Last week, on 6th February, it was Finland’s National Tea Day. To celebrate I went along to a little tea party thrown by TeeMaa and Muyo in downtown Helsinki. In just over one hour, Xinyuan from TeeMaa took us on a whistle-stop tour of five very different teas.
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.
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.
Wuyi Cliff Oolong also goes by the name of Wuyi Rock Oolong, Wuyi Rock tea, or Wuyi Yan Cha. For me, Wuyi Cliff Oolongs are the hardcore ones. I’ve dabbled before in their rocky charms, but as our tea guide, Xin Yuan says, they can take many years to get to know. It’s like a slow burn love affair. They’re complex, challenging, sometimes hard to love. It takes patience to fully appreciate their charm.
Taiwan is internationally renowned for excellent Oolong teas, having both inherited the Oolong tradition and developed many innovations. There are so many different types of Oolongs in Taiwan, it’s no wonder that this week’s workshop at TeeMaa overran by almost an hour! Too many delicious teas to taste and history to discover.
Oolong is my favourite type of tea. From dark oolongs to green oolongs, it’s immensely generous in its variety of colour, shape, aroma and taste. You can never get bored with oolong tea! Along the way, I’ve tried lots of different oolongs, but never in a systematic way. So I was super excited to see ‘A Deep Dive into Oolongs’ series at my favourite local teahouse here in Helsinki, TeeMaa, run by Peng and Xinyuan.
I have found a beautiful, tranquil little teahouse in the heart of Helsinki specialising in Chinese teas! TeeMaa teahouse is run by a lovely woman from Hunan. They are doing a series of tea workshops, and the first one I attend is actually about a Japanese tea! Matcha is a Japanese green tea in fine powder form. It’s used in the traditional Japanese tea ceremony where the whole tea leaf is consumed.
At this month’s Helsinki Tea Tasting we delved into the murky world of Finnish tea drinking. It has to be said that tea is not the drink of choice for your average Finn. They are in fact the world’s largest consumers of coffee per capita. However for those who do chose tea, it’s most likely flavoured.
More tea tasting this week courtesy of Tarmo who has joined Yunnan Sourcing’s Sheng Pu’er Club. We tried four different Sheng Pu’ers. This time around we blind tasted each tea for three infusions. Then we wrote our own notes before comparing. Finally the details of the tea were revealed. It was a great experiment in showing just how differently people experience taste and flavours. For some infusions we had similar notes, for others, wildly different!
In November the Helsinki Tea Tasting Meetup tasted some great sheng pu’ers . This month it was round to my place, where we tasted some oolongs. I’d stocked up before leaving China, and was looking forward to tasting them with some newly found tea enthusiasts. Along with black tea, oolong is my favourite as it gives such a breadth of flavour.
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.
