Yesterday started out with the return of the bloggers to Tea Expo (it’s kind of like the return of the swallows to Capistrano, except noisier).
Jen Piccotti, Jo Johnson, Tony Gebely, Geoff Norman, Chris Giddings
I was very pleased to find that The Tea Spot and Teas, Etc. were in the lobby to keep us all adequately caffeinated. I enjoyed cups of their tea before, during, and after the seminars. Interestingly, both companies had chocolate pu-erh blends, and both recommended steeping them for 4-5 minutes. That’s an awfully long time for a shu pu-erh. I went for 3 minutes, and quite liked both of them (sorry, purists).
My first seminar of the day was an absolutely fantastic start to Tea Expo: Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson talked about “A Social History of Tea in the UK and USA.”
Bruce Richardson and Jane Pettigrew
They walked us through the history of tea in the western hemisphere from the 1600s to modern times, covering everything from Catherine of Braganza to A&P (originally the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company). A few of my favorite factoids from their seminar:
Every year I take another picture of this matcha stone at AOI. It just intrigues me. Last year I described it and even posted video of it, but I just can’t stay away from it.
One of the things I look for at Tea Expo every year is new and different tea. I do love the teas from the big tea-producing countries like China, India, and Kenya, but it’s fun to explore some of the varieties you don’t run into every day, from countries that aren’t represented in every single tea shop. We had a very pleasant tasting of Indonesian teas at three adjacent booths and found some great surprises.
Trying successive steepings of a green tea from Java.
The afternoon session “Amplifying Your Business Voice Through Tea Bloggers” was informative, even for tea bloggers. All of us look at things differently and run our blogs differently. I update this blog every Friday (most of the time, unless I’m late) with bursts of activity during events like World Tea Expo. Nicole Martin has been updating hers every weekday for the last six years. One of the blogs nominated for a World Tea Award this year hasn’t been updated since early 2014.
Some tea blogs are all about reviewing individual teas. Some are about teaware. Some are about stories. Mine is whatever happens to be either exciting me or annoying me at the moment. The big message from this session was, if you wish to work with tea bloggers, do your research first. Read the blogs. If you are selling flavored chamomile blends, don’t pick a tea blogger that’s a single-origin Camellia sinensis specialist. Geoff Norman told us that he didn’t know the difference between Yixing and Wedgewood, so don’t waste your time and money sending him a teapot to review!
Something else I’ll be writing about in more detail later is “Coffee leaf tea.”
The name may be a bit confusing, as this product contains no coffee beans and no tea. It’s a tisane (“herbal tea”) made from the leaves of coffee plants. I can’t stand coffee, but I found the flavor of this drink quite pleasant. The company’s focus is on extending the season (picking leaves when you can’t pick beans) and creating more jobs, but there will be more on that in a future post.
We all have our taste preferences, and mine tend to run towards pure (unflavored) tea. I’m not a big fan of ginger, either, but my wife, Kathy, and I couldn’t resist having our picture taken with this gigantic (and slightly creepy) Korean red ginseng root:
And, just as a close, my birthday is coming up and this automated pyramid satchel tea bagging machine is only $70,000. It would be an easy way to take some of my whole-leaf teas on the road with me. Hint, hint…
Here we go! World Tea Expo 2015 begins tomorrow!
Between the Expo and my new book, my once-a-week blog schedule is completely disrupted at the moment. Look for daily updates this week (possibly multiple updates per day), as well as a fairly steady stream of tweets.
You can keep up with my Tea Expo tweets either by following @TeaWithGary or following the Twitter hashtag #WTE15, which most of the tea bloggers (and many attendees) will be using.
If you’re attending, don’t miss the Tea Bloggers Roundtable that I’m moderating on Thursday from 2:30 to 3:30. It’s free for anyone with a World Tea Expo badge.
My wife and I will also be wandering the show floor and attending various seminars. I have a lot of booths to visit for the shop, but I’m always happy to meet other tea people, so feel free to say hi!
Recently, I came across a Quora question asking, “What advice is there for starting a tea shop … that is targeted to a younger crowd?” I’d been thinking a lot about that demographic since my Millennials & Tea post last month, so I decided to answer it. Looking over my answer, I realized that it was absolutely begging to be tweaked, expanded, and transformed into a Tea With Gary blog post.
If you are planning to open a tea shop and you want to target the young folks, here’s what I’d advise:
Once again, World Tea Expo attendees will have an opportunity to share in the wacky (and occasionally educational) world of professional tea bloggers. You’re all invited to the Tea Bloggers Roundtable 2:30 to 3:30pm on Thursday, May 7. It will be a panel discussion featuring some of the names tea aficionados just might recognize.
The panel will consist of Rachel Carter (iHeart Teas), Chris Giddings (Tea Guy), Jo Johnson (A Gift of Tea), Nicole Martin (Tea for Me Please), Geoffrey Norman (Lazy Literatus), Jen Piccotti (An International Tea Moment), and Naomi Rosen (Joy’s Teaspoon). I’ll be moderating the panel, which has the theme this year of “Melding of Voices.” I know, all of those names are in that poster image right below this paragraph, but I wanted to include links to all of the blogs. Check us all out before the event!
One of the things I enjoy most about the world of tea blogging is the lack of competition. I don’t find myself thinking “oh, no, Geoff scooped me on that story,” or “how can I get more viewers than Robert (Lord Devotea’s Tea Spouts) this week?” Instead, we read each other’s posts; we talk about each other’s stories; we link to each other’s blogs; we gain inspiration from each other. We’re not in it to beat each other at the game. We’re in it to share our love of tea and each be the best we can be.
Our blogs all have different themes, too. Some of us just do tea reviews. Some talk about gadgets. Some are very professional in tone; and some are very personal. Some talk about the tea business, and some prefer to just focus on the tea itself. Some blogs, like mine, are all over the map. That’s what makes the tea blogging community such a great environment for newcomers.
Speaking of past events, here’s a candid shot from last year’s Roundtable. I’m the big dude on the right.
It really gets to be fun when we open things up to questions from the audience, and that’s where we find out just how many people in the tea business are interested in blogging. In addition to the prepared questions, if past roundtables are any indication, we’ll also be dealing with questions like how to choose topics, how to get tea to review, the Association of Tea Bloggers, whether to schedule posts, what social media sites work best for promotion, the difference between a hobby tea blog and a professional tea blog, and much more.
If you have a conference badge, there’s no additional cost to attend the Tea Bloggers Roundtable, so take advantage of this opportunity to hobnob with experienced tea bloggers, writers, and social media marketers.
If you have questions, contact Jo Johnson at agiftoftea@gmail.com. She’ll take care of everything!
And just in case you haven’t had enough nostalgia, here’s the 2013 Tea Bloggers Roundtable. I wasn’t on it back then, so they had to add three extra people to compensate.
While writing this blog post, I was drinking a Vietnamese black tea called Good Morning Vietnam! I brewed this cup for 3:00 using boiling water. As usual, I did not add milk or sugar. Although this is a typical black tea in most ways, there is very little astringency. I don’t think your typical half-tea-half-milk breakfast tea drinker would find it overly satisfying, but it’s turning into my new favorite black tea.
I’m a big fan of beer. In fact, I used to write a beer column for a local newspaper a few years back. I’ll often have a beer when I start dinner, and switch to tea at the end. I even took a seminar at World Tea Expo about pairing tea and beer, looking for common flavor characteristics in different styles of the two beverages. A conversation with fellow tea blogger Robert Godden (Lord Devotea’s Tea Spouts), however, got me thinking about the possibility of actually combining the two. You know, putting beer and tea in the same glass. Yeah, Robert’s a strange one.
But why not?
There are beer styles exemplified by certain flavors, which you might get from additives like fruit or other grains, or you might get from doing strange things to the barley, like smoking it. Why not get those flavors from tea? Especially that smoky one…
A buddy of mine, Doug “Beerbarian” Bailey, works at our local brewery, Red Lodge Ales. Doug is a sales guy, but he still understands beer pretty well. He and I both go for smoky flavors. We drink lapsang souchong and Russian caravan tea. We drink smoky rauschbier. We drink Islay Scotches like Laphroaig, which just ooze peat and smoke. We even enjoy the same pipe tobaccos.
So Doug and I had a long discussion about flavoring beer with tea — especially about making our own variety of rauschbier by adding smoked tea to a nice robust beer. It was a wonderful discussion, but we didn’t follow through on it. And then, months later, I get a private message from him on Facebook:
In case you can’t see the image, it says, “I need an experimental beer ASAP and I want to try something wacky. Brewing some really strong smoked tea and adding it directly to the already brewed beer in the keg.”
Initially, we’d been talking about actually adding the tea leaves to the kettle while brewing the beer, but Doug was in a hurry. He proposed adding the tea to beer that was already brewed and sitting in the keg. This brings up a few complications, like how to avoid watering down the beer and how to pour tea into a full keg of carbonated beer.
The solution to the first problem was simple: just make the tea really strong so we don’t have to use much of it. In fact, to avoid diluting the flavor of the beer, we went right past “really strong” to “stupid strong.” And as for the second problem, Doug came up with a set of fittings that allowed us to put the tea into an empty keg, pressurize it, and then add the contents of a full keg of beer to it.
The more we talked about the solutions to the problems, the more we realized making just one beer wasn’t going to cut it, so when experiment day arrived, Doug grabbed the kegs of beer and I brewed three stupid strong batches of tea from Red Lodge Books & Tea to match them.
We started by adding carefully measured amounts of the übertea to glasses of beer. Instead of wrecking our palates with the smoked tea, we started with a lighter one. The beer is Helio Hefeweizen, a light and citrusy unfiltered wheat beer. I paired that with a cinnamon orange spice rooibos tea. I had brewed the tea with 1 ounce of leaf to 8 ounces of boiling water and steeped it for six minutes. It didn’t take a whole lot of tea to give the beer a wondrous spicy flavor with an orangy nose. We settled on 940 ml of strong tea in the 5-gallon keg of beer. It was a rousing triumph. We made a bit extra so I could take a growler home with me.
Wait. Was I supposed to take a picture before we drank it? This is the wheat beer we spiced up.
Our second experiment was completely off the wall. Doug did say he wanted something “wacky,” so I paired their Beartooth Pale Ale with an infusion of one of my own special tea blends, which I call “Coyotes of the Purple Sage.” It’s an Earl Grey made with black tea, sage, and a hint of mint. I didn’t brew it quite as strong (same amount of leaf as the first one, but with a 5 minute infusion). Our first experiment was rather overwhelming, so we backed down the ratio, using 750 ml of tea in the 5-gallon keg.
I’m not going to call this one an overwhelming success. The sage and bergamot was just a little strange in the pale ale.
Here are the four finished kegs. The apparatus for transferring carbonated beer from one pressurized keg to another is in the sanitizer bucket in the lower left of the picture.
The final beer was the one that started all this. We used a Russian Caravan tea, 1 ounce of leaf per 8 ounces of water, brewed for 4 minutes. The base beer is Jack’s Scottish Ale. We played around with the proportions for a bit, and ended up using 900 ml of tea per five gallon keg. We made two kegs: one for Doug’s special event, and one to put on tap in the tasting room that night. Doug named it “Smokin’ Jack.” It was exactly what we were trying to accomplish!
This will not be the last time I bring together my loves of beer and tea. Maybe it’s getting to be time to dust off all of my old homebrewing equipment and get to work.
This is a sample of a scented white tea I got at World Tea Expo. I will be selling it in the tea bar and at RedLodgeTea.com within a couple of weeks. Love it!
Delicate; fragrant
I’m a sucker for jasmine;
White tea more than green
Last week at World Tea Expo 2014, most of my time was focused on finding new things. I tasted new tea blends and fresh varietals, while browsing through billions of new gadgets, accessories, and tea-related products. I did try to make time to visit with our existing vendors and friends, and when we stopped at AOI, the company we buy our matcha from, I found something old rather than something new.
Have you ever looked at matcha powder and wondered how it’s made? Oh, it sounds very simple: take some high quality Japanese steamed green tea and powder it. But how do you powder it? Today, there are high-volume machines for absolutely everything, but matcha has been around for a very long time (see my posts about matcha and the Japanese tea ceremony for more information). How did they make matcha before the advent of machines?
AOI had the answer in their booth: a hand-carved millstone designed for tea leaves.
The upper stone has a hole in the top where dried tea leaves are inserted, and a vertical wooden shaft in the lower stone keeps it centered. There are grooves that move the ground-up leaves out to the lower stone’s dish. Of course, I had to try it, and then I made a short video of my son using the mill:
I saw a lot of cool gadgets, but this is the one I’d like to have sitting next to my desk at home. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for sale…
If you haven’t already read Day 1: The Saga Begins, Day 2: Attack of the Clonals, and Tea Bloggers Roundtable, you might want to read them first for context. If not, that’s fine. Read on. No biggie.
The third day of World Tea Expo 2014 started rather unexpectedly, as we pulled into the parking garage and encountered Harley Quinn. On roller skates. As we walked to the expo center, we met up with a variety of other comic characters — along with some characters from movie and TV shows. Yes, it was cosplay time at a comic book convention. Parked in front of the expo center, we saw a variety of vehicles: Kit from Knight Rider, three (Count em! Three!) Jurassic Park tour vehicles, the Back to the Future DeLorean, complete with a dead ringer for Doc Brown, and quite possibly the most awesome Batmobile I’ve ever seen.
That wookie was BIG! I’m guessing he drinks a lot of good healthy Taiwanese oolong.
Once we got past the Star Wars crowd, however, it was back to the business of tea. And most of that consists of placing orders on the last day of expo to catch all of the show specials. Most of what we purchased was pu-erh tea, which I drink a lot of these days. A good part of the reason we buy so much pu-erh at the World Tea Expo is that there’s a rich variety available, but it can be hard to find in the U.S.
Looking for a nice first-flush Darjeeling? Every major tea importer or distributor has one. Sencha? There’s hardly a catalog without at least one. Earl Grey? Even grocery stores in Montana are likely to carry more than one. But if you’re looking for unique and tasty pu-erh teas, you just might have a long (and pleasant) task ahead of you.
At World Tea Expo, there’s a broad variety of pu-erh laid out on tables all across the expansive show floor, almost all of it compressed into cakes of some form or another. One of the most intriguing we came across this year is a jasmine sheng pu-erh. It has the same jasmine aroma that any Chinese green jasmine tea has, but the underlying flavor is much more robust. A touch of the expected pu-erh earthiness comes through, along with more astringency than most. Part of the astringency is explained by the relatively long steeping time that LongRun used in their booth. They steeped for about four minutes. When I got it home, I played around and decided two minutes is more my speed on this one.
These are 100 gram beeng cha cakes, which are significantly smaller than the traditional 357 gram cakes. This also makes them more affordable for someone who’s experimenting.
Yes, I can hear the faux gagging sounds coming from the purists, aghast at the idea of scenting a pu-erh tea. Pish tosh, I say to you. I’ll drink my straight pu-erh in the morning, but this lightly scented jasmine delight is just the thing for mid-afternoon. Also, being such a young fermented tea (2012), it will continue to get better and smoother for many years, aging like a fine wine. If you end up with enough self-control to put some away for five more years, it will be awesome!
Two other interesting things about that picture: the color of the tea in the glass in the background, and the pu-erh knife in the foreground. If you’re used to shu (“ripe”) pu-erh, which brews up very dark red, this pale green concoction will look mighty odd. I suppose if I wanted to really show the color, I wouldn’t have set it on a dark wood counter, but that’s beside the point. Sheng (“raw”) pu-erhs are much lighter and more delicate than the “in your face” shu pu-erhs.
For breaking apart pu-erh cakes, you don’t want a regular sharp knife. Cutting it will tear the leaves. What you want is a pointed knife that will slide between the layers of leaves and flake them apart. This pu-erh knife, which they call a “needle,” has a very sharp tip and basically no edges at all. I also like the ceramic handle.
In addition to the other pu-erh cakes we bought, my friend and fellow tea blogger Geoffrey Norman slipped me a little present: two “pu-erh” teas from different countries.
I’ve talked about spelling of Chinese teas here before, so don’t let Geoff’s “puer” and my “pu-erh” throw you off. The transliteration from Chinese into English will never be perfect, and often you’ll find different translators spelling the same words in different ways. The spelling Geoff uses is how the town of Puer appears on most maps, so it may end up winning out eventually if we ever come to consensus, but until then I’ll stick with my way.
Speaking of the town name, that’s why “puer” appears in quotes on the tube. Technically speaking, you’re not supposed to use the name pu-erh unless the tea comes from the Yunnan province of China, where the style originated. The tea is named for the town where it was processed and marketed. A fermented tea from anywhere else should be called a dark tea rather than a pu-erh. We’ll see if that works out as well as “masala chai.” Translated into English, that one should be “masala tea,” indicating a tea made with a masala spice blend. Instead, most Americans call it “chai tea,” which translates to “tea tea” and loses the whole meaning. *sigh*
There are fermented teas (pu-erh style dark teas) made in a number of places outside of Yunnan. In addition to the Taiwanese and Vietnamese I got from Geoff, I bought dark teas from Fujian and Anhui provinces, and I am carefully aging a Laotian beeng cha as well.
There is no other style of tea that has the variety pu-erh does. Some I steep for minutes, and some for mere seconds. Some brews so dark you can’t see through it, and some as light as a short-steeped dragonwell. The colors range from yellowish-green to orange to deep red. The flavors are all over the map. You can steep pu-erh leaves a dozen times, and each infusion will be different from the last. If you haven’t experienced pu-erh before, don’t blindly order some online. Go to a tea shop and talk to someone who really knows the style. Try several different ones to narrow it down. Only then, make the investment in a good pu-erh cake to take home and enjoy.
So here I am at World Tea Expo 2014. The day didn’t start all that well. I’ve been attending expos and trade shows for decades, and this has to be the hardest one to find ever. Very little signage, and the parking area had no directions to the expo area. We got there late, there was an issue with my badge, and we didn’t get breakfast.
The day got better quickly, though. One of the first booths we visited had BACON TEA! That’s right. Tea with maple and BACON! Yeah, it sounds weird, but it was quite tasty. Also, my magic press pass has a sticker on it that allows me to take pictures on the show floor. I know, I took pictures last year, too, but a large security guard offered to escort me out of the building and take my badge away if I didn’t stop it. This year, it’s kosher.
It’s okay, Mr. Security Guard. I’m legit this time.
I won’t even try to cover everything in this one post. Steampunk and vacuum tea infusion systems are going to get their own article. I’ll be writing book reviews separately. There will be an upcoming post comparing yaupan with the other caffeinated holly infusions (guayusa and yerba mate). And smokable mate? That’s definitely another subject all on its own!
They call it “Country Breakfast” tea, but I’m a “tell it like it is” kind of guy, so I’m going to call it bacon tea.
The bacon tea is from the Tovah Group. Its ingredients, among other things, are maple black tea, lapsang souchong (for a smoky flavor), maple hickory smoked bacon jerky, and various masala chai spices. I think this will go really well with breakfast!
The next person to improve my day was Lillie at the Modern Tea Girl. She was showing off a line of tea-based frosting mixes (“just add two sticks of butter…”). To demonstrate, she had tasting cups with little tasting spoons, but that’s not all! She went above and beyond the call of duty by making little cupcakes. After Doug and I sampled — just a few, of course — we decided that the Lady Grey and the Chocolate Chai were definitely standout flavors!
With some cupcakes in my belly and tea samples from a half-dozen booths, I finally felt that I could settle into my rhythm for the day.
With hundreds of booths showing off approximately 4.3 zillion products, you can’t get overly caught up in one booth unless it’s (a) a good fit for the tea bar or (b) a great subject for a blog post. Oh, since I’m with my 21-year-old (single) son, there’s also a (c) that has to do with pretty girls in the booth, but we won’t get into that one.
As I said, there will be more posts, so I won’t describe the plethora of tea storage containers, yixing teapots, infusers, travel mugs, food products, RTD (ready-to-drink) beverages, tea blends, raw spices, electric kettles, and other wondrous things we looked at. We’ll be buying a lot of this stuff and taking it back to the shop. Some of what we looked at had me itching for a bigger budget (would you buy a $400 teacup with real gold in the ceramic glaze?), and some had me scratching my head.
Although this looks like the Grand Inquisitor’s tray of torture devices, I’m pretty sure they’re all tea infusers. The one second from the left is really cool!
Two of the tea blends I encountered caught my eye, and the merchandizing part of my brain immediately jumped to the conclusion that they should be displayed side-by-side:
Elmwood Inn Fine Teas has a new small batch bourbon black tea. No, it doesn’t actually have bourbon in it, but they’ve put together a collection of teas and spices (including a smoky lapsang souchong) that really evoke the flavor of bourbon. It reminds me of what Vintage Tea Works did with their line of wine-inspired tea blends last year.
To go with it, we have Hancook Tea’s “Hang-Over (sic) No More” blend. This South Korean company has blended lotus leaf, persimmon leaf, hydrangea serrata leaf, and mulberry leaf to come up with a surprisingly sweet (but sugar-free) hangover remedy. It’s not something I’d drink just for the flavor, but it’s still rather pleasant — and who drinks hangover remedies for the flavor, anyway?
Have you ever seen a toy that you really wanted, but you just couldn’t have? AOI (our matcha supplier) had a matcha grinding stone device in their booth. It’s two pieces of hand-carved stone with some wooden parts. You place dried green tea leaves in the top, crank the handle, and it mills those leaves into matcha powder.
We tried it out, and it works wonderfully. The kind folks at AOI took it apart and showed us how it works. I’m not likely to ever start grinding my own matcha, and this device isn’t for sale anyway, but I’d sure love to have it in the tea bar, just to show off!
We finished out the day with the networking party, which featured the most 70s band ever, complete with bell-bottoms, afros, and Earth, Wind & Fire songs, and headed back to the hotel to wind down, blog a bit, and put together some orders for tomorrow.
And now, it is time to sleep. There will be more tomorrow. Lots more…
If you follow me on Twitter (@TeaWithGary), you can get updates all day long. Otherwise, check the blog at the end of the day.
And if you’re here in Long Beach, don’t miss the Tea Bloggers Roundtable, which will feature me along with a half-dozen or so of my fellow tea bloggers. They’re not all as strange as me (Robert Godden isn’t here, so I guess I have to be the weird one this year), but it should be a great panel discussion. It’s at 5:00 p.m. in room 104B.
Last year at World Tea Expo (caution: that link autoplays video with sound) in Las Vegas, I attended a Tea Blogger’s Roundtable. It was a great opportunity to talk with some of the big tea bloggers, share experiences, and discuss challenges. This year in Long Beach, California, I’m pleased to be one of the panelists.
The panel will be on Friday, May 30th, starting at 5:00 p.m. Anyone registered for World Tea Expo or Healthy Beverage Expo is welcome to attend. If you can make it, please let us know using the email address in the poster above. Prepare questions for your favorite tea bloggers (and the ones you just tolerate, too). Take some time to check out the blogs before you attend, too. We all love getting new readers!
The event is being coordinated by A Gift of Tea (Twitter feed @AGiftOfTea). I will also be posting updates here and on my Twitter feed (@TeaWithGary). The bloggers on the panel (in alphabetical order) are:
I’m really not sure what they were thinking when they replaced Robert Godden (Lord Devotea’s Tea Spouts) with me. Maybe he’s too edgy and controversial. Or maybe he’s just getting old and everyone thought his 45-minute PowerPoint presentation on Australian eucalyptus tea was too darned boring. (I have a feeling I’m going to pay for that comment!)
See you there (except for Robert, unfortunately)!
Tea With Gary 