Mr. Thousand Dollar Oolong: Something Like a Blog (07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004)

In response to my previous post about my low tea standards, here is my boyfriend's long-ago post about his experience with the stuff...

Tea

Being a Korean Buddhist, drinking tea has always been part of my life. Tap water in Korea wasn't drinkable but the easiest way to make it drinkable was making a barley tea call boricha. It's not surprising that we drank this stuff everyday in Korea. We continued to do so several years into living in America. Our family always had a love for oolong tea, especially the top grade, hand picked stuff from Lake Tung Ting. On sick days, my mom would brew pot after pot of this amazing stuff which would do wonders in both making me feel better physically from the medicinal properties of the tea and spiritually as I savored every drop of this stuff. Because this tea was expensive, we would only drink it when we were sick or when we had guests over.

The prototypical nice gift for Buddhists are nice tea sets and premium grade teas, some costing as much as $150/pound. Ten years ago, when my mom became more religious and therefore, more active at our temple, she naturally started receiving a lot of tea as gifts. We started drinking it on a regular basis.

When I moved to Maryland, I had a craving for oolong so I went to a Korean grocery store, Lotte Plaza(This was pre-Han Ah Reum). I picked out a box of bagged Korean oolong. I told my mom about it and she was horrified that I was drinking such crap. She said that she would bring some good tea for me to have the next time she visited. Lo and behold, she brought two kinds of Taiwanese oolong, including one from Lake Tung Ting. She had to show me how to brew the tea since in all these years, it was always my parents who brewed it for me. She didn't bring any green tea because the process for brewing was a little more complicated and the margin of error was much smaller. She didn't want me to ruin good stuff yet. Even brewing the oolong took some pratice: If you don't steep it for long enough, it tastes like grass. If you brew it for too long, it tastes like bad black tea.

Now, I'm more well versed in the tea world, but still kind of lost. The best stuff almost always has no english on the label and more often than not, the label is in a script that I cannot read. With Korean teas I fare a little better, but I still don't know tea terminology in order to be a knowledgeable buyer. With wines, at least the label will always be written using the roman alphabet and at this point, I know most of the terms in French, Italian and German in order to make an informed purchase. Through a close friend of mine, I found a tea distributor(Ten Ren) who caters to English speakers. I now have someone to turn to when my mom can't help me out. I went in there a few monthes ago with two of my best friends. It was an amazing experience. It got to the point where I had to tell my friends, "Get me the fuck out of here before I do something really stupid!" I've been contemplating going back until my mom found out about my plans and gave me two Korean green teas and two Taiwanese oolongs. And now that I've tried them all, I can safely say that they are unbelievable.

In all, I have many positive associations with tea - family, religion, ethnicity. Of course there is the most immediate gratification - the taste. The teas I'm into are like everything else in my life that I'm into - they demand a certain degree of attention and contemplation in order for them to be appreciated.

From Something Like a Blog