life in mokievision

I will not lie to you, journal: this review for Republic of Tea's coconut puerh is short because I polished the tea off before I had the chance to write it up. It was that good.

In the Bag:
Visually, it's very dark and well-shredded tea with big hunks of coconut in it.

Olfactorily (really, we have no better word?), it's a syrupy, milky coconut smell--a little odd, but an improvement over the plainly chemical coconut scent I've encountered elsewhere, like Adagio's coconut black, which isn't bad, but isn't good either.

Yes, I've tried multiple coconut teas. I was not joshing you about how dire a coconut allergy would have been for me.

The Steepening:
Boiling tap water over a teaspoon of tea, steeped a minute or so longer than my usual test time because puerh likes it that way, served up plain with no sweetener and no milk/creamer.

On any given puerh tea, you'll see some "This is the worst black tea I've ever tried!" comments, and you can ignore them, because puerh isn't black tea--it's not just oxidized, it's fermented and put away for a long while to get funky, let things grow in it, be tripped over by hobbitses, and so forth. Generally speaking, the funk those reviewers are complaining about is what puerh is supposed to be. But in order for it to brew up deep and earthy and a little shroomy, rather than muddy and dank and suspiciously fishy (in the sense that one asks, "Is there fish in this tea?"), it usually needs a brief rinse. Most loose leaf teas benefit from a rinse, really--dried leaves packed into small contains and jostling against each other in transit can lead to a fair bit of grindage and dust, and that's putting aside any actual dust (etc.) they might have picked up in picking, processing and waiting around on the market.

The point of all that is, I got a whiff of fishiness and realized I'd forgotten to give the cup a quick rinse. The scent of the tea was mostly rich earthy dark chocolate (!) and coconut, but with a little background aquarium tang. More disturbing than the fish tang was that this was not an unappealing combination of scents.

When I used the last of the sampler, I gave it a proper rinse. It eliminated the fishy scent, but it also took some of the depth from the flavor. I've decided not to think too hard about that.

The Verdict:
Some strange alchemy of the base puerh and coconut chunks gives this a complex dark chocolate/coconut vibe. I would accuse the coconut of playing mind tricks on my taste buds, but as I said, this isn't my first coconut tea, and it's never gone chocolatey on me before. It's got to be the fish.

But I'm okay with that.

Milk oolong. What? Is that a serving suggestion? A poetic translation, like "Monkey-picked tea"? (Spoiler: no actual monkeys involved.) Some bubble tea concoction? A new fad where the leaves are rolled in powdered milk?

According to shops, it's so named for its milky taste, but that explains nothing. Does that mean the tea tastes like milk? Does it taste like tea with milk already added? Or does it have a milky quality, like liquidized coconut or soy or rice or almonds or hemp or all the other not-actually-milks?

It has taunted me for over a year. Milk oolong. Sold in a variety of swanky online tea shops, but pricey and available only in the So you need a lot of tea sizes. No matter how curious I was, I couldn't go through a repeat of the lapsang souchong incident, of trying not to waste a large bag of tea, and trying to find a home for a tea I couldn't drink without making it sound like I was trying to pass along an undrinkable tea. (While feeling terribly ungrateful, too, since the bag had been a gift from Tina. Neither of us expected 'smoky quality' to mean it would trigger an allergic reaction, just like actual smoke.)

But Republic of Tea sent out a sale e-mail, and I'm not much of a tea snob--not enough of one to turn down a good sale, certainly. And there it was, milk oolong, and in a sampler tin at that.

Cup of Abundance - This delightful, hand-processed green oolong is grown high in the Fujian mountains in China. Famous for its “milky” taste and silky texture, the large, tightly-rolled leaves have the alluring fragrance of sweet cream and pineapple. The flavor is smooth with light, orchid notes. Great for multiple infusions.

Look at it, shamelessly tempting me with its multiple infusions.

In the Bag Tin:
Wee wrinkled pellets that smell like the Platonic ideal of peaches. You know the way some oolongs are described as having notes of peach? (Or maybe that's mostly Ti Kuan Yin.) This tea mocks those teas. Sweet cream and pineapple? I won't argue with RoT's writers--a ripe peach all sun-warmed and dripping juice isn't far off from sweet cream and pineapple to me.

The Steepening:
Eyeballing pellets when you're used to loose leaf is a pain.

For the first cup, fresh tap water straight from the boiling kettle over an eyeballed allotment of wee wrinkled pellets, steeped about two minutes (it's easier to steep longer next time than fix a too-bitter first impression) and served hot and plain. I thought at first I'd added too many pellets, because the steeping pot was packed with green and red leaves, all rumpled and looking like a very misplaced salad. Then I noticed those wee wrinkled pellets had unfolded into the biggest damn tea leaves I have ever seen. The leaves of other teas? Mocked. We're talking capsule-into-spongeosaurus expansion.

The resulting liquor was a touch lighter in color than expected, but it packed a lush floral scent that filled the room and waved a baseball bat at the neighbors.

"Light, orchid notes" is misleading: the flavor is like sitting down to tea in the middle of a hothouse in full bloom. The flavor-scent of orchid isn't the assault on the senses that strong lavender and rose can be, though, so it's a gorgeous sensation, with a good whiff of natural fruity sweetness underneath. What others refer to as a milky taste I would describe as a natural mildness in the flavor, as if the tea were served with cream, and a rich, almost luxurious mouthfeel. Even the aftertaste, a slightly dry perfumed pucker, is delicious.

The second cup got a few minutes more to brew. (Resteepings should in general, but I also wanted to try the tea a little stronger.) It held up well in scent and flavor, and I chilled some for later testing. Cold, it's a little fruitier than floral, with less mouthfeel but more aftertaste, like a fruity herbal tea but without the hibiscus dilemma.*

The third cup is still fruity and floral but noticeably weaker, low on that lovely mouthfeel, and as it cools, more of a standard green tea flavor--but pleasantly floral green, like a favorite cousin to jasmine. I don't think I can squeeze more resteepings out of this batch of leaves tonight (summer, mold, ick!), but I intend to jump back into testing on a smaller steep soon.

The Verdict:
I may have a new contender for Best Tea Ever.

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* Hibiscus is a popular filler in flavored teas for its fruity twang. In herbal teas, it can add a fullness and body to an otherwise weak fruity cup, and cover up a bit of unpleasant earthiness or bitterness. Some herbals, if served without a strong tent pole ingredient like hibiscus, taste weak and watery. On the other hand, herbals with a strong tent pole ingredient like hibiscus often taste most strongly of that ingredient, which is annoying if you hate that ingredient and/or expect your herbals to taste like the herb(s) in the name.

I call it the hibiscus dilemma, but it could as easily be "Goddammit, this is rooibos."

What's the secret to green tea, mokie?

Time and temperature, mokie. Mostly time.

Experts suggest water heated to 160 - 180 °F for green tea, 190-ish °F for oolong and 212 °F for black, and argue over 140 °F or 212 °F for white, presumably debating whether to lower the temp because of the lower oxidation or raise it since herbals are given a full boil. Herbal experts, meanwhile, huff that just as you can't boil all teas, you can't boil all tisanes. (That's the proper name for an herbal tea, since they don't actually contain, you know, tea.) And yet more expert experts point out that there's a difference between Japanese and Chinese greens, and spring-plucked and summer-plucked greens. All that's before you even get into the Celsius conversions or the debate over whether greens should be steeped just 1 minute or 7 minutes...

And they wonder why green tea didn't take off in the US until Lipton started bottling it.

Let me make your life easier the Chinese granny way: 'shrimp eyes'.

For black tea, your water needs to come to a full raging boil, but when you put on the water for green tea, wait for little bubbles rising to the top, the size of--you guessed it--shrimp eyes. The next two steps up are 'crab eyes' and 'fish eyes', and they're well within the green tea range. If you think your bubbles are too big, or you've just lost track of time and hit full boil, turn the pot off and let it sit a minute or two. With a bit of practice, you'll be able to tell where your water is just by the sound of the kettle.

That said, time is the killer. Water that's too hot may leave you with a bitter green, but most greens, including those you're going to pick up from the shops, also become bitter or astringent if they're steeped too long. Most packaging on green teas is oblivious to this; people from countries that drink sugary coffee milkshakes and sugary milky black tea are told to steep their green teas up to 7 minutes, as if to confirm the healthy benefits of green tea we must first make it taste godawful. Trust me and aim for 3 minutes; if your cup is too weak/strong, you'll at least have a good reference point for adjusting the timing on the next pot.

Now that's out of the way...

What's the biggest problem with flowering teas, mokie?

Time and temperature, mokie. Mostly time.

First, let me explain (finally, halfway down the entry) that flowering teas are whole tea leaves tied together in such a way that, as they steep, they 'bloom' from a hard round ball into a floating 'flower' in the pot, often with actual flowers like jasmine at the center. It's also, according to some, a very pretty way to sell off really outdated tea stock, and I believe it, since I haven't had any yet that didn't taste stale.

Second, there's the issue of steeping time. A flowering tea starts out as a hard bound ball o' tea, but tea leaves need room to move and infuse--that's why bagged tea is chopped into tiny pieces (more surface area), and why tea balls are great for corralling herbs and herbals, but not so great for actual teas. It can take anywhere from 3 - 7 minutes for the outer leaves of a flowering tea to infuse enough that they unfold, and that means that while the outer leaves are oversteeping, the inner leaves aren't getting much room to infuse and expand at all. You can easily end up with a contrarily astringent cup of weak tea.

Which I did.

In the Bag:
Oh look, the actual review! The brand in the cup today is Primula's flowering green jasmine tea. It has several negative Amazon reviews which mention that the customers' tea arrived already several years old judging by the 'manufacture' date and/or expired. I find this perversely funny, since, again, flowering teas seem to be made exclusively from stale tea.

In the bag, this is a little knobby ball that smells a little dusty. No jasmine scent.

The Steepening:
Took forever.

The unfolding of the leaves and flowers into a little bouquet is the real point of flowering teas (more on that below), but this one underwhelmed me. The leaves are rolled and bound in such a way that it didn't gently bloom into a dainty bouquet, awaiting the oohs and aahs of onlookers, as much as it porcupined out into a delicate tea mine, awaiting passing U-boats.

The scent was also disappointing. The mark of any good jasmine tea is its ability to make you forget you're supposed to drink it, because you're too busy inhaling the aroma wafting off the pot, but jasmine barely showed up to the party in this tea.

The Verdict:
Weak, astringent, and not even particularly jasmine-ish? Blah.

I'll admit that the primary draw of flowering teas isn't the cup but the pot: they're not drinking teas, they're watching teas. If you're hosting a little girl's tea party (raiding party, whatever), and everyone's going to drink their flower tea with a heaping spoon of sugar and a handful of cookies anyway, then it's not a problem. They're also not too shabby for that relative who'll drink it and think, "Ah, so that's what a fancy tea tastes like," and then return to her Diet Coke quite pleased at having had fancy tea that one time.

If you want a drinking tea, though, flowering teas aren't the way to go. And if you want a watching tea, you can certainly do better than Primula's.

The climate is changing, and the important issue isn't whether this change has been caused by man or is merely influenced by human activities.

No, friends. The issue is how do we save the coffee?

Running Arabica’s chances against three emission scenarios, over three timescales (2020, 2050 and 2080), and with a geographical resolution of 1 Km for the plant’s Ethiopian homeland, the models “showed a profoundly negative influence on the number and extent of wild Arabica populations”, Kew says. (Richard Chirgwin, "Coffee next on climate chopping-block: The looming ARABICA APOCALYPSE," The Register 10 November 2012)

This is how the zombie apocalypse starts.

Or the Rage virus pandemic, because I will surely beat someone to death without coffee.