A popular place to buy tea in Beijing, Wuyutai (吴裕泰)has over 180 stores across the city. You’ll find them in the popular tourist shopping streets like Qianmen or Wangfujing. But most, discreet and unpretentious, are seamlessly blended into the capital’s urban landscape. They seem to have been there forever. Well, almost. The first shop was opened 125 years ago, which, for the ever-changing Beijing, is almost an eternity. The notion of the “Old Beijing” is quite elusive for me, as I came here during the pre-Olympics construction boom, when major surgeries on the city’s face had been already operated. Nevertheless, I do feel this shop has a certain old Beijing flavor and do think that the status of “China time-honored brand” (中华老字号) fits it well.

Tea is among the necessity goods for Chinese, which means:  it has to be readily available, of consistent quality and not overpriced. I think Wuyutai shops cater precisely for that.

No wonder that Wuyutai’s bestseller is jasmine-scented tea, or Mo Li Hua Cha (茉莉花茶), the preferred drink of local Beijingers. Jasmine tea makes up a good deal of Wuyutai reputation and almost half of its sales. In the stores, jasmine fragrance dominates all the rest. Jasmine tea here comes in all possible shapes and grades, with prices that can fit every budget.

Besides jasmine tea, Wuyutai has a good generalist selection of all major tea types. Nothing too fancy, just consistently good.

Their offer of green teas is quite standard, but it goes a bit wider than the ubiquitous and quite pricey Long Jing, Bi Luo Chun and Huang Shan Mao Feng. You can find here green teas like Zhu Ye Qing竹叶青, Xin Yang Mao Jian (信阳毛尖) and An Ji Bai Cha (安吉白茶). The selection of black teas is limited to Qimen from Anhui and Dian Hong from Yunnan, as well as Zhen Shan Xiao Zhong (known to foreigners as Lapsang Suchong), but this is understandable: black tea is not the most popular tea among locals.

For oolongs, they sell Tie Guan Yin and Da Hong Pao, as well as some Taiwanese oolongs. But in no way are oolongs Wuyutai’s specialty.  Pu Er tea is there as well, but the offer is not spectacular. Last but not least, at Wuyutai you can find prepacked tins of white tea Bai Hao Yin Zhen and Bai Mu Dan all over the year. Otherwise, they have tea snacks, gift boxes and usual tea paraphernalia.

Basic English is spoken in the shops in the tourist areas. Tasting is not systematically offered. On the last visit to Wuyutai Wangfujing store, the tea house on the first floor seemed to me a bit gloomy and uninviting. If I were a tourist, I would rather go to their Qianmen store. Impossible to miss it – it’s just next the gate of the northern entrance of the street.

If you are looking for a random tea shop in Beijing, chances are high that the first shop you stumble upon will be Ten Fu’s tea (天福名茶). With 74 shops in Beijing only and over 1100 across the mainland China, Ten Fu must be the country’s biggest specialized tea retailer. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind is a real tea empire with own plantations  Zhejiang, Fujian and Sichuan, tea processing and food factories and even its own University. On the way the tea leaf makes from a tea tree to a tea pot, every process is under control and no renminbi is lost. Ten Fu’s tea is big. But being big has both its advantages and flip sides.

The variety and the quality are uniform across the shops. It is reassuring, like a BigMac that tastes the same across all MacDonalds shops. But a bit boring as well, once you become more familiar with Chinese tea. Ten Fu’s Tea shops mainly sell just a few tea “blockbusters”, but in different quality and price ranges. For green tea, it is LongJing and BiLuoChun; wu long are represented by Tie Guan Yin and Da Hong Pao. There is plenty of jasmine tea for all budgets. They do have Pu Er tea cakes, but those that I tasted were not too exciting. That’s about it. This leaves little room for surprise, but at least you can be reasonably sure that price/quality ratios are adequate.

The shop assistants are friendly, they warmly welcome you with a cup of fragrant jasmine tea. They are quite open to brew a particular tea for you to taste, even if your pick is among the expensive ones, but be expected to buy something in return. English is often spoken, but in most cases, it’s very basic.

With all the mixed opinion I have about this chain, I must say I owe my first encounter with Chinese tea to Ten Fu. On my very first trip to Beijing in June 2007, I stayed in the Novotel Peace hotel, close to Wangfujing shopping street. Ten Fu’s Tea flagship store happens to be just next door. You can recognize it by the teapot fountain just in front. One smoggy afternoon, I had some time to kill, waiting for my husband stuck in Beijing traffic. So I went to this tea shop. The guy who welcomed me turned out to be really passionate about tea. Besides, he spoke perfect English. We tasted multiple teas, and for every tea he had a story to tell and patiently answered my endless questions. That was brilliant. When you are a foreigner and enter a Chinese tea shop for the first time, knowing nothing about Chinese tea, such a passionate and patient English-speaking guide is just what you need. Of course, his approach paid off, and I did not leave the shop empty-handed. But I was truly happy about the discovery I had just made. It is a shame I lost his business card: when we returned to Beijing to settle in, he was no longer in the shop and no one seemed to know where he moved.

What else to say? My preferred goodies at Ten Fu are tea snacks – they come handy when you have unexpected guests. I also like individual packs with the mix for Eight Treasures Tea (八宝茶), as well as chrysanthemum flowers. And for sure, you can find there plenty of different tea sets and tea trays. A visit to the flagship store next to Wangfujing can be an interesting learning experience: on the second floor they have a sort of tea museum where all the steps of tea processing are well described. They even have “toy” versions of some tea making machines – and they move!

What is the easiest way to do a successful green-tea-inspired dessert? The first thing that comes to my mind is matcha (抹茶 mǒchá), or green tea powder (绿茶粉 lǜcháfěn). I always feel a bit like a magician (the Wonderful Wizzard of Oz in the Emerald city?) using a dash of this  – oh, so fantastically smelling! – powder to add a surprising flavorful and colorful twist to a classical recipe. But I have to admit, sometimes green-colored baked goodies look too crazy to my otherwise omnivorous kids. Which makes me use matcha only sparingly.

My stock of matcha has not been replenished for quite a while. But when I recently discovered a small baking supplies shop in CBD (more details about it at the end of the post), I was happy to grab a couple of bags to revisit some classical recipes and try new ones.

Among my absolute personal favorites are Green Tea Sweets by Kelli, an award-winning classic that has made a tour du monde of the food blogosphere. Ama(i)zingly simple, and ama(i)zingly good, they give hope to even the most desperate bakers like me. I follow the recipe à la lettre, but like adding a local Beijing finishing touch by coating their sides with a mix of black and white sesame seeds.

Here is the recipe from Kelli’s website, with just some minor changes of mine:

Green Tea Sweets

Ingredients

3/4 cup (2.25 oz) Confectioners sugar
5 oz Unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1 3/4 cup (8.5 oz) All-purpose flour
3 Large egg yolks
1.5 TBS Matcha (powdered green tea)
1 cup Granulated sugar, 2 TBS black sesame seeds, 2 TBS white sesame seeds (for coating)

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.
• Whisk the confectioner’s sugar and green tea together in a bowl.
• Add the butter and green tea/sugar mixture to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix until smooth and light in color.
• Add the flour and mix until well combined.
• Add the egg yolks and mix just until the eggs are fully incorporated and a mass forms.
• Form the dough into a disk and chill in the refrigerator until firm (about 30 minutes).
• Roll the dough out to ½” thickness.
• Cut the dough with a leaf cookie cutter.
• Mix granulated sugar and sesame seeds in a bowl. Roll each cut cookie in the bowl co coat the sides.
• Place the sugar and sesame-coated cookie on a parchment lined pan. Bake at 350F for 12-15 minutes, or until slightly golden around the edges.

Now the info useful to fellow Beijingers about the Jia You Zhu Bi (家有猪鼻) baking supplies shop where you can find matcha and lots of other baking staff. It’s hidden in the residential area at the south-west corner of the crossing of Chaoyang Beilu and Yintai Lu. They have a very decent stock of baking ustensils, as well as a plethora of ingredients. I have to say, their butter looked a bit suspicious for me, and they did not have almond flour I searched to make macarons, only almond powder, a totally different thing. Matcha (绿茶粉 lǜcháfěn) is sold there for 10 RMB per 50g. They also sell matcha pudding powder (抹茶布丁粉) and green-tea flavored mousse powder (绿茶味慕斯粉), those two are pale green and not as bright green as matcha, they are cheaper (10 RMB for 100 g) and do not have a strong distinctive matcha perfume. The shop does not accept cards, cash only.

Some directions: The south-west corner of the crossing between Chaoyang Beilu and Jin Tai Lu is the one with the Jia he yi pin congee restaurant (top left pic.),  go along the building to the west, and you will see a gate (top right pic). Walk into the gate and turn left when you see a path leading to a red brick wall (bottom left pic.). Walk to the end of the path and you will see a door on your left hand, get in and you’ll see the shop.

A long-standing favorite among expats and visitors, China Culture Center (or “CCC”) offers  a wide selection of talks and classes on Chinese culture. The coverage goes from fairly traditional topics like Chinese history, philosophy, painting or medicine to very practical, hands-on classes on how to make dumplings or tie Chinese knots, passing by exotics like cricket fighting or the history of feet binding. With such a wide range of subjects, no wonder that tea culture has not been left unattended. Unlike The Hutong, where the Tea Lounge is a regular, biweekly fare, talks on Chinese tea at CCC do not have a fixed schedule, but do take place on a regular basis, probably about once every two months.

When you come for a talk or class at CCC for the first time, expect any event to be animated by Feng Cheng, the CCC “founding father”. The presentations at CCC are usually well prepared and informative – they do their homework very well. You also usually get a print-out with the highlights of the talk. What I particularly like about CCC is that they usually invite a local expert. For the tea talk I attended in September, the guest star was a tea master from Taiwan, a very nice, graceful and humble young lady.

Tha talk was combined with a tea tasting, whereby we could taste five of the six main categories of Chinese tea (except yellow tea) – an excellent introduction into a subject for someone who is just starting a journey into Chinese tea. A minor critical note: I found that the guests were sitting a bit too far from the tea master, like students in a classroom. It was no doubt good for visualising Powerpoint presentation, but made the experience lack a little bit of community spirit, so good for Chinese tea drinking. Having a big common table arranged next to the tea master would make the event more personal, would facilitate and encourage exchanges between the participants. For a finishing touch, I would also add a nice background traditional Chinese music…

The event went on longer than two hours, but no one seemed in a hurry to wrap up and plenty of time was given to questions and answers.

As a side note, I would also recommend CCC tours for those who are new to China and do not mind group travel. We went on a couple of tours with CCC shortly after our arrival in Beijing, including their tour to Wu Yi Shan mountains – a very memorable experience…

The CCC currently operates from its  welcoming offices at the Kent Center, very close to Chaoyang Park and Lufthansa area. But no one knows for how long – like many other Beijing districts, the surrounding area has  apparently been scheduled to be demolished for quite a while…

Next time you do not know what to do at 4:30 AM on a weekend morning in Beijing, and sleeping does not sound like an option, head to Beijing’s most famous flea market – Panjiayuan (潘家园, Pānjiāyuán). With more than 3000 stalls, it’s the biggest flea market of the capital. Here you can find anything, from (presumable or real) antiquities to Mao memorabilia, as well as paintings, furniture,  textile, porcelain, ceramics, woodwork, metalwork you name it. The market is open daily, but on weekdays it is in standby mode. It really wakes up on Saturday morning, and does it early. By9 AM, the place will be as crowded and busy as an anthill. So come here early, bring cash and bargain hard.

What’s in there for a tea aficionado? At the porcelain stalls at the east end of the market you can find tea cups and gaiwans, teapots and tea storage jars.

A whole line has vendors selling clay teapots. Some display  them accurately, others just pile them up, sometimes bound like crabs, to keep the lid in place. Those piled up are generally VERY cheap.

Right next to the teapot line you can find nice woodwork, including beautifully carved wooden teapot stands and displays. I have never managed to bargain really hard here, but I like the quality of the work.

I doubt the ceramics and porcelain here are of the finest possible quality, but I definitely think Panjiayuan is really an exciting place to do one-stop souvenir shopping in Beijing.

At a turtle’s pace, I’m approaching the moment when I actually start publishing on this blog the tasting notes for my Tea Marathon project. But wasn’t the turtle the race winner at the end? Anyway, after I’ve put some order in my head about the language for color, aroma, taste and texture, time has come to put together a puzzle of the tasting note template. According to my beloved wine tasting authors, there is no perfect tasting note template. Good news. But a good tasting note template should still  meet several important criteria:

• it should be appropriate for the occasion. Some tastings are held to rate different teas separately, some focus on comparison, some aim just to discover some important characteristics… whatever the occasion, the tea tasting template should be geared towards it.
• it should take into account the experience of a taster. Give a blank sheet of paper to a seasoned taster, and she will do just fine. But for beginners, like me, it should be structured in a way to guide you through the tasting process, and serve a sort of check-list for the observations to make.
• Some structure is helpful for novices, but it shouldn’t limit your expression. A template should always have room for free, unstructured comment.
• It should be kept simple and understandable, easy to read and interpret by a third person, not too long and complicated.

For my tasting notes, I’m going to use the following structure:

1. GENERAL INFORMATION

• Tea Name: Chinese (characters and  pinyin) and English translation
• Tea Type
• Production Year
• Production Place
• Grade
• Where purchased

2. TEAWARE AND WATER

• Water used
• Water temperature
• Kind of teapot used (gaiwan, teapot, glass etc.)
• Number of infusions

3. DRY LEAF

• General appearance
• Color
• Shape
• Size & Uniformity
• Aroma

4. INFUSION (INFUSED LEAVES)

• Color
• Aroma

5. LIQUOR

• Color
• Texture
• Taste
• Aroma

6. OTHER COMMENTS

I’m going to hold tea tasting events for family and friends. Then, the template will need to be put on paper. I’m thinking of how to make the events interesting, entertaining and fun. Here is one idea. It comes from one of my absolute favorite blogs that I follow daily and often go for inspiration, Design * Sponge. It is actually for coffee cupping, but I think some of its elements can be creatively adopted for tea tastings as well.

I would love to know if you use a template for your tasting notes and if you have ever organised tasting events and how you used your creativity to make them fun. Please do not hesitate to share! Links, musings, ideas, images, everyting is welcome, I’m thirsty for inspiration ! Thanks!

Laoshe Teahouse is to tea what Quan Ju De restaurant chain is to roast duck: not the best food or tea in town, but quite a brand name, endorsed by political heavyweights all over the world. In Quan Ju De they will remind you that Nixon was there 30-something years ago, and at Laoshe Teahouse’ lobby you will stumble on George Bush Sr bronze alter ego.

Opened in 1988 and named after a famous XX century Chinese writer Lao She and his play “Teahouse”, Laoshe Teahouse is strategically located just a few steps off the Tiananmen square. On the second floor there is a tea shop and a number of tea tasting suites, but it is not for the tea, or not only for the tea, that visitors come here. Every night buses unload groups of tourists that go straight to the third floor to enjoy the dinner and a nightly show. A number of traiditional Chinese performances, like Peking Opera, face-changing of Sichuan Opera, Chinese dance, kung fu or acrobatics, and of course, tea ceremony, are tightly packed into a 90 minutes show. Throughout the dinner and performance, waiters will serve you tea from long-spouted pots. Doing this without a spill is quite acrobatic in itself.

I think Laoshe Teahouse is a nice place to take your visiting family or friends to enjoy a condensed version of Chinese performing arts. The show is on every night at 19:50. Ticket prices range from 180 to 380 RMB. There are also afternoon shows on Saturday (15:00) and on Sunday (15:30), with prices from 60 to 180 RMB. To have a peek, you can watch a CCTV report about the Teahouse (along with other stories about Chinese tea. I found this link as well as a list of other very useful links at www.tillbergs.se, it is a pity I cannot read Swedish to enjoy the rest of this tea blog…)

Address: No.3, Qianmen Xidajie, Xuanwu District, Beijing (south-west of Tiananmen Square)

北京市宣武区前门西大街正阳市场三号楼

When you learn how to appreciate texture in food or beverage, it is akin to seeing a familiar Hollywood movie in 3D: texture can add an astonishing extra dimension to the familiar senses of color, taste and smell. This is particularly true for Chinese cuisine, where a special concept 口感 kǒugǎn, literally translated as mouth-feel, exists to describe our tactile sensations and pleasures when eating or drinking. The concept of texture is somehow overlooked in the West, and I eagerly invite you to consult the books by Fuchsia Dunlop. Her account of the importance of texture for the Chinese cuisine is the best I’ve ever come across in the books on the subject. But is texture really important for tea tasting?

The answer is yes. Because different teas can produce a completely different mouth-feel, and a tasting note would be incomplete without mentioning your tactile sensations.

The basic tactile sensations to capture are your sensations of hot and cold. Describing whether a tea was hot or warm is not the most important part of a tasting note, right ? You just need to remember that different teas require different temperatures to taste their best. But you already knew it anyway…

More interesting mouth-feel comes from the presence of tannins. Those guys are also the usual suspects for the bitter taste, but other things come into play to shape the body of a tea, so there is much more about the tea than just bitterness and astringency. To describe a possible range of tactile sensations, I have borrowed the texture terms from the Tea Drinker’s Handbook by Delmas et al., rearranging them according to the strength of the mouth-feel.

• Watery: liquor without sense of texture.
• Flowing: liquor without asperity. Corresponds to low tannic content.
• Smooth: liquor lacking harsh tannins, without asperity
• Powdery: very slight astringency on the palate, leaving an impression of a fine powder
• Rounded: filling a mouth in a rounded way
• Mouth-filling: giving a sensation of foolness in the mouth, similar to rounded
• Structured: prominently tannic liquor
• Robust: a very full bodies liquor
• Rasping: very astringent teas due to poor quality or longer infusion

Another dimension to describe texture is somewhat elusive when seen on paper. I talk about oiliness or thickness. But it might be that you will need exactly those words to describe your mouth-feel:

• Oily: you do not have to add a yak butter to achieve this, some teas will naturally remind you of oily texture.
• Thick: texture reminiscent of oil or cream, rather than water.
• Velvety: slightly thick liquor
• Supple: more velvety than astringent
• Silky: supple and slightly oily
• Unctious: rounded in the mouth and slightly oily

Yesterday I went on a tea market tour and was slightly “high” after all fabulous teas we tasted. To decaffeinate myself a bit , I’ve decided to launch a new series of posts. I’m going to call it Caffeine-Free Mondays and here I’ll be writing about all those fruits, buds, petals, seeds and herbs that can also go into a cup of hot water and make superb tisanes and “fruisanes”. There will be recipes I’ve found in cookbooks, as well as my own inspiration.

To kick it off, I’ve picked one of my preferred recipes I found in Ching-He Huang’s “Chinese Food Made Easy” cookbook. It is a tisane made of dried goji berries, jujubes and rose buds.

Goji berry, or Chinese wolfberry, 枸杞 gǒuqǐ, is very popular for its good looks and medicinal properties. These little berried size of a raisin are often added not only to tisanes, but also to soups or stews for a dash of color. They are believed to be a great antioxydant, capable to remedy chronic coughs and to enhance Yin energy. Jujube, or Chinese date, 枣 zǎo, can calm down a bad cough, but also a bad mood – it’s an excellent stress fighter. Jujubes can serve as a tea snack in its own right. Both goji berry and jujube have sweet taste, so no extra sugar is needed. Well, if you really have a sweet tooth, add some rock sugar or honey.

In Beijing, all these ingredients can be easily found either with the spice girls at the fruit and vegetable markets, or at any supermarket. This tisane can be a great finishing touch for a meal and even replace a dessert.

Recommended preparation method: Use a glass teapot. Take 2 tablespoons dried goji berries, 6 dried jujubes, 6 dried rose buds. A 3 cm cube of rock sugar or 2 teaspoonful of honey are optional. Place everything in a teapot, pour hot water over and stir well. Leave to infuse for 1 minute, then serve.

Recommended food pairing: this tisane is just as good without any food. But if you insist, get some nice rose gelato from your favorite gelateria. And do not hesitate to pick jujubes and wolfberries from the pot, infused they are even better than dried…

Recommended music: Something delicate and poetic, like the sunset sky in Beijing tonight, – nothing would be better than XIX century’s The Last Rose of Summer, marvelously rendered by Nina Simone …

The Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, zhōngqiūjié) celebration is over, and with it is gone the mooncake (月饼, yuèbing) epidemy that hits China every year around mid-September.  This year, I have had particularly severe symptoms of mooncake fever: I got the molds and tried making mooncakes myself (snow-skin green tea flavored ones with chocolate filling if you want to know).

Just a couple of days ago, wherever you went, you could not escape colorful gift boxes with mooncakes. And now they have vanished. Overnight. But don’t you think those little pastries have been all eaten up. Although everyone gives and receives them as a gift, I know very few people who really like eating them. So if you are living in China, or have Chinese family or colleagues, chances are that you have accumulated a fair amount of mooncake boxes that you have not managed to give to someone else. I swear, I’ve never “recycled” our mooncakes like this, but the guy who conducted our mooncake cooking class said it was quite common. The box you have received and given to someone else with a sweet smile can actually pass through a dozen of different hands only to boomerang back to you : the laws of Karma work even in the mooncake turnover (btw, here I learned you can actually donate the mooncakes to charities. I have not heard of anything like this in Beijing, but apparently in Shanghai it is the case).

Anyway, if you still have some mooncakes at home and pondering a strange idea of eating them, let’s see how a cup of good tea can be of help. The September 2010 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, Chinese edition, gives some matchmaking suggestions for mooncakes and teas.

• Cantonese-style mooncakes (广式月饼, guǎngshìyuèbing）with fillings quite heavy on sugar and easy on oil will make a good pairing with a cup of Tie Guan Yin (铁观音）or a taiwanese Ginseng Oolong （人参乌龙）. A very slightly sweet taste and floral aromas of these teas can actually make an ordinary mooncake a feast.

• Suzhou-style flaky pastry mooncakes （酥松苏式月饼, sūsōngsūshìyuèbing）are heavy both on oil and on sugar, and a cup of lightly scented jasmine tea (茉莉花茶, mòlìhuāchá) will make them seem a little bit lighter.

• For Taiwanese-style mooncakes (台式月饼, shìyuèbing) with lighter fillings and fresher taste, any Taiwanese oolong would be a good match, for example, Dong Ding oolong.

中秋节快乐 ! I wish you a happy Mid-Autumn Festival !

The Hutong is a really cool place hidden amidst the traditional alleyways of the capital. Run by expats for expats and guests of Beijing, it offers a very impressive range of classes, from life drawing to knitting, passing by all possible Asian cuisines and healthy habits. I first came here about a year ago for a series of classes in … building websites, run by wonderful Susie Hart. So indirectly, the Hutong is also to blame for the existence of this very blog. I returned to The Hutong at the end of August to attend the Tea Lounge tea tasting workshop. It is held twice a month, lasts two hours and costs 160 RMB.

The Hutong crew features an impressive number of guys who enjoy a good brew – passionate tea enthusiasts, many of them running their own tea businesses. Joel Shuchat is one of them. He hosted the Tea Lounge this time.

The ad for this class says that “participants are introduced to 6 teas processed in different styles from varying Chinese regions. They learn to taste, brew and select various teas. While tasting delicious teas they are taught the history and mythology that is infused in each cup of Chinese tea“.

As many ads, this one does carry a bit of exaggerated promice. Firstly, tasting all six main varieties of Chinese tea is difficult having just two hours, provided you want to do it in a relaxed atmosphere and have a bit of talk in between the sips. We had enough time to taste four different teas : one green tea, Long Jing; two oolongs, Tie Guan Yin and Dan Cong; and one raw Pu Er. Secondly, do not expect the whole history and mythology to be squeezed into the two-hours tasting session, mission impossible. But you will definitely learn a fair amount of stuff from a very knowledgeable guy. Thirdly, be prepared that “learning to brew” will not be by doing but by watching, although you will have all necessary tips and tricks to repeat the experience at home.

But the most important promise was held  :  all the teas we tasted were delicious and of excellent quality. I found the choice of teas and the order in which they were presented quite pertinent. I also appreciated that the tasting was a rather “unceremonious”, relaxed and informal discussion with enough room for the exchange of tasting impressions and for a free flow of questions and anwsers… Recommend it.

In Chinese language, the word 味 [wèi] can mean both “taste” and “smell”. Of all the five senses solicited in the tasting process, those two are most closely connected. So closely, that we often speak of flavor, which is the combination of taste and aromas. Guess how you could say “flavor” in Chinese? 味 of course !

If the number of different aromas is virtually unlimited, the number of basic tastes is strictly finite. In the West  four basic tastes have been traditionally recognized: bitter, sweet, sour and salty.

Four Basic Tastes

Tea is inherently bitter, due to the presence of theine and polyphenols. But the degree of bitterness can hugely vary depending on how you brew your tea. As a rule of thumb, the less time the leaves stay in contact with hot water, the less bitter your tea will be. And if you cold brew your tea (certainly, a non-orthodox way of doing, but I tried this in summer), the resulting drink will have almost no bitterness. Saying that bitter taste can be pleasant sounds as oxymoron. But we can actually learn to appreciate it, as we do for coffee or dark chocolate.

A light sour taste can sometimes be present in teas as well, even if you do not add the lemon, as Russians often do. Some black tea varieties may have a slightly sour taste.

Some teas are also naturally slightly sweet, especially Pu Er. In general, Chinese do not sweeten their teas. If they do, they use rock sugar for the mixtures of tea leaves and dried fruits, flowers and berries, like different ba bao cha (eight treasures tea).

Do not expect to encounter a salty taste in tea. People in Tibet and Inner Mongolia like to add salt to their tea, along with butter or milk. The combination sounds quite strange, but I tasted those savory teas and they are interesting and not unpleasant.

Five Tastes as Five Elements

In the traditional Chinese cuisine there are not four, but five different tastes. To sweet, sour, salty and bitter adds the pungent taste. Foods with pungent qualities are mainly herbs and spices, but some root vegetables can be pungent as well (e.g. daikon or pumpkin). I think in the Western culture we have not considered pungency as a basic taste, because of the rather limited use of spices in our cuisines and because pungency is not a uniform quality. Some pungent foods like chilli or cinnamon can have warming effect, others like mint, fennel or star anis – cooling effect. Sichuan peppercorns will numb your palate, and garlic will be just very stimulating, without having any “thermal” effects.

What is particularly interesting about the five basic tastes  recognised by Chinese cuisine and traditional dietary therapy is how they fit into the Five Elements concept key to Taoist thinking and applied universally in many disciplines from feng shui to the traditional Chinese medicine. On a very high level, each basic taste corresponds to one of the Five Elements and through them linked to five pairs of organs. Sour taste corresponds to Wood element and to liver and gall-bladder, bitter – to Fire, heart and small intestine, sweet – to Earth element, spleen and stomach, pungent – to Metal, lungs and large intestine, and finally salty – to Water element, kidneys and bladder. In any given meal all five tastes have to be present and balanced to help our body to thrive.

Five Elements are connected together through the cycles of promotion and consumption (solid lines on the image above), and the cycle of control (dotted lines). According to promotion and consumption cycles, a cup of strong bitter tea would  call for something sweet, and an excess of sweet can mask bitter (True for sweetened tea, but also for chocolate). If we look at the control cycle, we see that bitter taste is offset by salty – here is a clue to why salty Tibetan or Mongolian teas do not taste that bitter. For the same reason, a cup of bitter tea could go well with hot and spicy dishes to offset their pungent taste. I find the whole subject very exciting, but will not dwell on it further here. For a very accessible and practical introduction into Five Elements concept in Chinese cuisine, I recommend reading a book by Lorraine Clissold, “Why the Chinese Don’t Count Calories : 15 Secrets from a 3,000-Year-Old Food Culture”.

The Essence of Taste

Very often in the recent books on tea and cookbooks a reference is made to umami as the fifth basic taste. It has become sort of “fetish” word: elusive and enigmatic, but sounds nice and can give you the airs of an expert. Along with some other authors I would describe this taste as “savoriness“, or “deliciousness“. The closest word in Chinese would probably be 鲜 [xiǎn] fresh, delicious. I do not know if it would be more appropriate to call umami a taste in its own right, or a taste enhancing quality. The chemical substance behind the taste enhancing properties is glutamic acid, extracted from seaweed by Japanese chemist Ikeda in 1907. Combined with sodium it gives monosodium glutamate, or MSG. Called 味精 [wèijīng], or the “essence of taste” in Chinese, this almost tasteless and odorless powder is heartily used in many restaurants to enhance the flavor of the dishes. MSG it is controversial due to potential negative side effects on health, but many manufacturers of the processed foods add MSG to their products (when it is not forbidden by law) to improve their taste. In her book on Sichuan cookery, Fuchsia Dunlop describes MSG as a “substitute for good ingredients and properly made stocks” and a “cheat that makes all the dishes taste similar”. The good news is that many natural ingredients also have taste-enhancing properties: seaweed, soy sauce or shiitake mushrooms. Not all of them belong to Asian cuisine, like, for example Parmesan cheese or cured ham. If you want further reading, a very good account of MSG is given in the book by Jen Lin-Liu “Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China”. Regarding the presence of umami in tea, in some of the tasting notes I’ve encountered the mentions of its presence in some green and white teas.

Taste: an Equation with Many Variables

What makes it really exciting with taste is its variable, evolving nature.  Many factors can affect it. I’ve already mentioned the way basic tastes are described to influence each other according to Five Elements concept.

Temperature can also affect the taste: higher temperatures enhance sweet and pungent tastes, but tone down saltiness and bitterness. A cup of black tea will taste less bitter just after brewing than when it has cooled down. It will also seem less sweet (in case you’ve sweetened it with sugar).

Taste can evolve with time and be dependant on our overall sensitivity. For example, our taste buds are much more sensitive to bitter taste than to sweet. So if a tea combines both flavors, we’ll feel bitterness first. That’s what happens when you drink ku ding cha – after the massive attack of overwhelming bitterness, you will be pleasantly surprised to see that it also has sweet taste, initially masked. Some teas can open up its flavors very quickly, others will have a long series of aftertastes, sometimes surprising. Exactly like wines.

In general, I think that when you describe you sensation when you taste something, you should not only try to name the tastes or aromas that you identify, but express all the associations that may come to your mind, should it be an allusion to a shape (eg rounded taste), volume or structure. Anything that helps to better describe what you feel, is precious.

“When Jean-Baptiste did finally learn to talk, he soon found the everyday language proved inadequate for all the olfactory experiences accumulated within himself“, – Perfume :  The Story of a Murderer.

The Powerful Sense

Most of us do not have a fraction of the extraordinary superpowers of the vicious Monsieur Grenouille from Süskind’s novel. But the fact is, the most important sensorial stimuli that make us like or dislike a particular food or beverage, or simply recognize them, come from smell. Sometimes we just do not realize that. I once conducted a “young mom” version of a well-known sensory experience. When blending some fruit or vegetable purées for my baby I closed my eyes, squeezed the nostrils and than tasted a spoonful of each. All purées were similar in texture, so I could not get any helpful hint from that. The result? Every time I just could not tell what it was! Leave out the aromas, and the food becomes tasteless.

The smell helps newborns find their way to their mom’s breast, and the smell (consciously or subconsciously) can even determine the choice of your lifetime partner! So why, if the sense of smell is so crucially important, are we often dazed and confused when it comes to describe particular aromas?

There can be multiple answers to that question.

Unspoken Memories

The first answer is that many aromas can be extraordinarily complex. But human brain is usually geared to distinguish no more than 3-5 single aromas in an aromatic bouquet. Peynaud and Blouin mention an experience conducted among the experts-parfumeurs, the bad asses, or more appropriately said, the Noses of the olfactory profession. 96-98% easily identified single reference aromas. The number of correct identifications slashed by half when two single aromas were mixed together. And when presented with cocktails of four single aromas, just 10% of the experts gave correct responses. Good news : only 10% of those perfume geeks are superhuman and that gives hope to us, ordinary people. Another good news is, you do not always need to break down a particular bouquet into the smallest aroma components to enjoy tea drinking – leave this  detective job to the chemists (and it may lead to surprising results, as I’ll mention later).

Perfume is the most important form of memory, said Jean-Paul Guerlain. Inversely, the memory is probably the most important factor in being able to recognize and analyze different perfumes. When we taste something new, we try to search among the olfactory references recorded in our brain to find the closest approximation to the new aroma. But our mental “reference library” can be the size of Library of Congress or as humble as a tiny bookshelf. And similar to speaking a foreign language, our olfactory references can be either active or passive, not coming out easily. And here comes the second answer to the question. Most of us have not given a sufficient training to our sense of smell and do not possess an adequate olfactory “reference vocabulary”. I have encountered the numerous complaints of the renowned wine experts that even in the professional sommelier schools the olfactory training is rarely systematic or intensive. As a parent of young children, I myself admit to pay too little attention this part of sensory education. But experiences with recognising different aromas can actually be very fun! Montessori schools are hugely popular in Beijing. I know that this system incorporates the development of the sense of smell in its approach. (By the way, if you know of any good resources on the web that describe funny olfactory experiences for young kids, please give a shout – I would be so grateful!)

Although language can be inadequate in describing aromas, we still need a certain vocabulary to provide an approximate description. The known aromas can be classified in groups, and the classification approach can be twofold.

Poetry or Chemistry?

The first classification is rather intuitive and  combines odors into families based on their natural origin.  I am pleased every time I find similarities between tea and wine, and here they are very important. Most of the olfactory “families” used to describe wine and tea are actually the same. For the aromatic families used to describe tea, I will follow (almost) to the letter the classification proposed in Delmas / Minet / Brabaste “Tea Drinker’s Handbook”, my absolute favorite to date as far as the comprehensive approach to tea tasting is concerned. The following families are common for tea and wine:

• Herbaceous, vegetal: fresh herbaceous, dried herbaceous, aromatic herbs, cooked vegetables. For wine this characteristic is often pejorative – grape leaves are better suited to make dolma, not wine, after all. But for tea it’s a different story. Many teas, especially green and yellow, possess voluptuous herbal or vegetal aromas.

• Floral: fresh floral, white flowers, exotic flowers. Young wines, especially white or rosé, can often be described as floral. Some teas are additionally perfumed with flowers (jasmine, osmanthus, chrisantemum), but some exhibit natural floral aromas. Contrary to Delmas et al. book, I would add to this family the aroma of honey and pollen. The authors describe them as “sweet, vanilla” family. But sweet is a taste, and vanilla – hard to believe, is actually bitter. Our mental association of vanilla with sweet desserts plays a trick on us. I would rather put vanilla in the “rich” family (see further). Floral notes are present in many types of tea, including blacks, greens, whites and oolongs.

• Fruity: orchard fruits, berries, exotic fruit, citrus fruit, cooked fruit, nuts. Young wines are often fruity, and become less so with age. You can often find fruityand nutty aromas in green teas.

• Woody: the woody notes can be as numerous as Woody Allen’s masterpieces. Let’s just mention waxed wood, dry wood, sandalwood, pine, arnica. In wine nice woody notes are provided by oak barrels in which the wine is aged. Nice woody notes are often found in the oolongs and dark teas.

• Spicy: mild spices (cinnamon, licorice, anise, nutmeg etc), hot spices (clove, ginger, cardamom, pepper etc).

• Burnt: roasting coffee, brioche, toasted nuts, popcorn. The best example of a tea with powereful burnt notes is Da Hong Pao, a Big Red Robe oolong tea. But other green, yellow and oolong teas can also possess burtn notes.

• Animal, gamy: leather, musk, wool, sweat, manure (I know, I know, this sounds disgusting, but what would you say about some French cheeses or so beloved in Beijing stinky tofu then?). In teas, you are likely to encounter these notes in black and dark teas.

• Mineral: metallic, silica, flint. Can be found in some oolongs, as well as green teas.

For wines, additional families would be ethereal and chemical – you’d hardly find those aromas in teas. Otherwise, for teas we can add the following families of odors, as proposed by Delmas et al.:

• Marine: shellfish, crustaceans, fish, iodine, seaweed, kelp. These surprising notes can be found in green, yellow, oolong and even dark teas. A nice hint for food and tea pairing!

• Undergrowth: humus, damp leaves, patchouli, moss. True, it does not sound very appetising, but such notes can add unique character to some black, yellow and dark teas.

• Earthy: damp soil, wet earth after a storm, cellar, mushroom, mold, dust etc. Classical example of a tea with earthy notes is Pu Er that has undergone some post-fermentation.

• Rich: chocolate, cocoa, caramel, jam. I’d also add vanilla here. These notes go hand in hand with many black teas, but can also occur in green teas, Long Jing being a good example.

• Buttery: fresh butter, melted butter, cream, milk, condensed milk

The second classification approach is to describe the aromas based on their distinguishing chemical substances. Forget about everyday language, we are in the jungle (at least for me!) of the organic chemistry. Luckily or not, this approach is out of reach for non-chemists and impossible within the frame of an ordinary tea tasting. Still, the chemical analysis of the aromas of different food and beverages can lead to wonderful culinary discoveries and surprising food and wine / tea pairings, because they often break stereotypes and transgress the boundaries of the conventional groups of aromas. The most exciting resource I have found to date on the subject is the work of the renowned Canadian sommelier François Chartier (the website www.francoischartier.ca recently nicely redesigned, and his books “Papilles et Molecules”, its freshly-baked English translation “Taste Buds and Molecules”, and “Les Recettes Papilles et Molecules”).

From Theory to Practice

In tea tasting, we’ll have to adopt a multidimensional approach to describe our olfactory sensations.

We will be sniffing many times to appreciate the aromas of the

• Dry leaves

• Liquor. We can appreciate the aroma / scent of the liquor, just with the nose, or its flavour (aroma + taste) when the aroma gets to your nose from your mouth, “retronasally”.

• Infusion (a term for wet leaves after you’ve made your tea)

The exciting news is that the three aromas can be all different! Which makes the whole experience more challenging, but more fun as well.

All three times, it will be useful to describe the following:

• Intensity. The aroma can be intense, strong, well-developed, or, inversely, neutral, weak, insipid, lacking character.

• Bouquet. My approach would be to start with the overall impression. Then I’d try to detect if some notes in the bouquet tend to belong to one of the mentioned aromatic families. Sometimes, if the particular aromatic component is very strong or it just speaks to your olfactory universe, you will be able to be more concrete. Try not to read the descriptions of the tea in the book before tasting it, or you will be biased by someone else’s sensations. For the same reason, when several people participate in a tasting, do not tell your sensations immediately so that others are not influenced by your judgement.

• Evolution. Here you will observe how long the aroma persists and if it changes with time for one particular infusion. Moreover, if you adopt Chinese way of tasting (multiple infusions), you may notice if and how the aroma of the liquor changes with every new infusion. It can gain or lose in intensity, or show important changes of the bouquet.

• Clarity. This generally refers to the absence of foul smells.

It all looks rather intimidating, but I am sure the key here is practice. With practice, we’ll feel more and more at ease when describing our sensations.

When it comes to gift shopping, for three years in Beijing I have not been able to fall in love with its famous Silk Street, Hongqiao and Yashow markets, those one-stop-shops for anything fake and kitschy, packed with foreign tourists and  polyglot vendors with their annoying  “pasmatri!” (“look here!” in Russian). I prefer less boisterous places and when I need a stylish gift, I often head out to a quiet street in Lido Area where the shop of Spin Ceramics & Art is located.

They sell various lovely objects in ceramics, from chopsticks rests to platters and vases, priced from 30 to 1000+ RMB.  Their products  combine contemporary design and traditional craftsmanship, the mix that particularly match my personal tastes in home accessories and tableware. Most of their ceramics is hand-made in Jingdezhen, the capital of Chinese porcelain. I guess Spin make most of their sales to restaurants. Just the other night I spotted their tableware at Bei, a North Asian restaurant at the Opposite House hotel. The dinner could have been a deception without a nice company and Spin tableware, recognisable at first sight for its slightly Japanese flavor.

A tea lover will find here some stylish tea sets (usually a teapot + 2 cups) made of white glazed porcelain. They look good, but some may prove a little bit tricky to clean. A set of 12 small sake bowls, all different shapes, sold in a nice wooden box, could actually be used for tea tasting as well. They have a nice selection of Western-style cups and a growing variety of tea jars and tea sets made from unglazed Yixing ceramics.

Spin has its bestsellers that they keep selling for a long time, but otherwise the collection is regularly updated, so the shop is worth a visit every once in a while.

Details:

• 6 Fangyuan Xilu, Chaoyang District
• 朝阳区芳园西路6号
• Daily 11am-9pm
• 010 – 6437 8649

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it helped me discover a very unusual tea on our recent family holiday trip to Sanya.

You may know that in China in many local restaurants you are offered 茶水 (cháshuǐ), a boiled water with a pinch of tea leaves to add interest. Usually it is a complementary drink, so do not expect anything too exquisite. In Beijing, it is often some low grade green tea or jasmine tea that is used for tea water. So when we were served tea water in a local Hainan restaurant in Sanya, I was intrigued to discover a pleasant liquor that had a rounded sweet taste and a nice aroma of herbs, dried fruits and licorice, with a touch of “herbal medicine” . The reflex was to take the lid off the pot and see what was inside.

What I discovered was a ball of big whole leaves carefully bundled together with a straw like a small parcel. A quick interrogation of the waitress to learn that it was 鹧鸪茶 （zhègūchá), a partridge tea, the local Hainanese specialty. The girl spent at least five minutes to give me a passionate lecture on various benefits of drinking the partridge tea, and  when I asked for a sample, graciously offered one.

During these holidays we did not adventure much outside of the our nice hotel. But in any Chinese city you can be almost sure to have a tea shop within a walking distance from any given spot. So I found one and of course had not left empty-handed. Zhegu Cha is sold not by liang (两，liǎng, a Chinese unit of measure, equal to 50 g), but by strings. On each string, there are about 15-20 Zhegu Cha “beads”, and one “necklace” costs 2-5 RMB. Not bad for a remedy that is supposed to cure all the illnesses.

The tea is made of the leaves of 鹧鸪茶树，zhegu cha tree, grown mainly on the slopes of the Dongshan mountain range. Apparently this species  is not very demanding in terms of soil, humidity and sunlight. Below is the picture of the tree I’ve managed to found on the Internet. I have some doubts that it is a variety of camelia sinensis:

The main harvesting period is during the fourth lunar month, before the Dragon Boat Festival on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. Unlike most of the Chinese teas, when picking leaves for zhegu cha, one looks for mature leaves of about 5-15 cm. The leaves undergo very little processing: they are sun-dried which is followed by steaming green and shaping. As a result, the tea preserves its vegetal aromas, and has a very pleasant naturally sweet taste and nice mouthfeel. The dried leaves are very fragrant, so I recommend to store them in an airtight container.

The tea has a slight smell of a herbal remedy, and, according to the locals, can also be used as one. The legend says, this tea became popular due to its healing properties. The slopes of Dongshan mountains were once home to many partridges. A birdcatcher once discovered a wounded baby partridge that could not fly and was about to die. Judging that there was no hope for the bird, he left. When our Chinese Papageno returns to the same place several days later, he is surprised to see that the baby bird has miraculously recovered. He also notices some fresh leaves nearby. Hidden in the bushes, he observes the baby bird’s mother feeding the wounded bird the same leaves. The son of the birdcatcher happens to be seriously ill, and the man decides to give those magical leaves a try. And several days later his son recovers as well! The good news quickly spreads through the village and the leaves which are now called partridge tea, become very popular.

The legend did not precise which illness the zhegu cha had cured. Still, the Hainanese people affirm that zhegu cha can dispel heat and prevent catching cold, detoxify the body, strengthen spleen and stomach. The old generations compared it to reishi mushroom (灵芝，língzhī), a magic mushroom believed to cure all the illnesses.  Zhegu cha can also help digestion and metabolism. It is an ideal drink for a hot summer day or after a heavy meal.

Recommended preparation method: Keep it simple. Use a teapot or individual cups. Use water at the next to boiling point temperature (95°C). Do as many infusions as you like, as far as the flavour persists.

Recommended food pairing: zongzi (dumpling made from glutinous rice, wrapped in bamboo leaves; eaten for the Dragon Boat Festival), either savory or sweet; meat baozi (steamed buns), Xinjiang mutton pilaf.

Recommended music: Die Zauberflöte by Mozart – would make a home-style meal a feast and will remind you of the birdcatcher story…