Anonymous User asked: hi, i would like to be a Guy Who's Into Tea, but there's a lot going on there. where did you start learning about tea? how do i try this without getting overwhelmed? i mostly know you from friends at the table, where it's sort of in the air that you're a nerd about tea, but i haven't heard you talk directly about your opinions before
Beware this is going to get long but I need to frontend the real advice by being clear on what kind of help i can give, because it's relatively narrow. Also, I've talked a lot about tea here, on twitter and on various podcasts before, and I'm happy to continue, but to help out i've just gone and tagged some of my posts on here with Tea Advice and pinned that tag on my profile for anyone to browse.
To answer your specific question: tea is overwhelming. it's the most popular drink in the world after water, it's drunk all over the world, it's made in many different styles, and people don't even know exactly what you mean when you say "tea" (herbal tea? rooibos? yerba mate?). You can make a tea out of anything, but the thing I care about is really just camellia sinensis, the tea plant, and it's various offshoots. This is the plant that makes green tea, black tea, and everything in between. Even just that is overwhelming. It rivals wine in it's complexity of flavor and probably beats wine in scope of processing despite having only one ingredient
BUT you're in luck because you don't need to learn about tea to drink good tea, you just need to drink good tea to drink good tea and your only stumbling block is knowing how/where to buy it. Learning to buy good tea is much easier and is a skill in its own right.
There's lots of ways to drink tea in this world but I am a snob and a hater and I dislike almost all of them. Here's what I cannot help with: teabags, flavored tea (like cinnamon maple oolong etc), American style tea blends (like white tea with coconut and dried cranberry)
What I can help with is loose leaf tea, mostly Oolong tea and Puerh tea but also some White and Green tea, mostly from China and Taiwan but also a little from Japan and India. Also big on teaware.
Now what you should do is go and think about or research what kinds of tea you'd like to try (white, black, oolong, puerh, green, yellow, etc). Ok, you're back? Did you do any research? If you did, I'm pretty sure everything you learned was shit, and you'll have to unlearn it. Sorry for tricking you. It's still probably going to be slightly useful as a starting place. personally, I recommend Oolong tea. Oolong tea basically means everything more oxidized than green tea (which is cooked before it can oxidize) and black tea (which is fully/nearly fully oxidized). Green tea is also very rarely roasted, black tea is very commonly roasted, and oolong tea is split. There's a whole world of tea just inside Oolong tea. It's sweet and fruity and roasty and aromatic and floral. Really great stuff.
I will now briefly and tyrannically say why some other teas are the wrong tea to explore as a beginner, from most to least appropriate:
White tea: white tea is delicious. There's no reason not to explore this right away. I'm being insane.
Green tea: green tea is the most difficult tea to brew imo, with the most conflicting information on how to brew it. it can be delicious
Yellow tea: Yellow tea is uncommon and very very similar to Green tea. It's mostly marketing/history. Don't avoid but don't fall for the stories. There's a lot of that in tea.
Raw Puerh (young) aka Sheng Puerh: Challenging, astringent, bitter, floral, fruity, sweet. Raw Puerh on its own rivals all of white wine in complexity. Expensive and complex, overkill for a new tea drinker
Ripe Puerh aka Shou Puerh, AND Heicha: Puerh is my first or second favorite kind of tea, but the fermented Shou Puerh often gets foisted onto new tea buyers because of it's interesting history and low price. It's very dark and tastes like a forest floor, or mulch, or dead leaves, on purpose. I like it, but it's an acquired, challenging beverage, and not massively interesting. Heicha is similar but it's just fermented non-puerh tea.
Raw Puerh (aged) aka Sheng Puerh: This is the real deal. This stuff is out of this world. Simply too expensive, and overkill for a beginner. Try a sample if you can cheaply. Look for something 15 or 20 years old.
Black tea: Called "red tea" in the parts of the world that make tea, because there's another tea already called black tea. Black tea is boring. It's nice to drink, and warm, and goes well with desserts I guess.
OKAY finally some actionable advice. I brew tea with tiny little pots (or, more commonly, I use a gaiwan) of 80-120ml with like 3-8 grams of tea and I brew it over and over again until the flavor is gone. This has been getting more and more common over the last 40-50 years for some surprisingly complicated reasons. It's best not to get too caught up in the why right now. My recommendation is that you get a cheap ($15-30) gaiwan or something like this and buy from places that sell to that style.
https://yunnansourcing.com/ is going to be the cheapest, and they will also sell you cheap teaware, but their site is a mess and they sell simply too much tea. You should try not to worry too much about it. It's frankly absurd that they have like 19 different versions of everything. Just go by stuff that's well reviewed I guess. I don't like recommending new people to YS even though price and convenience wise it's the obvious pick
Another pick is https://white2tea.com/ this is my favorite place to buy tea. A little expensive but the tea is really really well curated
And finally https://www.wuyiorigin.com/ this place is great because it's a husband and wife team who sell my two favorite kinds of oolong. Dancong from the Phoenix mountains and yancha from the Wuyi mountains. Let me quickly introduce a few kinds of oolong to consider:
Dancong: tons of different kinds just in this sub sub category. these are the fruitiest, most floral, most sweet oolongs. maybe tea period. famous examples are milanxiang, shuixian, and yashixiang (more commonly sold as the translated "duck shit")
Yancha: more oxidized and more intensely roasted than yancha. tastes like wheat and nuts and darker fruit and coffee and good examples have a deep minerality, like a flinty or coppery taste. famous examples include: also shuixian, tielouhan (commonly sold as the translated as iron arhat), qidan, and rougui.
Anxi oolong: Oolong from Anxi is most often rolled into balls. It used to be that they were commonly medium oxidized and roasted, now they are commonly fairly green and unroasted. I prefer the roasted kind. Famous example: Tieguanyin (occasionally sold translated as Iron Goddess)
Taiwanese Oolong: Taiwan has their whole own tea growing culture, though they excell at Oolongs. Often similar to Anxi in style but i think more frequently my preference. Also famous for their "bug bitten" teas. Real, but expensive and exaggerated and easy to fake. Buyer beware. Famous examples: "High mountain Oolong", Dong Ding, Concubine, Eastern Beauty (more commonly sold as Oriental Beauty) Check out https://www.tea-masters.com/en/ for taiwanese teas.
anyway long story short yes tea is overwhelming. there's a lot of bullshit to wade through, even from places that should know better, so its important to me to try and be clear and keep the bullshit potential as low as possible
One thing I'll add, as another non-flavored tea enjoyer, is that tea is an acquired taste. You will develop a palate for it over time. My girlfriend drinks less tea than me and she can't taste the difference between the one oolong I have and my japanese green teas, which is baffling to me because they're such different beasts to me.
What I mean is: don't worry too much about your first teas. Buy some cheap stuff. Try out different kinds. You can start digging into the more precise stuff as your taste and preferences develop, but at first the subtle differences will probably all taste the same to you, and that's okay
