I’ve got the pictures in this album on Picasa, here are a couple of highlights.

This was taken from the mid-elevation point on the farm.  We were at about 1800m elevation.  Supposedly, tea can be considered high mountain if is produced about 1200m elevation.  The air was so clean and fresh up there!

This picture shows the farm and the processing buildings.  The larger looking building on the right is used only for drying.  It’s a big open room with a big blower inside.  The building on the left is where the tea is processed and where people sleep.

Here the freshly picked leaves are drying.  After a couple of hours, they’ll be put inside to dry further.  They will dry between a half day and an entire day based upon the temperature, humidity, etc.

Here is a process where heat is applied to the leaves.  They roll around in this big dryer.  After a minute or two of this, they’ll be put into a bag and crunched / rolled for a few minutes.  These two processes are reaped many many times (about 40 ) until the tea is done.  The drying process opens the tea leaves and drys them out, while the rolling compacts and closes them.

Tea tasting is constantly happening during the processing.  Grab a handful of tea, put it in a bowl and pour boiling hot water on it.  They also put a spoon in there which is used to smell the tea.  I was surprised at how much emphasis is put on the smell of the tea.

It was great to see another side of Taiwan; Getting off the beaten path.  Going up into the mountains, breathing the fresh air, being around all the tea…It was awesome.  I believe the best Oolong teas in the world are from Taiwan – and there’s lots of them around here!

I like to read the Leaf, there are some excellent articles on tea there.  Compared with a lot of the information on the internet, they are much more in depth. Tea is simple in that you either like it or you don’t, so experimenting is a great way to expand your understanding of tea.  I think the first experiment I did with tea was with different temperatures of water.

One article called Gong Fu Tea Tips (Part 3) highlights a few tea experiments you can do. After a long time, I finally tried experiment # 4, using different cups.  A 30 min train ride from Taipei is a town called YingGe, which is famous for pottery.  It’s a great place to walk around, relax and view some really beautiful pottery.  The cobblestone streets are closed off to cars, and you can even make your own pottery for about $3 US.

While there, I purchased two cheap tea cups (Each $4 US) and after getting home realized my daily tea tasted totally different in them.  I got out my best tea cups. They are about 100 years old, and were a gift from a friend (Thank you Aaron!). The tea tasted quite different. The new cup had a slight unpleasant taste, and the old cup also gave the tea a certain smoothness or roundness. It’s hard to describe, sometimes in Asia people say good teas will immediately coat your entire mouth.  Almost like there is a different viscosity to the tea.  With the old cups the sensation I got was more like this.

Does this really matter?  I think the main point is that I bought some bad teacups.  I’ve bought other cheap, new cups before and never had this experience.   When comparing these bad cups directly to my best ones, I was really surprised to find out how much difference there is.  How can this be?

So the 13 of us had some tea at a place called Jiufen Tea House, it’s an old Japanese building / tea shop and it’s beautiful.  My friend with an SLR camera took some beautiful pictures.  The album is here.  What a beautiful place!!

This is another shot of most of our group at the table.  This tea shop used coal to heat the water at each table, which is something I’d never seen in a tea shop before.  Very nice.

When I was doing marketing at Screaming Circuits we would talk about how to “bring the engineer into our shop.”  Screaming Circuits was taking a purchase that used to be local and relational and bringing it to the internet; we’d ask ourselves “How can we make the customer feel like we are closer than the shop across town?”

I think all these tea websites have a similar mission.  They are all trying to facilitate a purchase over the internet, and bring you closer to the tea.  I liked this tea website, and I think the way the owner “Tea Lady” has succeeded in bring you all the way to the tea farms she sources tea from.  She’s used a Flickr page to tell the story of how your tea is picked and processed.  I have no idea if the tea is good, but I think it’s a great way to stand out in a sea of “Premium Loose Leaf Tea” companies.

• Tea is one of the few habits I have that is great.
• Tea facilitates communication between people; like alcohol does.  It doesn’t come along with hangovers, or the out of control-ness that alcohol has.
• Tea requires a certain quietness to have an effect.

I wanted to share two quotes, that say much better what tea is:

• “Tea is said to be a “way” (Tao). This is because it is something one
  learns to appreciate through feeling, not through verbal instruction.
  If a person maintains a state of quietness, only then will someone
  appreciate the quietness inherent in tea.”
  • Author Unknown to me- found in Tao of Tea Teahouse (Portland, Oregon)
• “History is continuous.  As one piece of fuel is consumed, the flame passes to another…Tea embodies the intimate relationship with man and nature.  It infiltrated into the lofty ideal of Chinese nationality since the beginning when tea was introduced into human life.”
  • From National Tea Museum of China (Hangzhou, China)

Definition of Tao:

1. In Taoism, the basic, eternal principle
of the universe that transcends reality and is the source of being,
non-being, and change.

So that’s what I can say about tea.  Comments?

The tea I got is a very young green puer.  It is from wild leaves in the Yunnan region, Yi Wu area, from a small town called MaHei.  This tea was sourced directly by Sun Sing with a small production, looking at the images you can see it is under the Sun Sing branded label also.  Puer is pretty intimidating to buy because there is so much fake stuff on the market, and it’s hard to know what is real.  You have to either be an expert or trust someone who is.

This cake was $70 US and is a 2007 vintage.  If I was to store it properly, it should be aged about 20 years before it is in prime condition for drinking.  $70 is pretty expensive for such a young tea.  Puer seems so expensive to a westerner; and it’s often compared with wine because you age it and the flavor develops over time.  I think one of the main differences in the purchase with puer is that you are effectively buying a couple cases of wine, not just a bottle.  So, this $70 cake is about 60 to 80 pots of tea, essentially a buck a serving.  Each serving is 6 – 10 pots of tea also, so its a lot of tea you are buying with a cake.  I’m just supposed to wait 20 years to have it…

If you are wondering about pu-erh tea check out this cake available on amazon.

I’ve got a lot of tea links posted on my delicious page, and would like to mention a couple of my favorite places to drink or purchase tea in Portland, Oregon.

Sacred Tea – This is a friend’s company, Paul Rosenburg.  He has been into tea and art for a very long time, and has turned the attic of an older house into a beautiful tea room with lots of beautiful art.  He serves some excellent aged puer teas also.

Portland Chinese Garden – Right in downtown Portland, this place is beautiful and peaceful.  There is a great tea shop in there which serves great Chinese teas and snacks.  It can get busy on a nice day, but on a rainy portland winter day there is no better place in Portland to enjoy a book and a cup of tea.

Tao of Tea – Their Belmont store is great, and there are 2 sides: One normal tea shop and one room that just sells teas and tea accessories.  The Tao is the company that operates the Chinese Garden Tea Shop, and their teas are high quality.  They are in my opinion, the center of the tea culture in Portland.

So those are a few places.  The NY Times wrote a great article about Portland and Tea this summer, which mentions some other places also.  The picture you see is a beautiful image from the National Tea Museum in China (China is where tea was discovered).  The museum is located in Hangzhou, just outside of Shanghai.

One of the major points of the most recent biking article
about Portland is the different spirit in which entrepreneurship is
thriving here. People are starting biking businesses here
because “the
original goals were rooted in environmental and public health, not the
economy.” Personally, Portland is a little too close to California for
that to be true on a larger scale, but it does bring up a good point
about the image people are trying to give in business here in Portland.
You could say it is elitist to be non-profit orientated. Craigslist comes to mind.

I have gone through some training with the OEN
(Oregon Entrepreneurs Network), but going to a 40th floor law firm for
the classes was a bit much for me. It felt like we should have been in
california, and in my opinion, it was totally removed from the culture
that a lot of entrepreneurs are coming from. I guess the real growth
and entrepreneurship isn’t going to come from these people, rather from
those who realize that business is about profit, and that imitation is
the highest form of flattery.

Anyone know that the wiki was invented in portland?