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I stopped by the Imperial Tea Court in San Francisco (near the ferry building) and on a whim bought an ounce of their medium-quality white tea--about $35 a pound, as I recall. Maybe I'm just a philistine but that tea was delicious and, unusually for a white, incredibly forgiving. It does as fine with the lovely water heater at work as my electric kettle, and I've made it with significant variance in the length of infusion without noticeably affecting quality. I can turn fancy green tea into bitter grasswater given half an excuse but I literally cannot gently caress up this white; it's amazing.
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Aug 21, 2012 22:35
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Oh my god i know that table. Please tell me that Aroma isn't closing up shop or hard-up for money or anything.
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Mar 21, 2016 09:14
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The number of steeps you'll get from a certain leaf vary wildly based on the ratio of leaf to water; a lot of asian brewing techniques use 2-3x more leaf per amount of water. If someone is telling you how many steeps a specific kind of tea is good for, you should probably also ask what tea:water ratio they use.
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Aug 8, 2017 01:49
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dms666 posted:I tried gyokuro Chinese green tea for the first time at a tea shop recently and it was so delicious. Can anyone recommend anything with a similar taste? It is kind of on the higher end of what I would pay for tea, wondering if there are any alternatives. It has kind of a briney/seaweed green taste. Gyokuro is a Japanese style usually grown with specialist cultivars and undergoes a fairly labor-intensive production process--I'm actually fairly surprised you found a quality Chinese gyokuro. Is the tea shop the sort that sells online? I'm fairly curious, now. The savory/briny character comes from the shading process. The plant is shaded for ~21 days before harvest; the stress apparently inhibits the conversion of savory/sweet chemicals to bitter chemicals in the leaf or something. That means one harvest per growing season even in warmer areas, so finding a cheap gyokuro could be quite difficult. Look for a machine-harvested, tarp-shaded (both modern cost-cutting innovations) gyokuro produced from a farm that still adheres to the full shading period. Uji/Kyoto gyokuro is the orthodox, well-balanced option which still maintains some astringency. Recently, teas from Yame in Kyushu have been taking advantage of the warmer climate to grow the (frost-vulnerable) saemidori cultivar, which cranks the savory/sweet nature to 11 at the cost of some aroma. I would expect to pay a minimum of $0.25/gram for quality gyokuro, even the machine-picked stuff. If you can't find a gyokuro within your price range, consider a kabuse-cha instead. Kabuse gets a 10+ day shading process which makes it something of a middle point between gyokuro and other green teas. The good stuff has a very noticeable savoryness paired with a traditional tea astringency. Some of the best comes from Mie/Ise. You can get fairly premium kabuse for $0.15-$0.20/gram.
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Dec 22, 2017 22:51
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TLDR: if you want MAXIMUM SAVORY, look for a handpicked gyokuro from Yame/Kyushu, preferably of the saemidori or ujihikari cultivars. If you want something reasonably priced, look for a kabuse-cha from a good vendor.
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Dec 22, 2017 22:53
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Little Red Cup specializes in inexpensive, pretty-decent versions of the "name brand" Chinese teas. They offer $1 tastes of all of their teas, and their catalog is small enough to feasibly drink all the way through this way (unlike teavivre's literal hundreds of offerings) yet large enough to be broadly comprehensive of the major Chinese styles. You won't go far wrong just loading up a bunch of samples into your cart and drinking them all. Figure out what you like, and then hit up a more specialist vendor.
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Mar 15, 2018 02:56
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What you've got is purporting to be 金骏眉 (more commonly romanized as Jin Jun Mei), from Wuyi. The internet, including Wikipedia, often confuses it with the pine-smoked lapsang souchoung style since they come from the same growing region, but they're not alike at all. If the brew does come out barbequeue/peateed whiskey levels of smoky, it's mislabeled lapsang. Otherwise, it's a knockoff trying to capitalize on a famous name. (Or you could have come across the best deal on the market, I suppose). True Jin Jun Mei is a very light, almost-chocolatey black tea that commands absurd prices. It also has a reputation for being somewhat temperamental, doing best with a relatively cool infusion in muting clay. I can't imagine the knockoffs are going tobe much more forgiving. Try cold-brewing, maybe?
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May 23, 2018 01:03
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yeah, i can agree with that. cooked pu and matcha both do that to me. it's honestly not a super pleasant feeling if you're not expecting it.
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May 26, 2018 00:27
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Truck Stop Daddy posted:I have some (most likely low grade) gunpowder tea. How are you supposed to steep this stuff? I find wildly different suggestions. I've tried different temps and brew times, but end up with a cloudy harsh goop regardless. What's a proper amount of gunpowder tea per 1dl? Caffeine amount in this stuff seems very high btw, got all headachy last time I gave it a go... "Gunpowder" is one of the fluffiest descriptions in the tea world, unfortunately--in the West, when unqualified, it generally refers to a middling-grade, tightly-rolled green tea from Mainland China. Cloudiness out of a cheap gunpowder generally means cheaply-produced, machine-rolled pellets. Try ~2 teaspoons in a 16-oz teapot at 90 Celsius and adjust the temperature upwards towards 95 if it's still weak? Don't expect more than 2 useful infusions out of it.
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Jun 4, 2018 10:27
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this is way too late to help, but the other thing to think about with gaiwans (or any other brewing vessel) is whether or not you want a muting material. porous clays will file off rough edges of a tea's flavor, which may or may not be a good thing--generally, if you drink a lot of high-fired oolongs or especailly pu'erh, you might want highly muting clay; if you drink lighter flavored green teas you should probably stick to a non-muting material like glazed clay or straight porcelain. corollary: expensive yixing clay is not a universal upgrade; i probably reach past my $150 zisha pot and grab the $15 porcelain with most of the teas i own highly muting materials are porous, which comes from a variety of factors--you want a low-fired, rough clay which has a high sand/quartz/mica composition. yixing zisha is the classic expensive muting clay. a better generalist option is a less porous clay like jianshui. then glazed earthenware, then porcelain or bone china.
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Jun 13, 2018 23:35
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RandomPauI posted:I bought a french press so I could make cold brew tea easily. Are there any teas that taste vastly different between being hot and cold brewed? some japanese teas--gyokuro in particular, but also good kabuse--do quite well with the kouridashi method, where you just leave ice cubes on top of the dried leaves and come back later. chinese black teas, which are already sweet and floral compared to the CTC indian/kenyan stuff most people are familiar with, tend to expose earthy honey and chocolate notes when cold brewed overnight. jin jun mei and bailin gongfu (the latter is often sold as golden monkey in english, for reasons that escape me) are great when prepared this way.
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Jul 14, 2018 01:23
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o-cha is excellent, the best in the business, if you already know exactly what you're looking for, or want the authentic catalog-scrolling/sink-or-swim experience. if you want a more curated selection (and are willing to pay a generally higher price for the same quality), i would suggest den's tea, hibiki-an or thes du japon i would not recommend adagio at all, or upton for anything other than the single-estate darjeelings they do a drat good job of specializing in.
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Jul 23, 2018 20:42
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here's my four step guide to judging a website selling japanese greens: 1) do they advertise spring/new-harvest/"shincha" gyukuro or matcha? 2) do they make dubious dr oz health claims about matcha powder? 3) do they ship from the united states instead of japan? 4) do they refuse to disclose the farm location (and preferably cultivar) of the tea? congratulations! go somewhere else.
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Jul 23, 2018 20:46
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i also consider selling organic shaded teas (gyokuro/matcha) at a premium kinda scammy, but i understand that there's a market for this sort of thing and the vendors gotta pay their bills, so i wouldn't write a vendor off for just that. it probably does mean that they're optimizing their marketing for people who aren't super picky about their tea, though
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Jul 23, 2018 23:08
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Martytoof posted:I went to a Ramen place yesterday and had the "cold tea" on their menu since it was a bajillion degrees out. The tea ended up being unlike anything I've ever had before -- it seemed to be a blackish green tea, but it tasted like wood smoke. It was bizarre and really offputting for the first few sips but it grew on me really quickly. I forgot to ask what it was so I guess I'll try my luck here. Any thoughts on what a really smoky tea in a Japanese restaurant could be? I'm talking like full-on tasted like I was drinking campfire smoke. You're probably looking for kyoubancha/iribancha. They're similar to the Chinese lapsang souchong style, but the smoke is layered onto a substantially lighter and more vegetal/grassy tea than lapsang. Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Jul 25, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 01:28
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bitprophet posted:Can you elaborate on this? I've been using Upton as one of my main suppliers for a while, tho I'm still firmly in the "TRY ALL THE THINGS" phase so it's typically sample sizes only. They can certainly be hit or miss, but I've had a lot of non Darjeeling stuff from them that was pretty good. (But then again…maybe my palate's just not discerning enough yet Tea vending is a specialist's game--most teas degrade with storage and the ones that do age well are also esoteric as gently caress, plus the market and production methods are different in all the major tea-growing regions and you can't be an expert at everything. Upton has a 60-page catalog with like 3 grades of everything no matter how obscure, so it stands to reason that a lot of it might not be the best, or have such low turnover that the tea will have degraded by the time it gets to you. I can recommend Upton without reservation for their massive range of single-estate Darjeelings, as well as a lot of their value-oriented Assam and Niligiri offerings. Nepalese and Sri Lankan teas are more sketchy with them. I've never tried a Chinese or Japanese tea from Upton that didn't taste like it'd been left in a dusty cupboard for a few years. I dunno; I just feel like that catalog has a lot of stinkers on it, too many to suggest that someone newer to tea should buy from them. If they sell something you really like don't let me stop you from drinking it, they do good work.
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Jul 25, 2018 01:37
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david_a posted:I feel like I’m shilling for Vahdam Teas since I bring them up so often... Vahdam and Upton are unquestionably the #1 and #2 internet vendors of Darjeeling; both vendors carry all of the big-name estates in first and second flushes, and sell for fair prices. Upton ships from the US, Vahdam from India, which is why I'd usually give the internet recommendation to Upton. I know I just got done complaining about Japanese tea vendors who ship from the US, but there always seems to be some annoying headache with EMS or customs specifically from Indian vendors (Japanese vendors tend to be meticulous, Chinese customs will pass anything that doesn't have cartoon bomb wires sticking out the side). And Upton definitely moves enough Darjeeling quickly enough to handle storage/shipping well even with an American warehouse, so I'd usually rather just take Upton's crazy good domestic shipping rates and call it a day. Still, nobody I've ever met has ever had anything bad to say about the tea from Vahdam. By all reports, their cheaper blended Darjeelings are also way better than Upton's.
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Jul 25, 2018 09:39
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RandomPauI posted:Is there any good way to cut expensive teas with cheaper teas? Particularly for cold brewing? to be honest, i'd just buy loose leaf teas known for being good value and being robust enough to support multiple steeps. the reason generic bagged tea is generic bagged tea is because it's fannings, which is basically tiny sawdust-sized pieces of tea leaf--they infuse really fast and with a bold flavor, but they also release bitter/acrid off-flavors quickly. i don't think there's any way to extract good flavors from loose leaf tea without leaving the tea bags in long enough to extract unpleasant flavors from those. maybe try cold brewing with just the tea bags in a seperate container, and and then mixing it with cold-brewed loose leaf tea? that'll let you know whether the combination is palatable with minimum risk.
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Aug 4, 2018 00:25
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good taiwanese oolong vendors imo (incomplete list (from cheap to expensive)) zen8tea's ebay page (stupendously cheap tea, cheap shipping too, cheapest "real" yixing i've seen on the internet. cheap. but decent!) taiwan tea crafts (crazy selection, generally great value-for-money, cheap-ish shipping) floating leaves (seattle-based, often considered low-altitude specialists, kinda pricy but nowhere near the next two vendors) red blossom (san francisco based, high-altitude specialists, relatively high prices) tea masters (run by a french person, crazy high prices and quality, good place to blow a paycheck on teaware also)
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Aug 5, 2018 07:34
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Ehhhh. If you just want to go see it, Maliandao is this mile-long commercial district/street in the rear end end of Western Beijing with nothing but tea-related businesses (including this Mall-of-the-Americas-size complex with literally thousands of tea vendors inside). It's definitely a sight, but the stores themselves mostly deal with the commercial wholesale market, with a side hustle of fleecing tourists. Wouldn't really suggest actually buying anything there, at least not more than just buying off the internet. If you can deal with the pushy sales tactics and have a Mandarin-speaker along, it might be a good chance to have a vendor brew some samples of any niche teas that you want to try before buying.
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Aug 6, 2018 08:07
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Green tea supposedly infuses pretty well in gin.
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Aug 13, 2018 21:42
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temperature also plays a huge role in an infusion and interacts weirdly with both brewing time and leaf/water ratio; some of the really wild japanese teas are best with outrageously cool (65-70C?) water for a minute or more even on the first infusion
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Jan 30, 2019 02:03
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Xun posted:We were gifted this tea set but we have no idea what kind of tea it actually is. Can anyone here read the Chinese? Hopefully it is more descriptive than the English. The actual Chinese text is thoroughly unhelpful, but it does mention the brand name. The company seems to specialize in tieguanyins from Anxi, Fujian, but there's nothing on the box to confirm that one way or the other--and they certainly do have a Wuyishan subsidiary. These sorts of gift sets usually contain individually packaged bags of tea; is there any more descriptive text on those?
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Feb 7, 2019 22:54
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anakha posted:I'll be travelling to Tokyo at the end of the month, and I'd like to stock up on sencha and hojicha while I'm there. I prefer cold-brewing my loose-leaf tea, so I'm not sure that getting the higher-end stuff will be worth it, though. Go to any of the high-end department stores and look for the tea counter in the basement where all the food stalls are--the "flagship" department stores (Isetan in Shinjuku, Mitsukoshi in Ginza, probably some other ones) carry very good teas there. a brand i buy a lot of is Marukyu Koyamaen, a Kyoto-based tea concern that should be distributed at most high-end department stores in Tokyo; they specialize in shaded teas but also have a bunch of consistently blended, reasonably priced senchas and kabuses. If you wanna nerd out hardcore, visit a tea shop called Chachanoma, close to Harajuku station. They specialize in single-estate, unblended teas sold by cultivar, which is unusual in the world of Japanese teas (now dominated by Yabukita cultivar monoculture, except in high-end shaded teas). You can try and taste and compare, say, a high-end Yabukita with Shizuoka 7132 with Koushun there. Plus the sweets and shaved ices are fantastic.
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Feb 13, 2019 02:46
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try upping the leaf-to-water ratio and cutting the steep time? that's usually what you do when you want to beat down astringency while still making the tea taste like tea.
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May 21, 2019 01:01
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i will admit to kind of hating earl gray (though baked goods made with the dry tea are fantastic) so i have no idea if this is a dumb idea but is it possible to just...buy bergamot oil and add a drop or whatever to the finished tea if you're doing it at scale
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May 22, 2019 00:13
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Little Red Cup is pretty hard to beat on value, at least for online vendors that have a reasonable free shipping option. Their stuff isn't blow-you-away good, but it's very solid for the price. also a note of caution: upton/adagio's per-cup estimations are always for western-style brewing with one tiny teabag per pot left to steep for like five minutes, which is perfectly reasonable for robust CTC-type teas intended for milk and sugar, but probably not for nicer greens/oolongs
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May 24, 2019 22:13
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MockingQuantum posted:Hey thread, I've got a couple of questions: I've just been getting back into tea. I drank a lot--in terms of volume, not variety--in college and right after, but just picked the habit up again after a while of not touching tea. Now I can actually buy decent stuff instead of the cheapest bagged green tea I can find! Is your electric kettle temperature-controlled, or does it only go to boiling? If the latter, that either somewhat limits the types of teas you can make, or you have to get a thermometer/get really good at the asian grandma thing where your pour water between two cups and measure the temperature by how hot the cups are getting. Tea Masters is excellent, but at a very high price point. This is going to be true of a lot of name-brand Taiwanese teas, because it's an overheated market and my understanding is that this year in particular crummy weather did kind of a number on the harvest. Yunnan Sourcing for mainland Chinese teas and Vahdam for Indian teas are my usual suggestions for having a good variety, excellent value-for-money, and reasonable shipping. YS in particular is good for having small sampler-sized packets available at a low markup, IIRC.
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Sep 5, 2019 21:07
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Huh, that's a neat tip, I'll have to put in another order at some point i'm in the mood for taiwanese tea. While I'm hear, since I'm not very familiar with the Indian tea market--a friend is looking for a good Darjeeling-style tea minus the slave labor and I have absolutely no idea where to begin looking. Surely there's some estate somewhere which is willing to treat the labor better and charge more for it, but maybe I'm being too optimistic about human nature?
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Sep 5, 2019 23:04
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I'll check out that link, thanks!HelloSailorSign posted:I’ve developed a taste for matcha. So far I’ve only had the Ito En from Safeway. There should absolutely not be sludge or clumped powder at the bottom. If there is, you've got a bum whisk or you need to sift the powder before putting it into the bowl. A normal kitchen sifter you'd use for flour or sugar or whatever will work fine. If you don't care about the ceremony at all you don't need a $30 handcarved bamboo whisk; you can get excellent results from one of those $5 tiny-electric whisk-on-a-sticks you use to froth milk for a latte. Matcha is an extremely specialist product and Adagio is absolutely not the place you want to be buying it. Because it's the new hot thing, there are a lot of unscrupulous vendors, including Adagio, hawking crappy Nishio or Chinese tea powder as "ceremonial grade" (this has no legal force in Japan or the United States, which is why they all use it) matcha. None of them are a particularly good value either--they command superpremium prices despite really not being any better than Ito En's Nishio-grown offering. If you don't have a lot of money to blow on matcha powder, you could do a lot worse than continuing to buy Ito En. Unfortunately, the good stuff is an incredible pain to store and ship because it's a powder instead of whole leaf; you'll be mail-ordering from Japan which means that you'll eat substantial shipping costs. Ippodo is one of the more western-friendly matcha vendors out there and has pretty reasonable shipping. Sazen offers a number of famous domestic producers, including Koyama-en's product line which I really like, but their shipping fees are Super Bullshit 64 unless you're ordering a lot. Both producers offer an excellent matcha at around the $0.50/gram mark--Koyama-en's Wako and Ippodo's Sayaka-no-mukashi are both very orthodox teas with balanced sweetness and umami. The more you order, the less of your cost will be shipping, but it's hard to go through a lot of powder at once before some of it starts to go off. Sorry for the long-rear end post, but scummy matcha vendors are one of the things that really annoy me. Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Sep 6, 2019 |
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Sep 6, 2019 05:18
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HelloSailorSign posted:So if I see matcha that says “ceremonial grade” I’ll avoid it, since it means nothing it’s likely only used by those trying to market their way out of an inferior product. Unfortunately the marketing term has more or less won and almost all matchas sold in English at a high price point will be described as "ceremonial grade," good or bad. The safest, if most expensive, bet is just to import from the well-known blending houses like Ippudo, Koyama-en and Tsuen. They've spent a very long time providing a very consistent product to very picky people. Otherwise look for teas from Kyoto prefecture/Uji city (if a matcha doesn't proudly declare this, it isn't), which have received the full 20-day shading (if a matcha doesn't proudly declare this, it probably hasn't) and then been stone-ground (etc). e: organic is also kind of a bad sign, weirdly enough--it turns out that putting a tarp on a plant for 3 weeks puts a lot of stress on it and unnatural fertilizers really do seem to make for better-tasting teas in this unnatural environment. i'm not saying you can't grow a good matcha organically, but i am saying that i've never had one that was competitive with conventionally grown matchas at the same price point Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Sep 7, 2019 |
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Sep 7, 2019 11:24
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white2tea has two pretty solid lapsangs, a well-balanced smoked lapsang with larger leaves (=more underlying tea flavor, less smoke) than you usually see, and an excellent unsmoked zhengshan which is very rare to see being offered outside of china. those are some of my personal favorites, but i find the really smoke-forward lapsangs that other people like to be kind of harsh in an acrid/chemical/did-you-smoke-this-with-ikea-particleboard sort of way. a lot of people i know who do prefer very smoke-forward lapsangs consider yunnan sourcing's offering to be one of the most heavily smoked in the industry, so if that's your taste i might try them out.
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Oct 8, 2019 22:09
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A steam-processed tea like sencha needs to go substantially cooler than a Chinese green tea, especially because the Japanese style of processing tends to result in a broken and powdery tea. 5 grams of leaf per 150ml of water, at 70C/158F, for one minute is a good starting point. Very broken senchas, especially fukamushis, can often be brewed for closer to 30 seconds. If the tea supports multiple infusions--plenty of perfectly good Japanese teas don't--you want to increase either the temperature or the duration for the subsequent ones; increasing temperature will usually get you better results but is also more of a pain in the rear end. Adagio is not a good vendor for unflavored teas. I don't drink a lot of sencha myself, but people seem to like Yunomi for having a good selection at fairly reasonable prices, with the option for cheap "we'll drop it in an regular airmail envelope and pray" shipping if you have a taste for risk.
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Oct 18, 2019 21:35
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For non-grandpa brewing, increasing the leaf-to-water ratio should let you get a tasty brew while reducing infusion time and temperature. Generally, the compounds that make tea astringent and bitter extract slower, especially at lower temperatures, so increasing the ratio is often a way to fight bitterness. People get really picky about ratios and temperature but the "best" way to make a tea--within a certain band of sanity--probably depends more on what you're in the mood for than anything else. also yeah rolled taiwanese oolongs can expand massively, like easily 10x the volume when fully opened
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Oct 31, 2019 23:30
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Thoht posted:Anyone have a favorite online vendor for Japanese greens? A reasonably priced gyokuro in particular would be great. do you prefer your gyokuros to emphasize sweet or savory flavors? o-cha stocks an uji gyokuro which is of the craziest, most savory teas i've ever had; way more so than even most yame gyokuros. o-cha in general kicks rear end, good value on their teas and they know how to ship green tea well. i'll also take the chance to broken-record plug koyamaen's product line, which you can get from only slightly sketchy rakuten resellers or if you have a real taste for adventure, emailing koyamaen directly for their order form and then sending it in by fax machine in tyool 2019. i've only had their tama-homare, which is pretty midline in price, but it was really good, more sweet and aromatic than the kamejirushi i suggested above. e: safest option, of course, is ippodo, you're paying a pretty decent surcharge for convenience but nobody's ever said the tea was bad
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Dec 4, 2019 20:43
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first off: what you're looking for might actually be kabuse-cha, which is a kind of whole leaf tea that gets some shading (generally 7-10 days) so it picks up a good deal of the shaded taste but is still brewed like a sencha (i.e you use reasonable water-to-leaf ratios instead of crazytown five-grams-per-one-ounces-of-water gyokuro brewing) and is quite a bit cheaper of a habit than gyokuro or matcha. i've tried kabuses from o-cha ($0.16/gram) and koyamaen ($0.10/gram) and liked them both, though i actually preferred the cheaper of the two. thread veterans are probably rolling their eyes right now because those are the two vendors i plug to everyone. matcha and gyokuro are a good deal more pricey; i'd expect to pay $0.25/gram for an entry level uji matcha (the nishio or zhejiang stuff intended for smothies is a good deal less expensive, though also unpalatably bitter when whisked traditionally) and maybe $0.40/gram for a full 20-day-shaded gyokuro. shipping from japan is going to dominate the price you pay for any japanese vendor, so if price is a concern you'd probably want to find someone who ships from the united states, assuming you live here. unfortunately every domestic matcha vendor i know of is terrible, though if you do find someone honest i'd love to hear about it. a compromise option might be ordering from yunomi, which has a cheap "we'll drop it in an airmail envelope and forget about it" tier of shipping.
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Dec 13, 2019 20:08
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do whatever you like as long as you use reasonably fresh, whole spices. all you really need is fresh whole cloves and cardamom and it'll already taste better than anything preblended.
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Jan 3, 2020 23:11
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confirm gyokuro ("jade dew" is a somewhat stylized direct translation) being a love-it/hate-it trip, it's completely wild that growers can squeeze that chicken-soupy flavor profile out of a normal-rear end tea bush. if you have the money to blow on what really is an outrageously expensive tea, you've gotta try it at least once.
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Jan 22, 2020 02:37
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thes du japon is run by a slightly mad french dude who sells only single-estate, single-cultivar japanese tea, with a strong focus on what i'm going to delicately describe as the hipster cultivars. a lot of his selection is definitely more on the "interesting, thanks, now to never buy that again" than "good quality for value" side, but the listings are generally pretty honest when he suspects that a tea won't have widespread appeal.
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Feb 26, 2020 23:34
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you can buy lead test strips off the internet for basically free iirc, and one pack will set you up with enough to test every teapot you'll ever own even if you're as much of a klutz as i am
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Mar 12, 2020 07:19
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