Category Archives: Tea Preparation

Enjoying the Moment – The Tea Ceremony

Tea readily lends itself to rituals and practices that let us slow down. It allows us to take in not just our surroundings, but our state of mind and the characteristic of the beverage we are patiently awaiting. Not surprisingly, Chinese and Japanese developed formal rituals around tea that are worth exploring as they explain both the culture of tea of those countries and some of the historical manufacturing processes.

Japanese Kyusu – Inspired by Japanese Tea Ceremony

Japanese Tea Ceremony

The Japanese tea ceremony originated with the Buddhist monks, who incorporated the preparation of powdered tea into their meditation rituals. The accessories and steps taken in the tea ceremony are focused on the comfort of the guests and the preparer. The ceremony appeared in Japan during the 15^th century, being created and documented by Sen No Rikyu, a Japanese Buddhist tea master. In his book, the Way of Tea, Rikyu not only lays out the steps of Chanoyu, the Japanese Tea Ceremony, but discusses the philosophy of tea and how tea helps to reinforce the contemplative experience of life and man’s interaction with other men and material objects. Rikyu used the Way of Tea to invite all who believed in harmony, respect, purity and tranquility to become masters of tea, opening up the beverage and the tea ceremony to the masses, effectively taking it out of the temple and into the upper classes of Japanese society.

The ritualization and formalization of the tea ceremony is still seen today in the accessories associated not just with Matcha but with Japanese green teas. Kyusu’s, Japanese tea pots used to serve whole leaf green tea, are either a solid color or decorated with pictures of nature, which are always on the side of the pot that should face the guest when serving the tea. Rikyu is also given credit for having created the bamboo whisk and scoop used in the preparation of Matcha.

Chinese Tea Ceremony

Chinese Tea Cups for a Tea Ceremony

The Chinese also have a tea ceremony. It is lesser known than the Japanese one but it still has its own beauty. Done with whole leaves instead of powder, it is a simple presentation of a kettle, teapot and handle-less cups. The preparation is done simply with few gestures of significance and little concern to the type of pottery or other accessories. Unlike the Japanese ceremony, there is discussion with guests, usually around nature, the tea being drunk and other topics usually related to nature and man’s place in it. The leaves will be infused multiple times by the host as conversation continues.

This informal ceremony reflects the very informal view of tea in China. However, informality should not imply a lack of importance. Tea is considered one of the seven critical items for a healthy life and is consumed throughout the day, every day, by most Chinese.

Creating Your Own Tea Ceremony or Ritual

It is not hard to create your own ritual around your cup of tea. It could be something as simple as taking a few minutes to hold still and breathe while you allow your tea to steep. Alternatively, you may prefer to sit with a pot of tea and a book in your favorite chair. The Chinese and the Japanese both got it right in focusing on tea’s tie to nature and its ability to allow people to slow down and contemplate their place in it. My favorite ritual is enjoying a cup of tea at my kitchen table looking out the windows and watching the stars fade and the sky fill with early morning sunlight. What is your favorite tea ceremony?

The Best Way to Experience Tea: By Flight

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Cupping teas in flight for comparison is a fun way to explore new flavors.

Tea flights are a great way to explore new teas.

What’s the best way to enjoy a cup of tea? Finding the best way to drink a cup of tea is truly a personal experience. No two people are going to agree on every aspect of which tea, which cup or pot, time of day, whether it is shared with others or enjoyed quietly with a good book or a beautiful view of nature. In developing Dominion Tea and most recently in opening our first retail space, David and I had to grapple with answering that question while allowing for the education of new and experienced tea drinkers alike. We borrowed the idea of a flight of tea from the local Virginia wineries, who offer flights of their wines when you visit them.

How Many Teas in a Flight?

In designing flights, we have opted for three teas. Why three? Well, even though these flights are not full cups of tea but just two ounces of each, there is only so much tasting and distinguishing a person can really do with tea, or wine for that matter, before the flavors blend together. It also helps to minimize the wait time for people as the tea steeps. Some days five minutes feels like an eternity when you really want that cup of tea. Also, by trying more than one there is an opportunity to practice real consciousness when tasting and comparing teas together. Don’t forget there is a lot to tasting that we humans have managed to take for granted.

Get To Know Your Tea

Tea flights also give us an opportunity to educate people about the places these teas come from and the care given to them from the farmers and manufacturers of the tea. As we all know, good tea requires just the right terroir, handling during plucking and manufacturing and proper storage to make it as good as possible. There are a lot of people out there who have no idea where tea comes from and how to make a proper cup of tea, so we seek to make use of this opportunity to help educate those who come into the tasting room.

I will also admit that it is fun to think up all the possible combinations of tea. So while it might be a little unorthodox to think of drinking teas in flight, we hope this new experience excites our fellow tea drinkers while recruiting new ones. Do you have any thoughts on the perfect pairing of three teas you would like to share?

Visit our Purcellville Tasting Room

Are you in the Northern Virginia area? We are located in Western Loudoun County in the heart of Northern Virginia Wine Country. Stop by and visit before heading off on your wine country excursion. Our Purcellville Tasting Room is located at 148 N. 21^st St, Purcellville, VA 20132.

Five Tips to Help You Savor Tea

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Experiencing tea involves all of the five senses.

Neural Pathways in the Brain Delivering the Full Tea Experience – by NICHD/P. Basser (CC BY 2.0)

When David and I started to really build Dominion Tea, we sampled a lot of different teas with experienced and inexperienced tea drinkers alike and found out how little we knew about what it means to adequately describe the experience of drinking one tea versus another. Taste is so much more than just the five senses that our tongue gets (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami). It also includes touch, smell, and sight. To say that you taste something ignores that fact that it really does require all five senses to register what is in your mouth. To savor tea acknowledges that it requires more than taste to truly enjoy a cup.

It is a testament to the complexity of the human body that all five senses can so quickly execute when we consume beverages or food that it often leaves us lost for words about what we just experienced. To help me figure out how to better describe tea, I went hunting through books on food, brain neurology and what scientists have learned about our mouths. Below are five tips on how to better understand what you are experiencing with your next cup of tea. These take time, patience and practice, but are well worth it.

Play when you drink the tea. Smell the tea before you put it in your mouth and try to describe the smell. Then slurp the tea when you drink it. Yes, slurp. It allows the aroma to travel up the back of your mouth into your nose again. Smell is actually what gives you the complexities of what you taste, not your tongue. Then try to describe what you just drank. How is your second description different from the first? Then sip the same tea while you pinch your nose closed and you will realize what you are missing when your sense of smell is taken out of the process.
Drink with others. No two people have the same tasting experience. Our genetics effect how strongly we taste bitter, salty and sour. There is no wrong way to describe what you taste but having someone else around to compare your experience with helps you get better in finding the right words for what you are experiencing.
Swish the tea around in your mouth. After you have had fun slurping, try swishing. As you swish the tea around in your mouth, what do you feel? Does your tongue feel dry around the sides or does the tea feel creamy down the middle of your tongue?
Know your biases around taste. Our experiences with food are written back into our brains, so if you associate a smell or taste with something bad, even unconsciously, it will affect your future experience. The same holds true for good experiences. Knowing your biases helps to guide you on what to try and may also help you explain why something doesn’t work for you.
Practice describing the what, how, where and when around the cup of tea. What refers to the five tastes. How refers to the intensity of the taste – low, medium or high. Where refers to where in your mouth you taste the tea and when refers usually to the start, middle or end (finish). Practice being precise as possible with these as that will ultimately help you understand what types of teas are pleasing. Often a tea can be pleasing not for its smell or taste but for how it feels in your mouth (think smooth).

Practice these five tips and you will become better on describing your tea experience and learn to appreciate the flavor of more than just your favorite cup of tea.

Water Quality for a Great Tea Experience

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Do you have great water quality for your tea? Are you sure?

Are you sacrificing a great cup of tea because your water leaves a little something to be desired? Water is the single biggest ingredient in your cup of tea so making sure you have great water quality is a great idea; especially if you have a well!

What is Water Quality?

Well the answer, like that of what is quality tea is, it depends. Water quality can be subjective and depends on the application. It’s really probably better to think in terms of fitness for use. Quality water for swimming, showering, and washing clothes is a very different discussion from the water quality desired for tea.

Its important to start off with a baseline. A large part of what we are trying to do when we make a cup of tea is steep leaves in water in order to extract the favor (and usually caffeine as well) from the leaves. The leaves contain both water soluble and water in-soluble compounds that can impact flavor. And some of these compounds are more soluble than others at a given temperature. We are looking to extract desirable flavor compounds while minimizing the tannins which result in bitterness.

So for tea we are looking for the ideal water to extract the right amount of flavor.

All We Want is Fresh Clear Water, Right?

Since we are looking for the best water to extract the right balance of flavor what does this look like? In short, fresh clean water, without off odors, and which has some minerals but isn’t too hard. Sounds easy right? Here are a few things you will want to know.

Tap water is not the same across the country. Some areas have naturally harder (or softer) water than others. Hardness being a measure of dissolved minerals. The ideal hardness for tea is between 50 and 100 parts per million.
Calcium in water creates scale which damages electric tea kettles and increases the energy required to boil water.
Public water supplies may have added chlorine and fluoride, may not be as soft as desired, and after travelling through a network of pipes, may not be as clean as you think.
Private (aka well) water may be all over the map. It depends where you live, how deep a well you have, what the local geology looks like, and more. While well water is tested for new wells this is minimal testing, primarily for coliform. It’s not necessarily for radon, pesticides, hardness, or other things which impact water quality.
We do not want distilled water or reverse osmosis water. The former leaves behind all minerals but not volatile organic compounds (for example benzene or other fuel-related components). The latter provides pure water with no minerals; flat, boring, and providing an equally boring cup of tea.

Getting Great Water Quality for Tea

First and foremost get your water tested. If you are on public water you can get a good baseline from the annual water quality report put out by your jurisdiction. However, this will only have basic information in it and won’t account for what happens on the journey from source to destination. It’s a great idea to get your personal water supply tested. If you are on a well this is really a must as water quality changes over time due to groundwater changes or due to damage to your well head or casing. As a homeowner you will only know the full details of your water by testing yourself. The CDC offers some thoughts on testing.

After testing, consider available solutions to address your water situation. This may be a basic sediment filter, a carbon filter to remove odors and other organics, softening through sodium (salt) ion exchange, and/or scale inhibitors. Its important to realize that there generally is not a one-sized fits all solution, you may use a combination of methods, and you may want to consider cost and options for treating all your water or only drinking water.

One more note on water quality. While we stated that its different from place to place there are exceptions for large nationwide coffee/tea chains and similar establishments. These businesses are looking for an exact flavor experience every time regardless of which shop you visit. These establishments actually use reverse osmosis to remove everything from the water. Then they use a pre-formulated solution to add back the exact mineral content for exactly the same water, everywhere!

Finally, A Note on Descaling Your Electric Kettle

Pamukkale Travertines of Turkey. Water quality for tea is a measure of disolved solids. In this case lots of calcium formed the travertines.

Extreme Example of Calcium (Scale) Buildup at the Pamukkale Travertines in Tukey. Photo by flickr user SaraYeomans (CC BY 2.0)

We find it amusing that the answer to scale or calcium buildup in your kettle is to purchase special descaling chemicals. However, regular descaling, as if it occurs at the same rate everywhere, is exactly what many electric kettle manuals even claim you should do! Scale, or calcium buildup depends on water hardness which, as we’ve seen, varies dramatically across the country as well as between well and municipal water. So descaling monthly is a bit inappropriate for many consumers. Regardless, you can use white vinegar to remove scale, so why buy something else? More importantly, if you are looking to enjoy your tea and you have excessive mineral buildup in your kettle then you have a bigger problem: hard water. By now you know that the first step is to have your water tested so you know what you are dealing with, can treat it appropriately to have great water quality, and ultimately have a great tea experience.

Tea Storage for Optimal Freshness and Shelf Life

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Correct tea storage provides the longest shelf life possible. This is important for all tea drinkers as your want your last cup to be as good as your first. So to get this correct, we need some basic understanding of how tea interacts with the environment and what the expected shelf life of tea really is. Keep in mind, if stored correctly the expected shelf life can go out much further than what is indicated below. The taste of tea, however, will change on you from when you first bought.

Then we can figure out where and how to store tea. Below is a chart that lays out the different types of teas and how long they are expected to keep their original flavor for if given the optimal treatment in the trip to market and then onto your shelves at home.

Tea Type	Expected Shelf Live	Tea Storage Comments
Black	24-36 months	Since this tea is generally dried longer, it will last longer under the right conditions.
Oolong	12-36 months	The darker the oolong the longer the shelf life.
Green and Yellow	6-24 months	The British Tea Council advises to drink the green teas before 6 months as the anti-oxidants will break down over time. If taste is more your concern, you are fine going out 12 months for most.
White	6-12 months	Since white tea is made from younger leaves with the least amount of manufacturing, so this is not a tea to keep long.
Blended with Flavoring	6-36 months	Extracts have long shelf lives, so it is the tea base that will dictate this shelf life
Blended with spices, flowers, herbs	6-12 months	Here the spices more than the tea dictate the shelf life. Cinnamon, mint, and cloves will start to lose their punch after six months. Most flowers add no flavor and will stay as long as the tea.
Blended with Nuts	6 months	Nuts go bad quickly, that is why you often don’t find them in tea. If a tea is nut flavored, it is generally through extracts.
Puerh	Generally the older the better, some of the best on the market are 20-30 years old, unlike the other tea, this one needs air to improve its flavor	Puerh needs air, so if you buy it store it somewhere other than the kitchen to allow for proper air circulation without it picking up the odors from your cooking.

Your Favorite Tea Storage Tin May Impair Freshness

Tea Storage Conditions

Tea is hygroscopic, which means it will absorb moisture and odor from the air. So it needs an air-tight container, kept away from spices, garlic, onions, and anything else that has strong odors in the kitchen. Tea should also be kept away from heat. Generally in a kitchen, when food is heated it releases steam and the tea will absorb all of it. So never store your tea near or above your oven, cook top, dishwasher, or microwave. By doing that, you are just asking to have your morning tea taste like last night’s dinner. Finally, tea is also light sensitive. Remember, the sun is used to whither the freshly plucked tea leaves. So more sun on the dried tea leaves, will just break them down faster. So its best to stay away from clear containers.

Best Tea Storage Options

Japanese Sencha in an Air-Tight Tea Storage Pouch to Optimize Freshness

If your tea comes in a resealable pouch that is not clear, you have the perfect container to store your tea. For those pesky tea bags in cardboard boxes, get them into a zip lock bag immediately and make sure you are using them regularly as they do not last that long. That is not to say you should not have a metal, plastic or dark glass container to store your tea, if you like those kinds of things. Just keep in mind they have seams and may not be as air-tight as most of the resealable pouches. Also, the flavor of the tea will stay with the container, especially plastic ones, so you have to be willing to constantly drink the same tea to justify having a secondary container for it. Either that or be prepared to wash it well between teas (and expect plastic to still retain the smell of the prior tea or soap used to wash it). Just remember to put your tea in a dark part of the kitchen away from heat, and not in the refrigerator, unless you have the tea in a vacuum sealed container. In closing, to keep your tea as fresh as possible, an air tight container that is dark and placed away from heat and appliances that produce heat or steam is the best solution.

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