All the Tea in China

If not for Starbucks, it would be impossible to find a good cup of coffee in China.  But though purgatory for coffee drinkers, China is heaven for tea lovers.  The Chinese passion and obsession for tea is identical in almost every way to the French for their wine.  The language of tea and wine lovers is also the same....it is all about the bouquet and the flavor profile and the terroir upon which the tea plants grow and the age of the tea plants and the timing of the harvest and the secret methods used by the different tea makers to elaborate their products.  Every person has their own personal favorite type and brand.

By the way, loose leaf tea is the real deal.  Tea bags are the equivalent of Boone's Farm strawberry wine in a screw cap bottle.

Everyone drinks tea all the time.  In the morning, you see businessmen and construction workers on their way to work carrying their thermoses of tea.  (What is the plural of thermos?  Is it thermi?)  Every taxi driver has a quart jar of steeping tea leaves on the floor between his feet.  The water dispensers in the office have two taps - one for hot water for making tea and the other for room temperature water to rinse the leaves out of your tea jug.  There are probably as many public hot water stations as there are public bathrooms.

While in Hangzhou, a few of us got the chance to do an afternoon tea break at a proper tea house .  For a set fee, you get tea and some light snacks and fruit.  You also get a person to prepare the tea for you.  At a proper tea house, the person you get should really know a lot about the tea and really really be a master of the exacting process for preparation of the tea - a mixture of sommelier and chef.  At a proper tea house, the preparer will most likely be young, female and attractive.   So it goes.

 The topmost photo shows our tea being prepared.  The process involved warming the tea bowl and warming the cups and rinsing the tea leaves and warming the water to the exact optimal brewing temperature (which is different for different types of tea) and then pouring the water around the tea rather than on them so as not to scorch the sensitive leaves.   When it came to the actual brewing part, I was surprised to learn that you're not supposed to just let the tea steep in the water for 20 minutes and then discard.  You brew, then decant the tea, and then use the same leaves over and over for multiple extractions.  For the first batch, she let the tea steep in the water for 2 minutes.  The tea would be served, fresh water added to the leaves, and then the batch would be allowed to steep for 45 seconds longer than the previous one.  The times are approximate, though, as the preparer ultimately relies on the color and smell to decide when a batch is done.

Our young lady got about 10 batches out of our tea leaves.  The whole process took about an hour and a half.  The second photo shows colleagues enjoying some of the snacks along with tea.

Since coming to Suzhou, we've accumulated an fairly impressive stash of tea. (see photo above.)  We have green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong tea, pu'er tea, jasmine tea, chrysanthemum tea, and i-have-no-idea-what-it-is tea.  About half of it was given to us as gifts. Tea is considered to be a very safe gift.  Much like bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party.

One last bit of trivia.  The hills around Hangzhou's West Lake are covered with tea plants in whatever you call the tea-growing equivalent of a vineyard.   Hangzhou is famous for LongJingCha, or Dragon Well Tea.  The top shelf stuff - the equivalent to grand cru - is outrageously expensive if you could find it at all.  Of course, there's always a Starbucks in town if that's not your cup of tea.