On Tea
I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts over the last few days. I was reading a book, written by an academic and former Twitter mutual, which referred briefly to some of my ideas without citing me. I suppose this was just source amnesia, but it did leave me feeling slightly miffed. And I became aware of a new book series which follows directly from my work on the concept of medieval Afro-Eurasia — something I’ve been pushing for years now — and it’s a series with which I am unaffiliated. This has dredged up those old familiar feelings of inadequacy inevitably brought about by failure within one’s chosen field.
So I’ve chosen instead to focus my attention on something else, and that something else, right now, is tea, which I drink in lots of different forms. I only have good things to say about it.
If I have a bit of time and some high-quality Chinese or Taiwanese tea in the house then I’ll get out my gàiwǎn (蓋碗 ‘lidded cup’) and borosilicate glass tea jug and have a gongfu tea session, using the ‘dry brewing’ method. My preferred teas for this are oolongs, especially Fujianese or Taiwanese tiěguānyīn, which tastes sort of like a crisp autumn day — but I’ll drink any good tea from the Sinosphere this way. I like white teas too. In my experience it’s harder to find good-quality Chinese greens and pu’ers in Europe, so I don’t drink those quite so often.
Over here in Europe the instructions on packs of even quite good Chinese tea will tell you to brew the leaves for two minutes or more — which is a pretty good way to ruin the tea. Thirty seconds or less will be more than enough for most teas, if the leaves are good and the temperature’s right. And of course you can steep good teas several times. I’ll steep a white tea ten times or more after the initial wash steep.
I use a Russell Hobbs Calm Kettle, which allows you to select the desired temperature, an essential property for gongfu tea — and which also lights up and makes supposedly calming noises if you want it to. I think it was designed for the neurodivergent, or something like that, but I just thought it looked nice. And it does work well, so I suppose I recommend it.
Lately I’ve also been drinking Japanese teas. I hadn’t previously been a fan of Japanese tea, which is generally green and grassy and seaweedy (and a little samey), and which lacks the variety and specificity of good Chinese and Taiwanese teas. I’m far from an expert, of course, but I can’t think of a Japanese tea that tastes like an autumn day or a herbal medicine shop or a ripe courgette or any of the other things Chinese teas will casually invoke. When we were in Japan last year I downed a lot of poor-quality hotel matcha and also some slightly better stuff, and also some hōjicha, which is fine, I suppose. But this year I bought some gyokuro on a whim. Gyokuro is the highest grade of Japanese green leaf tea (as opposed to matcha, which is powdered — as Chinese tea used to be way back in the Tang dynasty). It was €20 for 50g. And I was converted immediately. The liquor was so rich and warming. It felt like an umami health potion.
I’ve also enjoyed the Turkish tea tradition on visits to Istanbul and the Aegean — little glasses of somewhat astringent stewed tea, not on the level of East Asian teas flavour-wise but pleasant anyway — and Tibetan butter tea. I’ve never been to Tibet but I’ve had the tea at a few places, including at an old landlord’s house (many years ago my landlord was a Tibetan lama) and at Tibetan restaurants. I’ve also brewed it myself — you can find instructions here, if you’re curious. It’s usually a little salty and greasy, and those can be challenging sensations to experience from a cup of tea. But I like it.
I also like the British-and-Irish tea tradition, and I’m prepared to defend it. People have been drinking tea in Britain and Ireland for centuries now, since the drink was introduced (from Portugal!) by Catarina de Bragança. It is a tea tradition in its own right, and it is in fact good.
Most of the tea I drink by weight is Barry’s Gold Blend, an Irish blend of mostly African and Indian black teas in a biodegradable bag. Most British and Irish blends are the same sort of tea: they’re strong black teas that make rich dark liquors with biscuity, malty flavours. They aren’t very complex, but they are bold, and they take a few seconds, really, to brew, with boiling 100ºC water poured directly onto the bag. Teas like that go well with a few drops of cold milk, added after the bag is removed. (Sometimes heathens on the internet will try to tell you that you should brew this sort of tea with 90ºC water, or water even cooler than that. This sort of advocacy should be illegal. If you want to act perversely in your home, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t be allowed to attempt to convince others of your obvious error.)
Get West's World’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Yes, the tea in the bags is usually dust, and the fact that it’s crushed means that there’s some mix of bud and probably stem in there too. This isn’t especially high-grade stuff. But:
- Someone has to consume the dust
- The dust is actually pretty good!
- Sometimes what matters is the tea varietal and the processing rather than the overall quality of the leaves; British and Irish tea companies know which varietals to pick, and they tend to have rich and biscuity flavours
- The dust used in British and Irish tea blends is better than the dust used in continental European and North American tea blends, which are woody and astringent and which lack the warming malty flavours you’ll find in Britain and Ireland (this also seems true of the Ostfriesen tea tradition in Germany, which I don’t find very satisfying myself)
- Tea in Britain and Ireland isn’t for connoisseurs as such but for everyday consumers; there’s no reason to use the finest leaves because the drinkers aren’t going to be — and aren’t supposed to be — very mindful while drinking; and this isn’t a drawback but an inevitability, and a good thing
- But it is possible to find British-and-Irish-style tea blends that use good leaves, particularly Qímén (Keemun) black/red teas from China (I love Qímén on its own, and sometimes use it in gongfu tea).
On the subject of sugar: I don’t put sugar in my (British-and-Irish-style) tea because — frankly — I’m too middle class for it. I don’t see why you shouldn’t do it if that’s what you like, but it isn’t what I grew up doing and wouldn’t do it myself. I do put sugar in Turkish tea and in some Southeast Asian teas, which are usually less complex than Chinese and Taiwanese ones, but never otherwise.
I don’t normally drink alcohol these days — an occasional brandy at the weekend, particularly aguardente de medronho, my favourite Portuguese kind — but I do drink drinks other than tea. I like the taste of coffee. Coffee’s perilous, though: a cup or two makes me jittery, and then irritable, and then homicidal, and it seems to have a laxative effect too. Not pleasant! I seem to be unusually sensitive to caffeine, and my gut’s quite weak anyway (I have coeliac disease). My suspicion is that a lot of people are more sensitive to caffeine than they think they are, and so there are too many over-caffeinated people out there — wired, aggressive, un-chill. I suspect that’s why the world is the way it is. If everyone switched to tea, life might improve.
I like yerba mate, too, and I had quite a lot of it when we were in Paraguay a couple of years ago. The high caffeine content means that I don’t/can’t drink it very often, for the aforementioned reasons, and I don’t find it as interesting as tea on the whole. But it’s quite good stuff. And you can put other things in the cup alongside the mate; personally, I enjoy the added bitterness of a little jaguarete ka’a, which is supposed to be good for the tummy. (I don’t know if it really is.)
Anyway: my life would be much less satisfying without tea. I like the ritual of it, and the flavours, and the mildly stimulating effect it has. It keeps me on an even keel over the course of the day. I’d find it much harder to work and stay calm and enjoy life if I couldn’t have it. Even if I found Mormonism intellectually satisfying — and I don’t — I could never be a Mormon because I could never give up tea. If climate change kills tea production, or if the closure of some strait or other prevents the flow of tea leaves to Europe, then I’d truly find it hard to go on.
