Flash Brew #5: Useless Distinctions
Beginner tea drinkers should quickly leave behind categorical ways of thinking about tea.
One of the things that makes tea so hard to approach as a beginner is the confusing way it’s structured. At some point, someone thought we ought to separate tea into categories based on level of oxidation. A clever idea, as it helps at least group similar teas based on some sort of criteria (oxidation). However, this has unintended consequences like creating the impression that different types of tea come from different plants (they don’t; all tea comes from the Camellia Sinensis plant).
I suggest beginners put this behind them as quickly as possible. I believe sticking to categorical distinctions as an absolute truth will quickly become an impediment to deepening their understanding of tea. Rather than helping make sense of tea, it will only serve to confuse as the beginner gains more experience that calls into question the neatly organized system of labeling and nomenclature.
I recently had a flavor epiphany I’d like to use to illustrate the point.
Lately I’ve been rather taken by kamairicha (釜炒り茶, lit. “pan-fried tea”), a type of pan-fried green tea mostly grown in southern Japanese prefectures like Kumamoto. It’s a stronger and more astringent tea than your typical sweet, fresh sencha, which is something I enjoy. I like this type of tea so much I have a teapot set aside specifically for kamairicha, as it seems to do quite well with it.
If I’m being honest, my love for this tea made me a little uncomfortable. After all, the flavor profiles I enjoyed were typically Chinese in origin–just like the heritage of kamairicha. Had I spent all this time trying to explore Japanese tea just to find out I really just like Chinese tea?
Then I had a revelation.
I was nursing a minor cold with some cozy oolong over the weekend and grabbed a pack of Bai Ji Guan (白鸡冠, often called “white coxcombe”), a light-roast Chinese oolong from the Wuyi Mountains in Fujian. Since I felt crappy, I wasn’t brewing with any particular sort of focus. The tea was simply a salve for my spirit.
Suddenly, an aroma hit my nose that jolted me out of my haze. It was lush, verdant, and refreshing in a way I commonly associate with matcha. Shocked, I grabbed the gaiwan and offered it to my wife for a whiff.
“What does this smell like to you?”
“Sencha,” she replied.
I knew it. I took a few steps back and thought about the characteristics of the Bai Ji Guan. Then, I asked myself what other teas have similar characteristics. Suddenly, three separate teas merged in my brain as one overarching idea expressed three different ways: light-roasted oolong from China, pan-fried green tea from Japan, and ball-rolled oolong from Taiwan. These teas are united as variations on a particular theme:
High aroma, floral fragrance
Vegetal, savory soup
Buttery or creamy texture
In one mind-expanding moment, I saw how teas I thought were completely unrelated could be grouped by the experience they offer or the ideas they express rather than the characteristics of their production.
Any tea drinker clinging to the notions of what an oolong is versus a green tea could not have this sort of realization. Rather, one can only understand how different teas connect through time spent drinking numerous different teas.
Like reading books across a varied set of genres, the abstract connections slowly build in one’s mind until suddenly lightning strikes and seemingly disparate ideas unite in the brain in a flash of powerful insight.
It’s hopeless to explain this to a beginner. If one is just learning that all true tea is made from the same plant then there’s no way to grasp ideas at this depth. Hence, tea categories: white, green, yellow, oolong, black (called red in Asia), and dark. I’d like to think of a better way to organize tea and guide beginners through to a deeper sense of knowing faster, but I don’t know how to do this just yet.
Until I do figure something out, all I can say is keep an open mind, think about every new experience as it relates to other tea experiences, and keep on drinking.
Maybe as a tea drinker myself the notion of this being something odd never really occurred to me. Being of the same plant allows for different methods to lead to similar outcomes, like where it was grown, or how it was processed. As oxidation is a method of categorization largely based around the simple science of it, at least for the most part, any other categorization method we could want to adopt would likely need to also be based in science, and make more sense than what we already have. Not to discount the intrigue mentioned, I recall a first flush Darjeeling I had that my taste buds could hardly categorize. It was technically oolong by its processing, tasted somewhat like a fired green and a white tea at the same time, and used seeds intended for black teas, the experience is still fresh in my mind, but I don't think this in anyway diminishes the categories we currently have, just adds more depth and complexity to the conversation and meaning around them