喝什么茶？Drink what tea?

This is from an email to a friend. I have added a lot and subtracted a little.

My life here is about as far from my life in Seward as life could get!

I hardly exercise. I don't do yoga or meditation. I rarely go hiking. I never go hiking alone. I often go drinking. I rarely pass on hanging out with my friends in order to relax and be alone. I am learning a little bit of Chinese. I go between feeling satisfied with my slow progress and feeling completely dejected at my utter incompetence.

I eat tons of great food! Everyday!

The only Chinese I know is that that is around and about food or tea. (although today I did have a waitress comment on how poor my Chinese is.) I also drink copious quantities of quite delicious tea daily. I have learned most of the Chinese that I know in a tea shop with a great middle aged man who speaks no English. He even gave me my Chinese name 飞虎 (flying tiger). Unfortunately his landlord will not continue to rent him space because the area that I live in is quickly being gentrified. Although that shop is no longer around I still make it down to the tea market once a month or so. You would love this market! It is insane. It is probably about the size of downtown Seward, maybe a tad smaller, but with maybe more tea shops then then there are buildings in all of Seward, and a population that certainly far exceeds that of Seward, even on the 4th of July. I usually spend four to six hours sitting around with two of my good friends drinking all kinds of different teas. I know more kinds of tea now then I would have thought existed, and I have forgotten the names of far more...

The whole experience is a pleasant one. Except for the first bit when they try out their English on you and grab at you... "Hello, Try some tea!?!" or just "Tea! Sit!" Of course half of the time the words are spoken almost unintelligibly. I have learned not to go to any of those shops, it is better to find an older man or woman who seems almost completely disinterested in your existence. They are the good ones who know what they are talking about and are going to be more patient with the fact that I don't understand half of what they say.

The next step is to find a tea that you want to try. This is getting more and more difficult as I am becoming more and more familiar with more and more of the common teas. By the way "越来越", something like our "more and more" is pretty common in Chinese so they love to use the saying "more and more". Anyway, once you find a tea that you want to try then you have a seat at what is more often then not a large ornate tea tray with all manner of tea pots; funny little bowls with lids, or without; cute little clay statues of feet, pigs, dogs, rabbits, dragons, or frogs; a stand of traditional tea utensils, one looks like a paint brush, another a small set of tongs, and a few others. I prefer when the shop keeper pulls out a range of the selected tea. 铁观音 "Iron Goddess of Mercy", or more accurately (the One) Observing the Voice of the Chinese People, is one of my Favorites. There are of course legends about this tea but in addition to the fluff there are many levels of quality. The cheapest you can find at any Asian market in the US, here they cost about $1 for a bag. The higher end ranges all the way up to around $136 for the same amount. Of course I only drink on the higher end of the scale... In the $10 a bag range. I have not tried anything much more expensive, but for $10 I am drinking amazing tea! So, what I prefer is for the owner to pick out a few different varieties around the $10 mark and brew two of them at a time until I settle on one of them.

I guess for a proper education in tea the first thing you need to know is that there is only one basic tea plant. From that one plant the Chinese make six basic types of tea. Red, Green, White, Yellow, Oolong, and Pu'er. Many but not every tea master includes a seventh variety,maybe you can guess it? Jasmine Tea. Everyone I am sure is familiar with at least 3 of these; green, jasmine, and "red tea". What we call black tea is what the Chinese call red tea. Some of you may be familiar with white tea and oolong tea as well. Let me tell you now though, unless you are going to a Chinese tea shop and getting really good tea, it's probably not fair to even call what your used to drinking "Tea". Well, at least not "茶“, but I guess none of you probably do.

First of all, the black tea we drink is mostly from India, and though I think it's good, I love it in fact, and sometimes order it here in China actually... But It is so different then Chinese red tea that I think they should be called different things... hmmm...

I don't really care much for red tea myself. It has taken me many months of exploration before I recently, finally, found a few varieties that I like.

Green tea is awesome, but if you only drink green tea from a bag or something else unspectacular, the likes of which you you will find easily in the United States, you are really missing out.

White tea I am also not crazy about. I like the cheap white tea you get mixed with fruit in bags in the United States better actually.

Yellow tea is very similar to green tea and I still know very little about it. It is more bitter and much less common then green tea.

Oolong, or dark dragon tea, is by far my favorite variety. Among oolongs there are two that are far and away the most well known. Da hong pao and Tie guan yin would likely be the only two oolongs to make almost everyone's list of "the ten great teas of China" To me, quite erroneously, I consider these two to mark the two main kind of oolong teas; smoked, and unsmoked. I make this retarded distinction because I mostly drink tea from one area of china and this is a large distinction in the tea of the area. Two other remarkably distinct varieties are ginseng oolong, and milk fragrance. Ginseng oolong is predictably covered ginseng powder, so by fallacious logic we can conclude that the milk smelling stuff is covered in milk powder, or at least soaked in milk? Maybe they make it like jasmine tea, leaving the milk and tea in the same area and then separating them so that the smell stays? Wrong again. The actually water the plants with milk! Fucking crazy right? The stuff kinda tastes like butter.

Pu'er is something altogether different. If you are into tea you may have come across it, but if not you probably are not missing anything. The two kinds of Pu'er are so distinct in flavor and character that it is a little surprising that there distinctions are not more linguistically fundamental. After you go through the various processes required to make Sheng (raw) pu'er you have the option to basically start composting the stuff and vuala! Shou (hand) pu'er! If you ask me the composting is pretty necessary. Sheng pu'er not only tastes bad, if hurts my belly if I drink to much. Shou pu'er on the other hand, after some warming up to it, is really pretty great. I didn't like it at first, kinda thought it tastes like dirt, but my old tea master used to drink it all day, so I have gotten used to it.

Enough about tea already! Jesus Christ!