Author Archives: Gary D. Robson
Traveling with tea
As we packed for the book signing tour and convention, my wife and I carefully plotted what to bring along. Obviously, some good loose-leaf tea was a part of the process. My choices were my own Scottish Breakfast blend for first thing in the morning, our house Earl Grey (one of the most popular selections at our tea bar) for the afternoon, and Rooibos for bedtime. We brought along an infuser to brew the tea.
At most of the motels and hotels, there was a microwave oven in the room where we could heat up our water. Some have the microwave in the lobby. Others provided only a coffeepot, which yields coffee-flavored hot water (I skipped having tea those days).
Then we got to Las Vegas, where we’re attending a convention at Bally’s. We got to the room, and there’s no way to heat water. No hotplate, no coffeepot, no microwave.
Note to self: Travel with a device that heats water.
Not a problem. I’ll just call housekeeping and have them bring something up. That’s where I hit the first snag. I was informed by housekeeping that only “Platinum Players” get coffeepots in their rooms. I explained that I’m here for book signings and a business conference (the NCRA annual convention), not to gamble, and she explained that “it’s the rules.”
I asked for a manager, and she transferred me. Someone at the front desk answered, I asked again for a manager, and I spent 25 minutes on hold listening to advertising for the hotel. Yes, twenty-five minutes! When I first asked for the manager, I was not upset. Amused, yes. Mildly annoyed, perhaps. But I figured this was a minor snag and I would be making tea in a few minutes. By the time I actually got the Bally’s manager on the phone, my patience was starting to wane.
I reasonably explained the situation to her, and she explained that there was 24-hour room service, so I have no need for a water-heating device. I explained that by the time hot water from the kitchen arrived in my room, it would be tepid water, which does not make good tea. She explained that only Platinum Players got coffee pots, and I’m not a Platinum Player.
I explained that I wasn’t there to gamble, and it was my understanding that Bally’s actually welcomed business conferences. She said, “oh, yes, we do welcome business conferences, and the members order from room service.”
I asked if I was the first person ever to request a way to make tea in my hotel room. She grudgingly acknowledged that others have asked as well. I asked if she had blown them off the same way she was blowing me off. She got a wee bit huffy.
Note to self: Avoid staying at Bally’s in the future.
In over 30 years of business travel, my experience has been that good hotels are eager to provide their guests with whatever they need. Did you forget a toothbrush? They’ll give you one. Does your shirt need ironed? They’ll bring you an iron. Did your shoes get scuffed? They will provide a shoe polishing kit. They want your experience to be positive.
Bally’s, on the other hand, wants you to get out of your room and blow money in their casino. If you insist on staying in the room, they want you to buy coffee from room service ($12 for a pot of French roast, delivered in 20-30 minutes). I’m not one of those Tea Absolutists who insists on only the finest first-flush Darjeeling steeped for precisely 90 seconds in 210-212 degree carbon-filtered water. But I don’t want a Lipton teabag from room service, and I don’t want tea made with tepid water that was boiling ten minutes ago.
At this point, it’s not so much about the tea — I am an adaptable kind of guy — but about the fact that the manager would not work with me when I asked nicely, or even when I pushed. She refused to acknowledge that every 2-bit motel in the country is willing to accommodate my request for a way to heat my water, but Bally’s is not.
She made it clear that keeping the guest happy is not a priority for this hotel. Hoovering money out of the guests’ pockets is. Welcome to Las Vegas.
Tea Absolutists (a.k.a. Tea Nazis)
There are a lot of types of tea people. Tea purists, tea snobs, tea ceremonialists, tea sippers, tea guzzlers, tea herbalists, tea totalers (okay — just kidding on that last one). Today’s commentary is on the tea absolutists.
I, like most tea drinkers, have my favorite way of preparing each of my favorite teas. You may well do it differently, and I really don’t care. If you walk into my tea bar and ask for a cup of lapsang souchong, I will make it the way I make lapsang souchong for myself: 1 tbsp of leaves per 16 oz pot, 195-200 degree water, 3:00 steep time, no sweetener or milk. If you then decide that you’d rather use a bit less tea and steep it a bit longer, and perhaps add some stevia and cream, that’s fine with me.
The absolutist, however, doesn’t just have an opinion on how he wants his tea. He has an opinion on how you should have your tea! You see this all the time in books and magazine articles, and on the websites of many tea suppliers. “Use 5 grams of this tea for your 16-ounce pot (because we love mixing metric and English units). Use 195-degree water, and steep for 3:45. Dammit, don’t you dare steep it for 4 minutes or it will become too astringent. And boiling water will scald it. And if you add lemon, you’re a heathen. An uncultured heathen, I tell you!”
The absolutist, however, doesn’t just have an opinion on how he wants his tea. He has an opinion on how you should have your tea!
I am especially amused by the water temperature absolutists. They’ll come into my tea bar and ask if my water is 210-212 degrees. “Well, no,” I explain. “We’re at 5,550 feet altitude. You can’t get water that hot.” They’ll insist that they have to have boiling water, and I’ll explain that water boils at 202 degrees here. Yep, the water is 10 degrees cooler than boiling water at sea level, but by golly it’s still boiling.
I think the absolutist attitude has done much to turn people away from the enjoyment of tea. If someone says they don’t like black tea because it’s too bitter, it’s probably because they’ve been pouring leaves (or dropping bags) into a pot of boiling water and leaving them in there for ten minutes. I’ve had several people who “didn’t like black tea” get very excited about a nice first flush Darjeeling steeped for a scant two minutes. There’s still plenty of flavor, just a tiny bit of astringency, and barely any bitterness.
Darjeeling absolutists are probably starting up their flamethrowers as they read this. “How can you steep it for only two minutes? You’re not getting any flavor out of it!” A quick Google search shows recommendations anywhere from 90 seconds up to 6 minutes for a first flush Darjeeling (I’m one of those 2:00 to 2:15 people), and the majority of them are convinced that their answer is the one and only true answer. If everyone else just followed their procedure, the world would be a happier place.
The correct steeping time for your tea is the steeping time that produces a cup of tea that you like. You. Not me, not the tea expert in the shop down the street, not the guy that wrote that book on your coffee table (or tea table, I suppose). Ditto water temperature. Ditto quantity of leaves. Ditto sweetening. Ditto the type of cup. Ditto lemon, milk, cream, or whatever else you may enjoy putting in your tea.
At our tea bar, we really want people to enjoy the teas we serve. We’re not worried about making it “right,” we’re worried about presenting it well and making it so that our customers enjoy it. It’s very easy to lose track of how long your tea has steeped, so we take care of that for you. We use tea timers and a chart based on our own preferences. But we ask people, how strong do you like it? On their next visit, they may say, “I liked that sencha last time, but it was a bit strong.” So this time, we’ll use a little bit less, and steep for 3:00 instead of the 3:15 that I prefer. Hopefully, the customer will say, “That’s fantastic! Give me a half-pound bag!”
At home, you may prefer delicate porcelain teacups. Here, we use sturdy glass mugs, because they show off the tea well, and they don’t break easily. We keep whole milk, 1% milk, soy milk, and half-and-half at the bar rather than telling customers what we think they should use. We have locally-grown honey, but we also supply sugar and several artificial sweeteners.
When people are trying a new tea, I encourage them to let me make them a cup first, and then take an ounce home to experiment. Sometimes the “guess what I tried” stories I hear later give me ideas for new things to do with tea.
So, tea absolutists, I encourage you to be as anal-retentive as you like when preparing tea for yourself. But lighten up and let everyone else enjoy their tea any way they like. Please?
Our boba tea (“bubble tea”) experience
As my friends discovered that we were opening a tea bar at the bookstore, special requests began to pour in: Can you get me a first-flush Darjeeling? Will you have lapsang souchong? You’ll have gunpowder tea, right? Will you be stocking silver needle white tea? Are you going to have herbals? Can you bring in something good with ginger?
We selected our teas with a focus on “real” tea (Camellia sinensis) and related drinks like rooibos, honeybush, and maté. A few carefully-chosen herbals rounded out the mix. Then a friend asked if we were going to carry boba tea. Little did I know what that request would lead us to.
Stories vary, but the consensus seems to be that boba tea originated in Taiwan in the 1980s and took its sweet time (no pun intended) finding its way to the United States and picked up the nickname “bubble tea” because of the way it’s prepared. In Taiwan, it was called boba milk tea (波霸奶茶 or bōbà nǎichá), but it has many other names around the world. I have no idea whether there’s any truth to Boba Loca‘s story that “boba” is a children’s slang word for “nipple” in Mandarin.
Like chili or meatloaf, it seems that no two shops make boba tea the same way. What they all have in common is tapioca balls (“pearls”) sitting in the bottom of a chilled drink, and a fat straw big enough — just barely — to suck the pearls through. The “hip” places often use very sweet flavorings, similar to the ones used in sno-cones, and many of the boba “tea” drinks have no tea in them at all.
Typically, boba tea uses a base drink — typically a green or black tea — with milk and sweet syrup. This is placed in a shaker with ice and shaken into a bubbly froth (hence the appellation “bubble tea). The frothy mix is poured over tapioca pearls in a clear glass or plastic cup and served. As you drink the tea, the pearls randomly ride up the straw, and you find yourself with something chewy in your tea. It’s a joy watching people’s faces as they experience this for the first time!
I started asking people from the coasts, where boba is most popular, whether they thought it would make a good addition to our tea bar. The three most common answers were, “what the heck is boba tea?”, “yes, because then you’d be a real tea bar,” and “no, real tea bars don’t serve that stuff.” Given this massive lack of consensus, my wife and I flipped a coin and said, “What the heck? Let’s give it a shot.”
First decision: Since we are a tea bar, all of our boba would use real tea. After a bit of experimentation, I picked a nice black tea (organic English breakfast) and a jasmine green tea to use as a base. Two options should be adequate, right? How naïve I was!
Second decision: We’d keep the sweet syrup as basic as possible, and prepare it in advance. Since boba tea isn’t exactly a diet drink, we’d make it with real brown and white sugar, but we wouldn’t make it overly sweet.
The day after we launched our test in the store, a friend from the west coast told me that boba with chai tea is quite popular in Seattle. Coincidentally, we had recently brought in a new organic fair-trade chocolate chai for the tea bar, made with pu-erh tea and yerba maté. We gave it a shot, and it was an immediate hit. My attempt to simplify choices by only offering two base teas went right out the window. By the end of the day, we were making boba with any of the 80 teas we have at the bar.
We also found that special requests didn’t stop at the base tea. Miss Amber, a good customer of ours from another shop down the street, is from the South, and she likes her tea very sweet! We now have a “Miss Amber Boba,” made from cinnamon orange spice tea and about three times the normal amount of syrup.
Boba tea has turned out not to be the novelty drink we expected it to be, but a mainstay of the menu, especially on hot days. Some experiments in our store turn out to be wild successes and some turn out to be dismal flops. I’m going to give boba tea a “success” rating, and start looking for the next experiment. Thai red tea, perhaps?
Tea With Gary 