he's missing. Too bad for him, but great for me.

note on coffee & tea exchange

Coffee and Tea Exchange is great for decent-quality and even high-quality tea on a budget. They take good care of their clients, and I've found them to be a wonderful resource in learning what the heck a Darjeeling is, or introducing me to something called Hairy Crab oolong, and so on. Go to their Website when you need a package of tea to get you through the mornings, but you just don't feel like writing an essay about everything you have in your cupboard.

Red Wine, Green Tea, and Pseudoscience

{ Red wine, green tea, and pseudoscience }  

Oh, for crying out loud. Red wine researchers apparently faking data about resveratrol, which is hoped to be a substance that can slow down aging and aid the body's ability to heal itself. There's big money in the health claims made by food and drink people (and I'm looking at you, green tea and pu-erh sellers), which can be undercut by these kinds of shenanigans.







(Photo found on a blog called, "Bloody Students," written by Merys, who is a newly minted pediatrician.)

TEA CONVERSION RATE: 1 in 7 billion. A personal record!

{ Radar and Thumbelina: Two other record holders }  

I've been drinking tea with growing seriousness for over 20 years. (Of course, readers of this blog may argue whether seriousness is a term that can be used to describe me at all, but we'll have to argue about that later.) In all that time, I've never, ever, converted someone to becoming a tea drinker. It's been strictly inside-baseball, preaching to the choir, kicking at open doors, biting the wax tadpole.

{ "I love flower tea!"
Kate gushes embarrassingly }

But my record is now officially 1 in 7 billion. My sister-- my annoying, bratty, smart-aleck sister-- has blogged about how she loves flower tea. "Loves," she captions, and she even uses an exclamation point under the photo she helpfully supplied. Not unlike certain feminine fans of Justin Bieber, who love him to, like, eleventy!!11!!!!

Throughout the years, Kate has mocked my tea obsession in earnest. But she "loves" flower tea? Bwa-ha-ha! Please go over to her blog and cause her to repent her Snidely Whiplash routine whenever I talk tea, and because she has publicly outed herself as a tea drinker-- nay, luuuuuver.

{ Kate Prouty Hearts Justin Beaver }

Something Beautiful: Happy Birthday, Karen Wray

{  Karen Wray, "Purple Iris," 20" x 20", oil on canvas }  

I have talented siblings. My older sister, Karen Wray, lives in Los Alamos, NM, and she creates quite beautiful regional art, focusing on local (hopefully nonradioactive) flora; haunting landscapes from the area in which she lives; and gorgeous, photorealistic representations of basset hounds in tutus, or playing the guitar, or dancing flamenco. She sells her work and that of other local artists at her studio, Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery. If you ever get to the greater Santa Fe area, look her up. Los Alamos Laboratory and the town that supports it are about a half hour or so from SF. You can also buy her work online at her website, which includes pricing and so on.

Karen is 10 years older than I am, and I'm happy she did not kill me when she had the chance. She had the unfortunate job of babysitting me when I was a kid, and I remember saying to her so often, the moment my parents closed the front door as they left, "You're not my Mom. I don't have to listen to you." From that point on, it was war.

But eventually we grew out of it. In college sometime. She moved to Los Alamos, and as a family, we fell in love with this lovely region, so different from the Southwest suburbs of Chicago. "Look! Non-flat rock things! Non-gray skies! The color brown! It's a dry heat!"

{ Karen Wray, "Summer Thunderclouds," 18" x 24", oil on canvas }  

Karen opened her gallery a couple years ago, and she's been filling it with works by talented friends of hers from the pretty vibrant Los Alamos arts community.

You know, I never imagined Karen would end up as a painter when I was a kid. She worked at the lab, doing horrible number-crunching work as a budget analyst or something like that. When she left her position at the lab because the rheumatoid arthritis she struggles with became too much of a problem, she reinvented herself as an artist. She's faced so many medical procedures, operations, pharmaceutical regimes, therapies, and so on; and yet, she doesn't complain about it. She doesn't whine, or act self-pitying, or let herself off the hook for living a full and happy life with her dogs, her husband Bill, her beautiful home, and her paint. And her dogs. Really, she's a superhero to me, and one of the most brave, admirable, smart, and tenacious women you'd ever meet. I miss her, and New Mexico is a long way away.

Karen, happy birthday! XOXO

(And thank you in advance for not suing me because I posted your pictures without your permission.)

NOT Karen Wray's Painting.
I'm just sayin', they'd be a cash cow!

Something Beautiful: Teaboard by Mirko Randová

La Voie du Thé, a French-language tea blog, features a lovely tea table today, which was created by ceramicist Mirko Randová. Just beautiful to look at, no? Hit the link above and look at the table (lovingly photographed) from a variety of angles. Look at how the circular holes are echoed in the surface design. The artist can be contacted here.

End of Days Predicted as Coffee Becomes Rare and Expensive

{ Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! The Zombies Are Nigh! }  

At Forbes online magazine, tech writer Alex Knapp (Repent! the End of Cheap Coffee Is Nigh!) is in a dead panic. And by dead panic, I mean that he's having nightmares of a slow-zombie apocalypse slouching toward his cubicle to be born. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Alex; for it tolls for thee, the rest of the coffee-drinking world, and thus, civilization as we know it.





(Strangely enough, IMDb has no record of any movie entitled, Dead Panic. With all those zombie apocalypsi (fast or slow), sparkly vampires, and other delightfully sexy undead creature features, why has no one written a direct-to-DVD thriller with that name? I blame the exquisitely marbled Michael Moore, who would make a great entree in Dead Panic.)


What was I talking about? Oh, yes, a zombie apocalypse brought on by "peak coffee." Alex's nightmares began when he read an article by Zak Stone, editor of The Daily Good. Stone starts by discussing the high-end coffee market, where at Intelligentsia Coffee, in Venice, California, their baristas and "coffee groupies" sound just like tea drinkers displaying their obsessive-compulsive side. They have a "Slow Bar," where they do coffee in much the same way as my tea-drinking friends and I.

The idea of the Slow Bar is to “give the customer an experience that expands their idea of what coffee is,” says Charles Babinski, who trains the staff in different brewing techniques and hosts educational events for customers. It’s a place where customers can sit down and ask questions about coffee, but it’s “not meant to be beating people over the heads with education as much as just creating different coffee experiences.”

See? Doesn't that sound just like us? And here, we've been thinking that coffee swillers just slam their way through their vente cinnamon chokeaccinos without noticing the subtle nuances or using language such as the following: “Lychee, persimmon and botanical notes bring a weightlessness to the muscular and expansive Tegu. Marmalade and sweet herbs float in the background while the finish hangs onto a hint of spice.” Doesn't that sound like something Wojciech Bońkowski might have written on his blog, Polish Wine Guide, which-- name aside-- discusses tea with his rare and discerning palate?

Stone notes that for those willing to spend $5 or $6 for a cup of coffee, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. But for those unfortunate enough not to be willing to spend that kind of dough, they're likely to find that the cost of coffee is going to skyrocket to the point that they'll have to either cut back how much they drink or live with lower-quality stuff than they're used to. Increasing demand plus decreasing production volume equals extinction-level event. We're all gonna die.






Consider: What would Western civilization be without coffee? Would Bach have written those finger-tangling toccatas and fugues without a caffeine buzz to keep him going? Would Picasso have spent his life creating art objects like, Still Life from One Angle at a Time, Thank You Very Much? Would the sainted Steven Jobs have discovered the secret to making sleek, shiny objects that can hypnotize mass audiences into giving him all their savings?

I doubt it.

{ Peak Coffee: Batten Down the Hatches }  

Stone points to anthropogenic climate change (predictably) and not enough high-mountain acreage as the culprits for the decreasing supply of high-quality arabica beans. What he doesn't take into account are the possibilities that the decrease in volume may be a temporary aberration, or that human ingenuity may allow us to develop new cultivars in much the same way that the chocolate or tea geniuses have done. Or that people may just switch to drinking other beverages entirely, so there may be hope, after all. Nevertheless, short-term supply problems may trigger the zombie apocalypse predicted by jittery fanboys.

At the exact moment that rare beans are becoming all the rage, all beans are becoming rarer. The price of a cup of coffee—whether it be a $6 pour-over, a $2.50 dark roast at Starbucks, or a $1.50 mug of diner swill—is being driven up by a complex combination of weather events, pest and fungus outbreaks, speculation on commodities exchanges, an unstable labor market in the developing world, and an unprecedented thirst for good coffee among a growing global middle class. The problem, in simple economic terms, is that supply has gone down and demand has gone up.

Now, tea drinkers deal with some similarly troubling reports. A couple seasons ago, the Taiwanese dealt with horrible landslides that killed many, because the high-mountain Li Shan tea farms had increased in number and acreage to the point that the topsoil could not withstand a terrible storm. A burgeoning Chinese middle class is starting to demand coffee and tea (as well as other luxury items), which puts pressure on international markets. Unsustainable farming practices endanger some Indian tea-growing plantations' ability to produce high-quality leaves over the long term. And don't even get me started on the fake aged puerh phenomenon. And so on.

The upshot is that the very, very high-end Chinese teas are kept in-country for the consumption of Chinese millionaires and Party members; wonderful-enough-to-satisfy-everyone-else teas are still widely accessible, especially through the wonder of the Internet, for those willing to spend a premium; and cheap teas will probably follow in the path of coffee and have some kind of temporary spike in price (along with other comestibles), until markets react and come to a new equilibrium.

But until that point, when I'm around coffee drinkers, I'll still watch my back.