wel wel wel wel

Lord lord.
I went to tha tee shoppe yesterday. it's a Taiwanese place in Houston that specializes in high mountain oolongs and filtered water that will make you immortal, according to the giant metal filtering system that makes up the entire eastern wall of the building. but hey! your tea can only be as good as your water. While I was there a middle aged black guy was asking them (the proprietors) what sort of tea-preparation vessel he should buy. He was holding a french press in a box*. they asked him if he was making tea for lots of people and he said "i'm only making it for myself" and he said something along the lines of "If I'm buying 100 dollars worth of tea then I want to make it in the right thing" and that sure pricked me in the ears. 100 dolla! I don't know if I've even spent a collective 100 dollars on JUST tea in all my short life. if you throw in teapots, teacups, pitchers, gaiwan, tablets with fossilized fish etc. then of course, yes, probably, but this guy had actually purchased 100 dollars worth of fine Formosa oolong in one go and I"d be damned if he was going to make it in a fucking Freedom press. I asked him what sort of tea he was making and why he was making it, and thus thickened the plot.
Apparently, his wife had a dream that if he started drinking green tea he would lose weight. He had been working out and eating right for a while but it hadn't been paying off, but lo and behold, he started drinking tea and lost 25 lbs. Therefore, he explained, he was only making the tea for himself, and mostly for the health benefits. I asked him how he drank it and he somewhat reluctantly admitted that he'd just been making it like Lipton's, which, I am willing to bet, means adding sugar and maybe milk or lemon. He had been preparing it by boiling the leaves in the kettle with the water, which is SO 12th-century and certainly not appropriate for delicate oolong cha. I gave him my standard bleeding-heart answer "blah blah if you enjoy it blah blah right for you blah blah liberal blah" but he seemed interested enough in really enjoying tea so I told him "friend, if you really wants to make good tea just for yourself, you need a gaiwan" which, of course, they did not have at this TAIWANESE TEA SHOP. I am 100% confident that they use gaiwan in taiwan - they're almost the same word. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about this is a gaiwan

Gaiwan means "lid bowl" even though it's a cup. the "wan" part is a holdover from the old "chawan" or "tea bowl" that they used pre-Ming to make whisked tea ala Chanoyu. As you can see, it's just a cup, a lid, and a saucer (optional). the lid keeps the heat in so the tea can steep, and when you're ready to drink it (or pour it out) then it acts as a filter, keeping the leaves in while the water (now tea) flows out. so, you might say it's a cup with a lid. geddit?
I wanted this nice gentleman ("Rick") to have a gaiwan, and not one of the various yixing teapots they did manage to sell at Teasource, because the gaiwan is the simplest and probably oldest instrument for steeping tea that there is. no messy filters to clean out, no moving parts, and, if you're drinking alone, no accessories required. some very fine and expensive gaiwan exist, but at the end of the day it's just 3 pieces of clay.
A yixing teapot is probably the most sophisticated and technically brilliant device ever designed for making tea. I actually digressed grossly for a minute there, but you can't tell because I deleted about 8 lines of text and replaced them with what I am writing right now. now. funny the written word, expecially on the intranet. my digression was some poetic wax about yixing teapots, but I'll save it for a later post. All I will say now is that a yixing teapot is the perfect device for making the perfect tea, but they are complex and sensitive. They can only make one type of tea if you want them to work right, they require discipline and concentration to use effectively, and they must be cleansed with boiling water, inside and out, before and after every use. you can't make tea in a yixing teapot while watching tv or doing homework. well, you can, but it would be like making love with an iPod in your ears. IF you love your yixing right you'll form an intense emotional bond with it, it will become a mature and perfected instrument for brewing the finest tea, and it will have some of your soul smeared on the surface and absorbed into the pores of the interior. IF you love it wrong, you could ruin it, and lots of expensive tea in the process.
Buying a yixing teapot for someone who has only had tea "Lipton-style" is like buying a sitar for a music student who only had 2 months of piano back in 7th grade. sitars are beautiful, profound instruments with dozens of strings, rich droning harmonics and ever-changing tunings, but they only come to life in the hands of a master. A gaiwan is more like a 6-string classical guitar. Simple, standard, but still capable of producing beautiful music and great for learning. gaiwan are glazed on the inside, meaning you can use any kind of tea in it and it won't change the flavor. there's no way to ruin a gaiwan short of actually shattering it, and you can periodically "peek" at the tea to see how the color of the infusion is changing and how the leaves are unfolding. you can gauge the temperature easily (especially on porcelain gaiwan) by touching the lid. The act of pouring from a gaiwan takes a little practice, because you can burn your fingers if you're not careful and then you'll probably drop it. Once you've got it down, though, it's kind of impressive - the tea comes out in a broad waterfall - and you'll feel like a big boy (or girl) because you can do it all yourself. If you're not in a sharing mood you can sip the tea straight from the cup, using the lid to keep the leaves out of your mouth.
I have 2 teapots, one for pu-erh and one for the greener oolongs, as well as two general-purpose gaiwan that I use for green teas, dark oolongs, and any tea that is new to me. One's glass and one's porcelain (traditional), the glass one is nice because you can see the agony but Pyrex™ tends to have funny heating properties, so I use the porcelain one more . it's blue-and-white scribbles on the outside and the inside is pure creamy white, the ideal frame for viewing tea, with a single blue tealeaf painted at the bottom. If I am very familiar with an oolong or puerh I'll make it in my yixing pot; if I still have to figure out the ins and outs of a tea then a gaiwan is better. it's more predictable, I can see the leaves during the steeping process, I won't end up poisoning a delicate vessel with a crappy batch of tea, and if the gaiwan is well-made you can make the tea leaves "roll over" in the cup by brushing the lid against the surface of the water. I've never seen anyone else do this but it helps position the tea leaves so that they open up evenly, and it works too well for me to have made it up.
So naturally I wanted a gaiwan for my new friend, but it just wasn't in the cards. The tea-lady had no idea what I was talking about, even though I attempted to use both the Mandarin and Cantonese readings of the word in describing it to her. How she managed to a) live in Taiwan and b) be in the tea business without knowing what this ANCIENT TEA-MAKING TOOL is, I have no idea, but suffice it to say they didn't carry it.
REcall that, although Rick was interested in tea and the proper methods of brewing it, his primary interest in tea is health, esp. weight-loss. green tea has the most antioxidants (jade oolongs probably count) but the famous blood-purifying, metabolism-stimulating properties of pu-erh would probably do wonders for him in the weight-loss department - if you ever see "slimming tea" or "weight-loss tea" then that's probably cheap pu-erh destined for the European market. pu-erh binds lipids, so if you drink it after you eat it will help your digestion and keep you from absorbing fats. if he had already lost 25 pounds from green tea alone, pu-erh would probably turn him into a covergirl. The tea-man of the shop was in, doing his tee-thang, chatting with some of his buddies in Chinese so we sat down for a cup of the shop's flagship High Mountain oolong. We got plastic thimbles that resemble cough syrup cups full of green-yellow tea (all his clay cups were already in use by his friends) and although the presentation wasn't exquisite the tea was beautifully-brewed. Considering that this guy probably sits around making tea all day long, every day, he's had plenty of practice, especially with the tea in question, so his gongfu for formosa oolong is pretty much perfected. Also, he was using a yixing teapot that has probably brewed this tea hundreds of times, and almost definitely enhanced the flavor of the infusion.
As nice as that all may be, they didn't have any pu-erh tea. the taiwanese don't drink pu-erh; as far as I can tell only the Cantonese drink it. I asked them where I could find some and they laughed a little bit, said "the grocery store" and I rephrased my question "where can I find good pu-erh" - I have never once been satisfied with tea bought from the grocery store, even Chinese groceries (actually, especially Chinese groceries). I remembered a Chinese medicine shop/acupuncturist that had canisters of tea all along the wall, so me (and my friend whom I had come to the store with) drove to it and Rick followed us in his van. I feel a little bit bad for taking his patronage away from Teasource, but maybe it will teach them to carry pu-erh tea for the health-conscious or at least a fucking gaiwan for those of us who want to, you know, make tea.
I should mention that during the course of our conversation in the tea shop, I went through a fair portion of the material I usually teach in my tea class, though in the form of a dialogue rather than a lecture. in the course of this dialogue it came out that Rick was fond of Chinese herbal medicine, and was very vocal about his success with it compared to Western medicine. That's what reminded me of the herb shop, so it actually worked out really well that they carried pu-erh when nobody else in Chinatown seemed to. It is of note that tea began its career as Chinese medicine, and pu-erh is considered the most medicinal of teas. That said, there wasn't much of a pu-erh selection at this place but it was at least respectable. they had a plastic-wrapped pu-erh cake of questionable origin; the real deal are usually wrapped in paper and it wasn't from a factory that I recognized. The doctor (old Chinese man) said it was from Da Lu, which is in Yunnan, but I wasn't so sure so I advised Rick against buying it. They had 2 grades of loose leaf tea in canisters on their back shelf, one was $25/lb and one was $30. I smelled them both and there wasn't a noticeable difference; they both smelled sweet and vaguely earthy, not super-high quality but not offensive, probably cooked and maybe a few years old. They also sold pretty red tins, about half a pound, for 5 dollars, but since I couldn't see or smell the tea and can't read Chinese I knew nothing about it, and wasn't in a position to recommend for or against it. IN the end I advised him to go for the 25-dollar pound; cheaper but not the cheapest, and probably as good as the next.
I had no more luck finding a gaiwan at the herb shop than at the tea shop; this is slightly less heinous because they're not a tea store. I found a box of some herbal flower tea that had a picture of a gaiwan (lid removed so you could see the beautiful flowers steeping in the cup) on it, and I showed it to them and tried to explain that what I was interessted in was the cup, not the tea. it's like that scene in Short Circuit when Steve Guttenberg is trying to prove to that chick that Johnny 5 is not, in fact, alive. They make a Rorschach ketchup blot on a napkin and show Johnny 5, who starts describing the ketchup itself ("Salt, water, tomato paste" etc.). Just when Guttenberg is getting smug and saying "See? Now he's talking like a robot" Johnny 5 goes "Resemble? Butterfly, maple leaf, bird!" etc. etc.
That's about how I felt. I kept pointing to the picture on the box saying "The cup. do you have the cup. gaiwan. goiwun. teacup. I want the cup." and they kept saying "Yes, flower tea. very good for you. Is Chinese flower tea. pour the hot water over." I eventually got through to them and they told me to go to the grocery next door. Rick bought a pound of the tea and we went to the grocery, where they had mostly mass-produced but hihg-end Japanese ceramics. They had teapots (all glazed porcelain, no yixing), little pitchers with strainers inside, strange mugs with handles and lids which were clearly for making tea, and some kind of weird japanese cup that had a lid that fit snugly over the top, but NO GAIWAN. again. that's strike 3 for Houston Chinatown, as far as tea goes. the woman at the grocery got the bulk of my wrath, first directing me to the filter-pitchers, then to the mugs at the back, and finally to the Japanese lidded cups - to be fair, those all more or less fit the description. the problem is that the lids of these items fit over the lip of the cup, rather than inside it, making it impossible to use the lid as a filter either for drinking or for pouring. Her hypothesis is that maybe a gaiwan is new technology, and thus hasn't made it to the US yet. I set her straight with a quickness, telling her no, it's very old, it's chinese, it's been around since the ming dynasty. I would have taken Rick to the antiques store only a few doors down where I bought my sister's tea set (gaiwan, matching pitcher and 2 cups - way classy) but I didn't feel like wasting any more of his time, and I was pretty disgusted at this point. that three Chinese-owned establishments, all of which sell either tea or teaware, could fail to carry the simplest and most traditional tea-making vessel speaks poorly of our Chinese population. That a half-white American and a black guy know more about tea than they do is shameful. We weren't asking for an ivory cricket cage or a lacquer chopstick case. we wanted a teacup. There is some consolation in knowing that the apathy most Chinese have towards their own culture is balanced by the interest of people like Rick, who are willing to follow a complete stranger to two different stores looking for some old tea and an old tea cup.

*A french press is one of these http://fantes.com/images/6587french_press.jpg
the Vietnamese, and, I can only assume, the French, us it to make strong coffee. you put the grounds in the bottom and the metal filter/cage thing keeps them from coming out when you pour the coffee into a cup. it's a great tool for making coffee but then again, coffee grounds don't expand. if you squeeze tea leaves down into the bottom of a cup with a metal filter (metal is always a no-no for brewing Chinese tea) then what you'll get is a bitter cup of tea. anyways, they're too big to have good control, and glass has funny heating properties, esp. if you throw metal into the mix.