Blogging now on www.verdanttea.com

Verdant Tea's website is up and running. We have moved our blog operations to www.verdanttea.com

Check it out! Lots of new articles, and even more exciting: We are now sourcing and selling tea.

Thanks,

David

Venturing into the Unknown

Dear Friends,

After years of research, and months of tea tastings and long conversations with fellow tea-lovers, I have reached a high point of frustration with the quality of tea available in the West, and with the lack of emphasis on tea as an artisan-crafted relic of culture, not a commodity product. With this in mind, I have taken the leap into the unknown to begin sourcing teas unlike anything seen before. I am not interested in simple flavor differences, I am interested in the story of each tea, the story of the farmer, and the legends passed down by generations of cultivators. These are teas that go beyond engaging the palate. They play on the palate, the smells, the sight, all to draw from us memories and emotions. These are teas that go beyond themselves.

This is high-time for America to find such teas. All the tea enthusiasts I speak to are ready for something greater than the tea bag. A tea tasting that includes the kind of pu'er, oolong, black and green teas that I am bringing to America always takes people out of the stress of the everyday. People come from the outside, from traffic and noise, and after twenty minutes have found a new source of joy, new friends, and new sensations of taste.

My teas should be in America by the end of April if all goes well. I am growing this from the ground up. Any support in the form of spreading the word will be greatly appreciated. The faster this picks up, the faster I can bring more teas and tea wares to America. Here is a partial list of teas in my first shipment:

Sun Dried Wild Arbor Yabao Sheng Pu'er: This is a unique late winter budset tea picked from wild tea trees with a rich cinnamon and nutmeg taste and lingering sweetness.

Yunnan Research Institute Special Comission Stone-Pressed Ancient Tea Tree Sheng Pu'er 2001: This tea steeps up with a full, satisfying body, and a biscuity, malty flavor that gives way to notes of dried fruit in later steepings. It is sweet with a creamy mouthfeel that usually only occurs in oolong.


Wild Arbor Cedar Grove Shu Pu'er 2005: This brick steeps up thick and brothy with an incredibly fragrant pine or cedar flavor from the tea trees proximity to an ancient evergreen forest. In later steepings it is sweet, sparkly and slightly tangy. This one can steep up 20+ times and keep giving.

Single Mountain Origin: Mt Bulang Ancient Tea Tree Sheng 2005: This one is extremely intriguing, with overtones of juniper berries, a molasses sweetness, lingering nutmeg and clove in the aftertaste, and later steepings yielding dried apple.

Family-Crafted Wild Arbor Sheng 2004: This sheng is unlike all others. It was not made under the label of a larger workshop, but instead hand crafted by the farmers who live in the ancient tea tree forest where the leaf material comes from. The sheng is intense, creamy and full bodied with assertive flavors of walnut.

Small Cake Competition Grade Shu: This pu'er is pressed into single-pot bricks, and made from enormous leaf material. There is an almost overwhelming flavor of sweet corn that lingers through dozens of steepings.

Golden Budset 2006 Shu Pu'er: This tea is made not from leaves, but entirely from tiny early spring picking buds. The flavor is incredibly smooth, and subtle. There is nothing overwhelming about this tea. It quietly imparts an exquisite sweetness of raw honey, with notes of lilac. Though fermented for years, there is something in the flavor evocative of a field in late spring filled.

More teas coming! This is a selection of teas from my first shipment. If anybody has an interest, I am happy to send samples, or take pre-orders. Tea wares like yixing, and walnut tea boards are also planned in the next two months. If there is anything you want, send me a message and I will consider it as I plan future orders.

Best Wishes,

David

The Word "Tea"

Tea is a loaded word. It goes back to the early days of Chinese history. Across the world, there are two main variations of the term: Tea, or ti, te, the, etc. and Cha, or Chai. Ti and Cha are different pronunciations of the same Chinese character, one, cha, is the standard Mandarin Chinese pronunciation. The other, ti, is from a southern dialect. Countries that pronounce the word Ti, or Tea first got the stuff from the southern port towns. Countries that pronounce Cha got tea earlier through land trade routes or inland trading. Notable examples of this are Japan and India.

Us "tea" drinking countries were introduced to the beverage through merchants as a commodity good. Those "cha" drinking countries were introduced to the beverage through Buddhist monks as a part of religious ceremony. Perhaps this is one reason that Japan, India, and China drink far more tea than other beverages, while Europe and America split the caffeinated market share with coffee.

Even the word "Cha" is a pretty new concept. At first, tea did not have a name of its own. It was simply known as one more medicinal herb. It's first real name was "ming." Later, when people realized that there could be different levels of quality to the drink, they named the high quality budset tea "cha." The more common leaf tea was known as "ming." Of course, every tea shop was claiming that all of their teas were "cha." Anyone honest enough to sell "ming" was going out of business. It soon became industry standard to refer to all tea, leaf or bud, as "cha." Now, nobody in China thinks of "cha" as a higher quality product. To give the connotation of quality, companies are bringing back ming by making a two character word: "ming-cha." In old times, this would be seen as a lower grade product, but China has forgotten the origins of its words, and now "ming" just sounds old and lofty. It is similar to putting thee and thou into English to sound fancy even though "you" was the more formal term and "thou" was the familiar term.

Because simpler terms like "ming" have become overused and lost their power, Chinese tea merchants have had to introduce more and more elaborate descriptions to denote quality. Thus you might see something awkward and preposterous like: Premium imperial palace tribute grade dragon phoenix jasmine pearl supreme. I have really seen this in my travels. It is always a letdown drinking such a loftily named tea and having it taste average.

The Chinese character for tea is actually quite simple. It is closely related to the character for bitter herb. The top part is a picture grass growing out of the ground. This is the part of the character that gives meaning to the word. The bottom is phoenetic. It is just a character that is pronounced like "cha" to help readers. The character "ming" is the same picture of grass with a different phonetic. Despite their differences and connotations, they both go back to humble roots, the idea of plants growing out of the earth.