Saturday Morning Tea

Feb13

This is a weekend to celebrate love and the beginning of a new year. The Year of the Tiger. When I think of tigers, I think of power, strength and wildness. Also, beauty and ferocity, a melding of light and dark. Tiger has much to teach us about these attributes.

This morning’s tea, a Chinese Jasmine, is a melding of 2 different types of plants, the camellia sinensis (tea) and a fragrant flower that opens only at night.

Jasmine flowers are plucked in the dew of the morning and gathered together for scenting green tea. As tea leaves are highly susceptible to absorbing scents, the marriage of these components in carefully controlled conditions produces a wonderfully fragrant tea.

I steeped the leaves for 3 minutes in 180 degree F water. The soft floral aroma greeted me as I lifted the lid of my glass teapot.

Glowing like a warm sunset, the tea liquor imparts a delicate, sweet flavor with an overlay of floral notes on the green tea’s vegetal character. A bright finish lingers on my tongue.

As I sip my tea, I catch images of sitting in a summer garden, drinking tea from fragile cups shaped like tiny eggs, the fragrance of blooming flowers all around.

As you can probably tell, I am so ready for spring’s arrival and its gentle fuzz of color as inner growth manifests once again in the outer world.

I have been thinking a lot lately about opening my heart and what that means to me. It conjures words like breathe, awareness, connection, listening, forgiveness, acceptance.

How do you open your heart?

Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

~William Shakespeare

Saturday Morning Tea

Feb6

Our week was blessed with bright sunshine and deep blue skies even though temps have been hovering at the freezing mark during the day, dropping into the teens at night. I’ve warmed myself every night by wrapping in a big granny square blanket with a steaming teapot close by. The tv show LOST returned this week and, yes, I admit it, I am drawn to that show for some reason. Perhaps it’s their determination to survive that I admire.

This past week I replied to an e-mail from a customer disappointed in the tea I chose for my morning tea today. They thought it would be a green tea and, even though it is processed as a green tea first, I explained how it is far from it in flavor.

I introduce you to Ho-ji Cha tea, a roasted green tea.

Ho-ji Cha tea is traditionally grown and produced in Japan. Using what’s called Bancha (meaning common tea) green tea, the green tea leaves are roasted in porcelain pots over a charcoal fire. Roasting the tea leaves turns them a rich russet color and creates a completely different kind of tea from its original green state. This particular tea has been grown in China.

As you can see, the steeped leaves are chocolate brown with some twig mixed in. Straight twig tea is called Ku-ki Cha and is also very popular in Japan.

In my research, I have discovered that this type of tea was first created in Kyoto, Japan in the 1920s by a merchant but I have not been able to find out why. Perhaps he wanted to “spice” up the taste of the common grade of green tea. I have also read that the roasting process lowers the caffeine content of the leaf. I don’t understand that since all tea leaves are heated up to halt the oxidation process. Personally, I think this tea is lower in caffeine because it is common to have twigs from the tea plant mixed in. There isn’t any caffeine in the twigs.

I steeped my Ho-ji Cha tea for 3 minutes in 180 degree F water. As it brewed, its warm, toasty aroma filled my senses.

The flavor of the glowing, dark-amber liquor is woodsy, toasty, nutty and smooth with a whisper of sweet caramel in the finish.

The roasted flavor lingers in my mouth for a long time.

The winter sky is shrouded in a thick, gray blanket. Aside from the gentle water sound of my fountain and the classical music playing, my morning world is silent. I sip my tea and savor the quiet moments.

Weekends are for getting back in touch with myself.

“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself

and know that everything in this life has a purpose.”

~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Saturday Morning Tea

Jan30

Here in New England, we’re in the midst of an arctic blast with temps in the teens and howling winds making it feel like the air is below zero when you step outside. Brrrr… I’m grateful to be tucked away in my little nook with a steaming mug of green tea to warm my hands and my spirit.

This morning’s tea is called, interestingly enough, Lonely Mountain White Mist. Of course I chose this tea for its poetic name, conjuring images of a faraway land with tea bushes gracing a mountainside.

This tea comes from a fine plucking (top 2 leaves and a bud) of tea bushes grown in Fujian Province located in southeastern China. Traditionally described as “eight parts mountain, one part water, and one part farmland”, its climate is very suitable for tea growing with over 1200 tea plantations scattered throughout the province. So, our image of the mountainside is right on.

I steeped the leaves for 3 minutes in 180 degree water. As I gently lift the lid of my glass teapot, the pale golden liquor imparts a fresh, clean aroma. Is spring almost here?

The tea is so pale that I can see the texture in my hand crafted teabowl. If I could choose one word for this tea it would be

sweet

A sweetness that swirls and lingers through the asparagus notes and right on into the finish. So smooth…

As I mentioned in my last post, I am itching to play with my beads in a free-form way so today I will journey into the world of bead soups, mixing colorful bowls full of beady goodness.

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

~Maya Angelou

What are you creating this weekend?

Saturday Morning Tea

Jan2

My first full day in my new place started out bright and early with a visit from the Verizon man. A little bit of wiring magic, actually a couple of hours of plugging, unplugging, testing, and I now have an internet connection. Morning has turned into afternoon as the snow dances and swirls outside my window and I’ve finally got the chance to sit down and quietly sip a cup of Chinese green tea called Bing Yin Zhen.

Downy leaf buds, the tender new growth, are plucked and processed. The leaves are then artfully hand twisted which shows off the fine quality of the leaf to perfection.

I steeped the leaves in 180 degree F water for 3 minutes.

The hot water steep doesn’t even touch the shape of the leaf. What gorgeous handcraftmanship!

I know that Yin Zhen translates to silver needle. I couldn’t find the translation for Bing though. Does anyone know?

The aroma of the ecru tea liquor is soft and fresh, very reminiscent of a white tea. The tea settles in my mouth with a silky feeling and then releases faint flavor notes of tobacco that linger in the aftertaste.

The rest of this weekend will be spent organizing and decorating my new place. Stay warm!

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist

but the ability to start over.”

~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Saturday Morning Tea

Dec12

Hello dear tea friends. I hope you had a marvelous week. I had a glorious sleep in this morning. That is definitely at the top of my list of ways to get your balance back during a busy, frenetic holiday season. A lovely way to start the day, if a bit of a late start…

This morning’s tea is a wonderful aromatherapy experience. Conjuring up images of gardens and armfuls of just picked fragrant blooms, it is a green (pouchong) jasmine tea called Jasmine Mao Feng. The long tea leaves are twisted into wiry threads as they are processed as a green tea. Mao Feng means “Fur Peak” or “Hairy Mountain”, a reference to where the tea is grown and harvested. You can read more about another Mao Feng tea here.

The leaves look like a black tea when dry and then lighten up to a gorgeous olive green after steeping. I steeped the leaves for 3 minutes in 180 degree F water.

The tea liquor is the color of a golden sunset.

Once the jasmine flowers bloom, the flowers are plucked, in the case of this tea, all organic blooms. They are laid out with the dry tea leaves so the leaves will absorb the scent of the flowers. Mmmmm…

When I first opened the packet of tea, it smelled candy sweet with a strong aroma of jasmine. However, after steeping, the aroma changed in favor of the green tea’s fresh, vegetal fragrance with just a whisper of floral scent.

The flavor is sweet and lightly jasmine with an interesting pungency that causes the floral taste to linger in my mouth. A very pleasant sensation.

As I have been packing up more of my things this past week, I came across my gratitude journal. Picking up my pen every night before bed, I have returned to this practice of writing down 5 things that I am grateful for. I can’t begin to describe how this one simple act can so change your perspective and thus your day to day life. I’ve written about my gratitude journal before in this post.