A Natural Tea Seminar
Location, Warren Wilson Campus
What great fortune has occurred when three such men of rarity should in this world meet and fall to that civil occupation of drinking tea! Behold their subtlety and their ease! Behold the strange beauty of language they employ to equal their subject’s qualities! Behold as they mark every twist and turn of the tea’s taste—chasing it to that other side of eternity where perception and beauty escape even our simplest thoughts! And Oh what thousand-fold blessing it is that their experiences have been recorded in the annals of history, their exact methods, procedures, and correspondence described thus:
Brewing Parameters:
Amount - 0.25 ounces of Nanqiao shan Pu-erh (Factory: Mengyang Guoyan, 2006)
Water – filtered tap water, Swannanoa, Hun’s house, 106 Cabin Hill.
Amount – 120m
Water Temp – Boiled then cooled for 2 breathes
Method - Gongfu
Brewing Vessel - Yixing Teapot 150ml
After passing around several cakes, we decided upon a cake that we all agreed smelled of a certain mustiness that yet contained in its darkness the scent of flowers. “Sauntering Breeze” did honors as tea server, while "La Tea Doe" provided us with refreshments. And I, "Felt-Leaf," humbly took it upon myself to observe and record everything that took place.
The first infusion (twelve seconds):
We lifted our sniff cups and this is what arose. La said, “sweet honey incense;” S.B. said, “fermenting honey;” and I added, “very hot plastic spatula.” “Yes,” we said. “It is all of these things.”
Then we took sips and the taste provided quite another dimension to our senses. I said, “A very tight flavor”—here I could not find words, and then I could—“slightly bitter like a steamed lotus root.” My friends concurred, La reminiscing, “a light-green taste, a little bit of sharp bitterness—just a little sweet to keep you interested,” while S.B. attempted summation in the true spirit of science saying only, “Slightly dry. Sweet at the end. Light-bodied.”
So much to be said in one brewing of one tea! What more can be said? Yet the rise and fall of the taste in a Pu-erh tea is like the rise and fall of tides of all the world’s oceans, containing in it all of God’s creations. As it was once said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Likewise, I say now, Tea is in love with its productions in the mind of man.
The second brewing is finished, fifteen seconds by S.B.’s count:
La began by saying, “The aroma has a stronger green smell, with a sweet smell, like” (here, he was confident and smiled) “like General Tsao’s Imitation Chicken.” No argument there. I added that I still thought it reminiscent of that strange warm plastic spatula smell as when it has rested too long on the skillet, but this brew was less intense.
While the scent remained intangible to our normal vocabulary, the taste we agreed was very distinct. La began again, “Blank dryness—‘free-of-taste’ dryness—filled in with bitterness.” “An all-coating bitter effect upon the tongue,” I said, “and still light and dry.” “Dry…drier—bittersweet,” said S.B.
It seems, upon memory, that we were descending into the depths of taste, unguided by any hand. Led only by our instinct and will, into that darkness of tea, without thoughts and concerns that we might not return, that in this bitterness there could be Lethian forgetfulness… Yet surely all that sinks below arises once again.
Third brew, 19 seconds:
Very adamant, “Honey molasses!” La then told me that he outright rejects the reality of it smelling like a very hot plastic spatula. I suspect—but I cannot prove—that La is simply being contrary, led astray by the amount of tannin in his tea. I respectfully maintained that it did, indeed, to me, “smell like hot plastic.” S.B., eyes closed, smiled from over his cup as it came to him. “Very hot spatula,” he said, “stirring honey.”
The taste: “A throbbing dryness; it will make your teeth ache with bitter,” F-L. “A mirage of wetness to start; a bitter dryness to finish,” said La. S.B. said, with a confused look on his face, after smacking his lips, “like…dry.”
The fourth brew was 21 seconds.
Was it the wastes of the day—the wastes of the tea talking? Were we men then—or like the flies drunk on an early spring day with the delight of resurrection in the sunshine? The smell: I said, “maybe like wet hair.” La contended: “dry enough to reach my nose!”
In the taste, the bitter lifted, I thought, “awake in its intentions—sweet and wet.” La concurred though troubled, “wet with an oceanic swell, but I still can’t shake the dryness.” S.B.: “smooth sailing ambrosia.”
The fifth brew was 30 seconds.
Yet again, change. While the aroma to S.B. and myself reminded us of shiitakes, to La he objected to say that it smelled, “the same ol’,” but also, “smells wet.”
Then there was nothing but poetry left in us. Or perhaps, all the poetry had left us. As the tea had washed itself of life, so had, in our expression, come and gone the soul of just formulation. I could simply write in my pages, “A residual innocence left from the complete dispersal of the bitterness; the sweet and wet of the earlier brew is all that’s left.” And then to say something so charming I could not deny, La went on to say, “like bathing my tongue in shallow, sun-baked water.” S.B. murmured, “faint and warm…sugarcane.”
