Welcome to my blog. I hope you will join me for a cup of tea!
All tagged Pu Ehr
Hello, tea lovers and welcome back to The Tea Squirrel! This is episode number two of my series on tea and mindfulness. Being present in the moment, enjoying the beauty of little things, being intentional with one’s thoughts and actions are all things that tea lovers can easily teach themselves by cultivating a tea ritual, however simple or elaborate. My goal for this series is to practice mindfulness more consistently and explore it in a creative way.
I tried the Camelia Sour tea mocktail recipe by Portland-based Smith Teamaker. Here’s what happened.
While tasting a 2018 Yiwu raw puer by Bitterleaf, I practiced my macro photography skills (I have a new lens, yay!) and mindfulness with some gorgeous sea shells I found along the coast on a beautiful beach in Mendocino, California.
It's 9:30 on a Sunday morning. On a regular Sunday, I would still be in bed, snoozing. But it’s not a regular Sunday. A line is forming in front of the San Francisco Ferry Building. I join it with a sigh of relief, virtually patting myself on the back for getting there early. Passers-by approach the volunteers who are managing the line, they want to know what event people are standing in line for (and what they are missing out on). They are stunned that tea is the reason drawing such crowds.
Fall… the most nostalgic, sweet, smoky and luxurious of all seasons. The grape harvest, the weather turning chilly, we go back to craving hot tea, even though we never really abandoned it in the summer. When I was a child, fall meant collecting edible chestnuts with my dog, playing in the fallen leaves and trying to avoid the spiky chestnut pods (ouch, those spiky pods sting!). Chestnuts are delicious roasted on an open fire, they become soft, sweet, smoky and earthy. For me smoky and earthy flavors are the embodiment of fall, which is why I’ve created a tea based cocktail that brings all those notes together.
The weather in San Francisco is weird, there’s no other way to put it. We have a unique micro climate. So while the rest of the Northern Hemisphere is trying to survive the scorching heat of summer, we have to put up with the fog and lower-than-usual temperatures. August has even been renamed Fogust (= fog + August). It’s dreary and grey. For a tea drinker, it’s actually rather ideal. Did you know that the fog has a name?
The first time I had pu erh was a long time ago and I didn't even know it. Back then, the only thing I knew about tea was that I liked it a lot. One day a relative gave me a round colorful cardboard box with black Chinese characters. Inside the box, wrapped in paper, there was tuocha, a dome-shaped compressed tea, made of pu erh. I cannot describe the fascination this little box exerted on me. It might have not been very high quality tea but to me it was like a treasure. You had to grate the dome-shaped cake to make a cup of tea and this process alone had something magical to it. The tea was strong, intense.What is pu erh?
