All Photos Benjamin Reynolds, 2018.
This week had more sudden family time than I’d anticipated. I’d only satisfied maybe 23 of my 30 weekly hours, but now that I have all sorts of things sorted and out of the way, I feel I can more easily meet the weekly hours. So far I’ve only been able to head downtown a couple times. I have a potential intern/apprenticeship offer at Encore Tea and Chocolates, but I first want to get into contact with Rawk Star foods, Tumwater’s Good Karma Kitchen and Cascadia Homebrew.
I’ve gotten some good ingredients from the Evergreen organic farm. I think I’ll be able to begin a corn nixtamalization this week. I got in touch with Olympia Olive Oil, and I think I can get something good for preservation. Sandor Katz’s Art Of Fermentation came in this week, and I’ve begun reading James Beard’s Delights And Prejudices. Also talked about how to make tea a detectable ingredient in a finished kombucha when I visited Encore. Apparently the culture that kombucha is made with also eats tannins, so one option for this goal is their Irish breakfast blend. I’m also thinking of blending some shou pu-erh and lapsang souchong, because of their, strong, distinct flavors.
The Northwest Tea Festival was a very active event. Unfortunately, the workshops I was aiming for were rounded up and out before I could touch them. The vendors on the floor-space were very communicative, however, so I still got a lot of good information. I didn’t see any yellow tea as I was milling about, maybe it was only available to taste at its specific workshop. Probably the most helpful one was the Tea Bar run by Whatcom Tea. They were doing “rapid fire” taste comparisons at a turnover of 3-5 minutes. Their daughter was doing a separate, 20 min session for one tea, all day. The 20 minute session tea was a 2007 Yunnanese Snow Dragon white that they had incidentally aged on the shelf when they tried, found it awful and forgot about it, by the time we tried it at the event, it had mellowed into a tea with a consistent pea shoot, licorice, and stone fruit character from its prior harsh bitterness. One of the observers mentioned that while they worked at Teavana, their supervisors told them to throw away any tea that had reached a year old on the shelf. The same person also mentioned they were aging a green tea in a bamboo wrap. While I was at the Miro Tea display which had a whole variety sit down tasting space, we tasted and talked about their 1986 Baozhang oolong, an older vintage oolong that they felt was nasty and their Wuyi bourbon barrel aged tea. The bourbon barrel tea is aged at Miro sort of on a whim because they had quite a bit of that particular Wuyi black tea.
Tea was being brewed fairly constantly, both with gaiwan and small, Japanese style kyusu side-handle teapots, various people across the floor talked and demonstrated their methodologies, utensil handling, steeping times, temperature reading and control. If I want to go forward steeping anything other than black tea in my own untouched gaiwan, it seems I’m going to need to address reading/controlling temperature, for example. There aren’t really any hard and fast rules to this style of tea-brewing. There was also a traditional Japanese tea ceremony space attached to one of the Japanese tea companies present, along with a Wu-Wo tea ceremony event, both of which were first-come, first-serve small capacity events I just barely missed.
My rounds at the high speed “tea bar” sessions, in chronological order, were a comparison of two green teas that were fairly light in flavor, 2 aged oolongs of the woody/mushroomy variety, very recently imported powdered yak butter tea (one “salt”, the other “sweet”), pu-erh aged in dried citrus fruit claimed to having medicinal properties, and two consecutive years of a Taiwanese black tea from Sun Moon Lake which was produced from an irregular cultivar or subspecies and typified as a Ruby Red tea, which there are quite a few different producers producing wildly different results.
