Well, hasn’t it been a while. After the craziness of Christmas, I admit, it’s taken me some time to get back into the blogging groove. In the meantime, my White2Tea tea club packages, previously taking their very sweet time to get over here from China, have unblocked. I now have a big stack of intriguing teas to dive into. Here’s the lowdown on September 2021 tea club.
Curious Cultivars: Oolong Tea Tasting [Japanese Oolongs and Dan Cong]
My interest was most certainly piqued when I saw that my favourite teahouse in Helsinki, TeeMaa, was putting on a tea tasting of Japanese oolongs. Oolong teas are unusual in Japan, a country most famously known for its green teas. So I was very intrigued to taste some Japanese oolongs. Plus we were going to taste them alongside a favourite category of oolongs for me, Dan Cong.
Kombucha has seen a huge rise in popularity over the last few years. Once an obscure potion on the shelves of health food stores, it’s now gone mainstream! Known for its probiotic health properties, Kombucha is a slightly sparkling fermented tea drink made with a live culture called a Scoby. I’m a relative newcomer to kombucha. It’s only over the past couple of years that I’ve started to drink and appreciate it. And now I decided to give home brewing kombucha a go!
I’ve been meaning to join White2Tea Tea club for some time now. So this year I gave myself a birthday present and signed up! That was back in July, just in time for August's tea club. I knew it was going to be a waiting game, what with the state of shipments from China. So I was pretty excited when the notification of its arrival came towards the end of August.
In my Matcha 101 blog I wrote about the four main Matcha producing regions in Japan. Matcha has a very distinctive vegetal and savoury (umami) taste. And each region further adds its own unique flavour which is influenced by the growing environment - its climate, landscape and soil. In this post I compare Matcha from three of the regions - Uji, Fukuoka, and Nishio.
In a land of coffee drinkers, how happy was I to come across a newly created Meetup group – Helsinki Tea Tasting. Last Sunday I joined four other tea enthusiasts for some Sheng Pu’er tea tasting kindly hosted by Tarmo. We tasted four from his Sheng Pu’er collection before I reached my tea drunk limit.
This summer, after 6 and a half years living in Shanghai, I left China for Finland. From the birth place of tea to a nation obsessed with coffee… in fact the Finns are the largest consumers of coffee per capita on the planet. So, number one on my ‘must do before I leave’ list was a final trip to Shanghai’s Tianshan Tea Market.
A few years ago I did a pottery workshop and made possibly the ugliest, most useless tea pot in the history of all teapots. However it’s still part of my collection, and serves as a reminder of the amazing skill and years of dedicated practice that goes into making a beautiful pot. So of course I was very interested to see a master in action in Yixing. We visited Ding Shu Zhen, a small village and the original home of Yixing tea pots, which still houses many small scale pottery workshops.
As well as drinking tea, I also love teapots. Yixing in Jiangsu province is home to the famous Zi Sha (purple clay) teapot, and only a short train ride from Shanghai. So it would be rude not to! All I knew of Yixing’s famous pots were the purple-red smooth round teapots. On my weekend in Yixing, along with my trusty tea adventurer Jasmine, I discovered a vast array of weird and wonderful Yixing tea pot styles.
Tie Guan Yin, 铁观音, Iron Goddess of Mercy, or just plain old Iron Goddess. Probably the most popular oolong in China. And quite right too. In a quest to find out more about this famous oolong, my friend, Jasmine, and I set off one October weekend to the source of Tie Guan Yin - Anxi in Fujian province.
