People gathering around the gaiwan-shaped bar at Teance for tea and conversations.

The tea bar at Teance is unique in Berkeley because it’s round. Most tea houses don’t have bars, and most bars are long rectangles at which you can’t talk to anyone except the people next to you. I’ve lost count of how many amazing conversations I’ve had at this round bar. Its smooth, cool-yet-earthy shell-and-glass surface usually surprises the customers, who begin conversing in mutual admiration.

Complete strangers share one another’s bewilderment as they inhale the gardenia aroma of freshly infused Baochong oolong or share a cup of Yunnan Gold and nod in agreement when one person joyfully exclaims that she detects a peppery note in the tea’s sweetness. Then they go on to share business dreams, youthful memories, their children’s performance in school, political and religious beliefs. They bond over the tea bar. “The roundness brings people together,” says Winnie Yu, Teance’s director and founder.

Every year, Yu travels to the fog-shrouded tea mountains in Asia and hand-selects whole-leaf teas from award-winning tea farmers. She says one connection always leads to another while she searches for the best teas.

“Asians are all about connections — otherwise, they wouldn’t talk to you anyway,” Yu said. “You know one tea master. Then they introduce you to a farmer. A lot of farmers connect to other farmers, family members, their friends in the industry. Through years and years of legwork and introductions, eventually you find some good farmers.”

A lesson on basic Japanese tea ceremony provided to the TeaCal students.

Yu’s motivation for opening Teance was simple: to create a public environment where tea drinkers could gather and share teas.

“Let’s say you want to drink tea with your friends — where would you go?” she asked. “You go to a cafe? A coffee shop? It’s horrible tea there, and it’s usually teabags. It’s also a different kind of environment. Coffee shops smell like coffee. They’re not very tranquil. They’re not aesthetically the kind of place that I would like and that I’m used to in Asia.”

So with her friend Fu-Tung Cheng of Cheng Design, Yu strived to make Teance the serene oasis that shoppers on Fourth Street could duck into to seek shelter from the hustle and bustle outside and at the same time still feel connected with the outdoors through the abundance of sunlight, the water cascade that showers from the ceiling into a small pond with goldfish in it, the fresh flowers and even the bamboo coasters.

It’s no surprise that Teance’s calming atmosphere attracts many artistic patrons: designers, musicians, poets, dancers. It also hosts a number of book-signing events, Lunar New Year festivals and spring harvest tea parties, at which teas are served with artisan snacks such as mochi, tea-flavored ice cream, tea-flavored truffles and cookies all handmade by Teance staff members and their friends, all of whom embody the “slow food” concept that defines Berkeley cuisine.

Yu’s wish is for people to “think about tea as fine dining, as produce, a world of excitement, something very sophisticated but also extremely accessible.” Currently, Teance carries roughly 65 types of tea across all categories: white, green, yellow, oolong, red, pu’er, herbal. These teas come from Japan, China, Taiwan, India and sometimes Korea, depending on the season, considering that, just like those of wine, the tastes of the teas change from season to season.

All this may seem daunting at first, but TeaCal is a good start for students like me. For everyone else, the bar and the knowledgeable bartenders make it easy to taste everything and find out what one likes. The more enthusiastic tea learners can also make a reservation for a private tea lesson with an experienced bartender, and the cost is just the regular bar cost.

“We try to carry the highest grade of each type of tea,” Yu says, “so that the tea bar is the place for (customers) to be adventurous and try different teas and train their palate (for the high-quality teas).”

The more I learn about this beverage, some of which comes from trees that are hundreds of years old, not to mention the yixing teapots and the porcelain gaiwans in which it’s infused, the more I realize how much there still is to learn. The range of taste alone is overwhelming.

Teance offers over 60 types of tea in all categories from across the world.

There’s the simpler Anji Baicha with a buttery note or the somewhat complex Honey Jialong that tastes sweet like jicama with an aroma of chamomile and plumeria. Then there’s Song Zhong Phoenix, in a single sip of which you can taste pine nut, unburnt cigar, malt, clove, the black tip of a young banana and something sweet, aged, smoky, resinous that you can’t exactly pin down with a name. And you know that this tea is high in quality because you can steep it again and again, sometimes more than 10 times, and the flavor remains strong or new flavors emerge.

One evening, I asked Mr. Moghaddam, one of the managers of Teance and the bartender that evening, to tell me the name of the tea that I was enjoying. Refusing to say its name, he told me to enjoy its flavors and the moment because even for the same tea, it will never be the same again. That may sound too philosophical, but there’s a bittersweet fact behind it.

In 30 years, these kinds of artisan tea will be history because of pollution and climate change and, most importantly, because the tea masters are aging. The youngest tea master in China is about 60 years old, and it takes a few decades to master the art of growing, picking and producing the tea, which does not yield enough financial benefit to entice the young generations to take up the art.

“Now is the time to drink tea,” Yu said.

Disclaimer: This post is a re-publication of my feature of Teance on the Daily Californian.

Cheers to the flowers. 乾杯。

By the time I can resurface from the ocean of my work and gasp for some air, the cherry blossoms at the Japanese Tea Garden are mostly gone with the crazy San Francisco wind. But plenty of other flowers have started blooming or are at their peak: azalea, wisteria, iris, some flowers that I don’t know the names… and the more resilient yaezakura (八重桜 , double-layered cherry blossom) (I’ve uploaded the pictures at the garden here). As I walked by some of them, the sweet aroma infiltrated my thoughts.

We grasped a table outside near a pink yaezakura, which overlooks a pond with some gigantic koi, a walkway brightened by red azalea, young pierus leaves and the greenest of trees. We made some oolong. In this setting, shincha (新茶) or gyokuro (玉露) would probably be most fitting, but the floral, gently sweet, easy-going Four Seasons oolong does the job. It relaxes us, it doesn’t demand extreme attention so we can talk and look at the scenery, it’s light like a petal.

The food came out too fast for us to really sample the teas with everything. We had to focus on not oversteeping while clearing the plates for more table space. But some combinations stood out memorably:
- Taiwan Beauty + porridge: so floral,
- Baochong + egg custard : the Baochong brings out the pastry,
- Yushan High Mountain + egg custard: the Yushan makes it more eggy.

The complete food experience is recorded here, brought to you by FlavorBoulevard.com.

Later, Cheryl gave me a lesson on puer. There are basically two categories of puer: green puer (also known as “raw puer”) and black puer (also known as “sho puer” or “ripe puer”). Puer is a varietal of tea plant, not a producing method (whereas “white”, “green”, “oolong” and “red” are the results of different producing methods). “Green puer” versus “black puer” indicates the producing method: green puer is made by letting the tea age on its own, and black puer is made by sprinkling water and piling up the leaves a certain way to quicken the aging process. So instead of letting the tea develop its “aged” taste naturally, now it tastes old but it’s actually not that old in years. Well, guess what, black puer doesn’t taste one bit like green puer. Just like cantaloupe picked green and stored cold doesn’t taste like cantaloupe picked ripe. The puer that I’d had at Teance, minus the Fragrant Leaf, are black puer.

There’s another thing called “purple leaf puer“: green puer made with the purple leaves. Apparently on the puer trees of Yunnan, there are some purple leaves. The tea cake actually looks more purple than its green cousins. Needless to say, purple puer is rare. [Note to self: should figure out what makes the leaves purple and how it affects the taste.]

Together, we did three puer side by side: purple leaf, Jingmai green, and garden green. (Click on the image for a bigger view if you’d like to read the labels.) All three were roughly 4-5 years old, if I remember correctly. After a quick rinse, the purple leaf puer smelled of prune, the second one smelled of raisin (I know it doesn’t sound very different from the first one, but it’s definitely a notch down in the sweetness of dried fruits ), the third smelled completely different: grassy.

From left: raw purple leaf puer, jingmai mountain green puer, garden tea green puer. The color difference is quite vivid, isn’t it?

The taste: quite similar to the smell. The first two are sweet and fruity, and their tastes don’t really change much with time, but the last one gets more and more floral with the number of steeps. (Each infusion is extremely short, Cheryl basically poured the hot water in and out [Fragrant Leaf took 10 seconds, so this quick steeping is standard for green puer]. The water should not be too hot either, if you see steam rolling out of the pitcher, it’s too hot. I’m guessing the temperature was roughly 180 F…) I can’t choose a favorite among these three because I was mostly enthralled to realize that I do like puer after all, but it has to be raw puer.

We must have had at least 6 infusions of each. This I know for sure: 3 puer syncing together kept me up (fully awake, not tired, concentrative enough to work) for 2 consecutive nights. And I didn’t even feel sleepy during the day. \(O_O)/

Spring 2012 shin cha
($12, or maybe $10 per 3-oz [85-gr] bag) – from Yaoya-san Japanese Grocery in El Cerrito, CA

Now it’s almost spring again.

Finally I worked up my courage. I figured, as a tea lover I should open the bags and appreciate the tea. What’s the point of loving someone if you keep your distance from them, right?

Everything about the shincha is perfect. “Shin cha” (新茶) mean “new tea”, this shin cha is not so “shin” anymore (it’s 古茶 now), but still so beautifully delicious. What I remember from the shin cha that Yuri shared with me still shines in this 1-year-old shin cha: the gentle sweetness with a hint of seashores that is notably different from sencha but still unique to Japanese teas. I had the nagging feeling that I oversteeped it this time because the color is the green inside a green grape (too green), but now that I read my old post, which says it should look green like a 3-week-old onion sprout, than maybe I didn’t oversteep it. (How the heck did I even conjure up that description?!) Or maybe I did, this looks too yellow… Anyway. Oversteeped or not, it is the taste that I idolized.

It also didn’t help me stay up to study at all (>.>). I drank 6 cups starting at midnight. At 1 am, I slept like a rock.

Oolongs from Taiwan enjoy renown and prestige, as well some of the highest prices, in the world today. The locals happily consume most of what is produced, and little of its best teas ever get exported. But Taiwan did not start out to be the Oolong powerhouse it is today. When the Dutch conquered Formosa in the early 1620s, part of its plan was to export tea from China, via Taiwan to Persia. This port island served to package and re-export, but its own native wild tea plants were largely unnoticed.

In the early 1800s, the southern part of Taiwan was prosperously growing agricultural items like rice, sugar cane, etc.; but the north, being hilly, foggy, and colder were less suitable. However, tea was found to grow well by the Fujian Chinese immigrants in these high mountains. Tea plants and seeds were imported from China for planting on those terraced hills, and Taiwan’s own tea industry began between 1810-1827.

Wenshan, in particular, in the north, was one of the first areas to feature a uniquely Taiwanese brand of style and taste in its Baochong oolong (originally spelled Pouchong). At first, lacking confidence, the Taiwanese farmers added jasmine flowers to enhance the fragrance. Soon, they found it more compelling to grow fragrant flowers all around the tea bushes instead.

By 1881-1894, Baochong tea exported to the South China Seas has become the second most popular tea to be exported out of Taiwan. The name Baochong came about from its then packaging: standard feathery paper, with unit measures from one liang (about an ounce) to four liang. The word Bao meant ‘wrapped’ and this varietal of tea then was called ‘Chong’ in local slang(*).

The signature fragrance of Baochong oolong, one of the most intensely aromatic teas in the world, is a category of tea all its own called ‘Blue tea’. Boasting of being close to green tea in its low oxidation and thus retaining much of its nutrients, Baochong also offers the intoxicating aftertaste and body of the richest oolongs.

Today, other popular oolongs in Taiwan, like Tung Ting, High Mountain, Jin Shuan, and even Dayuling, are modelled after Baochong’s fragrance profile.

(*) My Chinese vocab of the day: Baochong – 包種茶, literally translated in the same word order: “wrapped seed tea”. The Japanese on reading of these characters is ほうしゅちゃ　|ho-shucha|, and this site categorizes hoshucha as a half fermented tea with oolong being fermented tea. I think they confused “fermentation” with “oxidation”. Oolongs are oxidized, puers are fermented.

Paired with goji berry tea: again, leave the misozuke on the tongue, then take a sip of goji berry. The berry reveals the rooibos, dilutes the bitterness of sake and the saltiness of miso, and leaves a sweet aftertaste. However, my conscience says something is off. A good match should rid this aged tofu of its pungency altogether and brighten its complexity.

At first, I thought that a light green oolong, something flowery, would go well with it, but I didn’t have any green oolong at home (on my way to buy some Buddha’s Hand soon), so I tried the Wild Trees instead. Now this oolong is crazy sweet but it accompanied a mooncake well (sweet on sweet!), it’s an easy-going tea (takes little effort to make), and it’s direct enough to not be overwhelmed by the aged tofu.

And yep. Tofu misozuke and sweet oolong are meant to be. The Wild Trees does everything I wanted it to, and the tofu misozuke, again, with its saltiness, brings out the depth of the tea.

(Afterthoughts:
- A green oolong like Baochong or Buddha’s Hand would be too weak for an umami flavor of this magnitude.
- Both the goji berry and the Wild Trees are sweet, but they’re different kinds of sweet: goji berry is grass sweet, and Wild Trees is cinnamon roll sweet.
- Paired with food, real teas (Camelia sinensis) change tastes more vigorously and less predictably than herbal teas.
- The normal tofu misozuke fares beaufifully with genmaicha, but that was a 2-monhth-old instead of 6-month-old tofu, so I can’t tell which one matches better, genmaicha or Wild Trees… Hmm experiment experiment…
- (*) UPDATE: I must have misheard Oanh when she said “kombu” and I registered “rooibos”. This just goes to show that what little information you have a priori affects how you perceive the taste.)

The free tasting today is Royal Courtesan, a deep orange Taiwanese oolong that smells roasty but tastes surprisingly more plumy as it cools. Usually teas are best warm, but I find this oolong most pleasant (sweet and complex) when it’s completely at room temperature. I wasn’t impressed by the Royal Courtesan a few months back, and apparently that crop was light yellow in color and didn’t smell roasty at all. Is the new crop so different, or is it because the tea is recently harvested, or is it a different infusion? It definitely leaves a much better impression this time though.

Overall, spring 2012 seems to yield better, more complex leaves across varieties. For green teas, both the new Anji Baicha (Chinese) and the new sencha (Japanese) develop a vigorous, refreshing note that last season didn’t have. The Taiwanese Tung Ting and Baochong oolongs are sweeter, and today’s Four Seasons, another Taiwanese oolong, although still comfortably straightforward as it should be, tastes a lot more floral than last winter’s crop. Even after 5 infusions and the leaves have opened up completely, the taste stays constant, and its 1-minute steeping time is also relaxing enough to have between conversations.

Because my original intention for today’s visit was the Bailin Gongfu, I wanted to build up to it starting with a green tea and then an oolong. Just as I’ve forgotten about the Dafang, Cheryl said it has finally arrived. I have no past season experience with Dafang to compare this spring’s with, but compared with the pre-rain Longjing in May, steeped with the same water and for the same amount of time, the Dafang is a lot simpler, nuttier, and more straightforward. It lacks the vegetal note of the Longjing.

Although the Dafang comes a bit short of my expectation, the Bailin Gongfu blows me away, another example of how this spring reigns superior to last year. Last year, it “smelled like dried blueberries or sweet potato, and tasted like a sweet root”, this year, it’s a garden of flavors that changes almost by the second: I taste lychee one moment then coffee candy another and dried jujube the next, the rich aroma reaches you from three feet away as soon as the hot water soaks the leaves. Kristen agrees with me on the lychee, and Cheryl describes it as “milk chocolate”, which is exactly what you get when you take a sip of Bailin Gongfu right after nibbling of a matcha cookie.

And just like in our last 5-course tea session with Kristen and Tiana, we end the day with Buddha’s Hand. I’ve recommended the Buddha’s Hand so many times I’m like its private spokeperson, and so far it’s a 100% success rate *knock on wood*. It’s a staple in my tea collection, the vegetal smoothness with a sweet hint of stone fruit is a happy ending for every tea date.

P.S. For bookkeeping’s sake, I should include that we also try a cup of complimentary Mt. Olympus, a Greek herbal tea. It’s like drinking basil. In my book, it shares the same group with Lavender Mint.

Notice how the leaves turn a lot greener post-infusion. Although it might be too sweet without much variations in flavor by itself, the Wild Trees pairs surprisingly well with a yam mooncake. This yam filling is starchy and dry, unlike most bean pastes and orange sweet potato pastes, so the mooncake has a fair saltiness instead of being too sweet. It adds depth to the Wild Trees, and the Wild Trees smoothens it.

I tried the Wild Trees with a few other mooncakes too, a red bean one, a mung bean one, and a flaky green tea pastry (similar to this taro ball from Sheng Kee Bakery), but none of these stood out, and the green tea-Wild Tree pair was even slightly stringent. Soon I got a bit bored by the sweetness, so I made a pot of chrysanthemum. Herbal teas are easy on the mind both mentally and neurologically: it takes boiling water and you cannot oversteep it, and it has zero caffeine.

The hard thing is chrysanthemum tea doesn’t smell nice, it actually smells a bit weird (well, like the fresh flower); it tastes neither sweet nor bitter, just really clean. I didn’t expect much but I took a bite of each mooncake followed with a sip of chrysanthemum anyway.

Who knew. With the red bean, it bloomed.