On Tea Expertise (plus, my experience at a tea class!)

I am not a tea expert.

I know that for many who know me, that statement seems surprising. I mean, I blog a lot about tea. I review and taste teas for my posts and often share my opinions. I’ve even written an entire series of posts presuming to teach you something about tea practice. But I still consider myself an enthusiastic amateur.

That said, I am often thought of as “the tea expert” (or, probably more accurately, “that weird tea lady”) by my friends, family, and acquaintances. I joked over the holidays to a family friend who struck up a conversation about tea that I know just enough about tea that everyone is too concerned that I’m judging them to offer me tea, kind of like being the chef that no one will invite over for dinner. And over the hospitable season, I’ve had more than one person remark that they don’t have a tea “that is up to your standards.” Which is part of why my Tea Primer starts with tea bags. Because I don’t look down on tea bags. Do I think there are more delicious options? Sure. But if you like them, you do you. And you will pry my half-sweet oolong milk bubble tea from my cold, dead fingers.

But as I’ve settled into my tea-blogging niche, I’ve thought a lot about how to communicate my love of tea to a broader audience, and the subject of expertise comes up a fair amount. I’ve toyed with the idea of some sort of formal tea education course or credential, like a Tea Sommelier certification, but it seems like a lot of money for a title that is controversial at best. Ultimately, while it would be fun to be seen as an expert, no amount of certification is ever going to alleviate what could charitably be called “perpetual beginner’s mind” and perhaps uncharitably called “imposter’s syndrome” when it comes to my knowledge of tea.

That said, I love learning and I am constantly striving to expand my knowledge of how to enjoy tea. So to this end, I decided to take a tea class from Victoria at MeiMei Fine Teas, a tea company based near me in Northern Virginia. I was thrilled when I found out that such a knowledgeable tea person lived so close to me and was willing to share her knowledge in classes! I signed up for two classes, one focusing on puerh and one focusing on oolong. This past Sunday, I attended the puerh class where I met some lovely tea-lovers and learned from such a graceful and wise teacher, who also happens to be incredibly nice!

The puerh class started with tea. Victoria brewed up two different sheng (or raw) puerhs, one from a cake and the other rolled into a dragon ball. The dragon ball rolled tea was amazingly sweet and right away, I knew this was going to be a better introduction to puerh teas than I could manage on my own because I was getting to taste much nicer teas than I could afford to buy all on my own! It was interesting that we started by tasting before Victoria started presenting her slides on Yunnan province, the growing, harvesting, and processing of puerh, and some notes on tasting. She intermixed the slides with tastings of various teas so that the slides felt like a break, and she paced them to always be relevant to the teas we were tasting. We tasted six sheng puerhs, ranging in age from a few years old to over two decades old, in order to see how the tea changes. I also got to learn the difference between sheng puerh and green tea, which was something I’d always wondered.

Only after we’d tasted a full range of ages of sheng puerh did she bring out the shu puerh. Because shu puerh processing was developed in the 1970s to speed up the sheng puerh aging process, it was interesting to see how the shu puerhs compared to the oldest of the sheng puerhs. It was particularly intriguing to see how the color of the sheng puerh changed with age. That said, I think my favorite moment was when we tried two teas side by side, one that was from a famous tea maker, and the other an unidentified cake from Victoria’s personal stash. The unidentified cake not only held its own against the famous cake, but it had the added interest of having a slight smoky flavor and aroma to it. It wasn’t as pronounced as a smoked tea, but it definitely had a note of pine smoke, similar to some whiskies that I enjoy. Upon noticing this, Victoria explained that puerh is processed by firing it in woks to kill off some of the compounds that cause oxidation, and sometimes tea processors heat this woks over wood fires, which allows a smoky note to get into the tea.

After many hours of tasting and talking tea, I had to leave, which was sad, but I’m excited to take a future class and further expand my tea knowledge. And joining this group of people showed me how much I have yet to learn, plus I found that tasting teas with others, regardless of their level of knowledge, can help expand my own tasting notes. So I continue on my journey, tasting and learning, and enjoy those I meet along the way.

NB: Photo was taken by me and used with Victoria’s permission.

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Tuesday Tasting: Taiwanese Tea and Coffee Tasting from Mountain Stream Teas

Recently, Matt at Mountain Stream Teas posted that some of his tea farmer friends had started experimenting with growing coffee and wondered if we might be interested in trying tea and coffee from the same terroir. Well, of course we would! Those of you who know me know that my husband Dan is something of a coffee snob, so I thought this would be a fun thing to try together, so I went ahead and ordered their February subscription box, which included the tea and coffee comparison. The box came with two coffees and two teas, from two different areas.

The set included samples of two coffees and two teas from two different places. There was a washed coffee and a Honey Fragrance Black Tea from Ruisui and a sun-dried coffee and a Red Oolong from Alishan. The coffees were obviously roasted to a medium-light roast, which is perfect because Dan strongly prefers lighter roast coffees.

I decided to set up the tasting using professional evaluation methods for each drink. So the coffees were cupped according to the method we were taught when we tasted coffee at Vigilante Coffee a few years ago. The teas were tasted in a professional cupping set. We used stainless steep spoons to taste everything, which were rinsed between tastings.

The coffees were made with 6g of beans to 100ml of water, ground with a hand-powered burr grinder, while the tea was made with 3g of leaves for a 120-ml cupping set. Everything was made using 95C water. The coffees were allowed to bloom for about 4 minutes, while the teas were steeped for 2 minutes.

Right off, Dan and I decided we liked different coffees best. I loved the Alishan coffee, with its bright acidity and dark chocolate mouthfeel, but Dan interpreted the minerality as “chalky” and preferred the Ruisui coffee, which is said tasted like tea. I got a honey caramel aftertaste from the Ruisui and a more pronounced woody bitterness at first. The Alishan also had a bergamot aftertaste that I enjoyed.

I agreed with Dan that the Ruisui tasted “like tea,” especially after tasting the similarities with the honey fragrance black tea. It had a very smooth tannin and a honey mouthfeel with almost oolong-level floral character. It definitely tasted very similar to the Ruisui coffee. The red oolong had a bright apricot fruitiness and a light, smooth mouthfeel. It echoed the bergamot brightness and had an almost slippery, mineral quality to the sweetness as it cooled. It was interesting to taste the similarities between the coffees and teas from each place. It was particularly interesting because they were so distinct from each other. I think choosing two different styles of tea to pair accentuated this, too.

Ultimately, Dan finished the Ruisui coffee, while I drank as much of the Alishan coffee as I could before my stomach rebelled (I don’t do well with black coffee). I went on to taste a second steeping of the teas, steeped for 2:30. The Alishan developed a strong honey aroma on the liquor, with flavors of honey and bergamot and a honey-water mouthfeel. There was a sweet floral, maybe a gardenia or lily, note to the flavor as it lingered. The Ruisui tea didn’t have a lot of aroma on the liquor, with a light flavor that mostly showed fruity acidity and some honey aroma detected retronasally.

All in all, this was a fascinating experiment and I’m excited to try another coffee-and-tea tasting again sometime.

NB: Nothing to declare. If you’re interested in reading why I’ve stopped reviewing teas, in favor of tasting notes, please read this post. If you’re interested in collaborating with me, please read my contact and collaboration information.

Adventures in Portable Tea with Tea Drops

Recently, Tea Drops* offered to send me some of their flavors after I was accepted into their affiliate program, so I’ve been trying their Classic Tea Drops Assortment* over the last couple of weeks. As I mentioned in my post on Pique Tea’s offerings, I’m a fan of finding ways to take tea with me on the go that is less complicated even than bringing a high-quality tea bag. Add to that recent concerns with microplastics in silky tea bags, and I’m always in the market for a way to take tea along with me that doesn’t immediately reveal me as a high-maintenance tea snob.

Tea Drops are a different direction of portable tea because they focus on flavors. Tea Drops are sweetened because the form is a compressed tea nugget, almost like a tea-flavored sugar cube, rather than a packet of powder. It’s worth noting that if you have to avoid all sugar, they do have some unsweetened types, but I went for their classic flavors: Rose Earl Grey*, Sweet Peppermint*, Citrus Ginger*, and Matcha Green Tea*. They come in a wooden gift box with two of each flavor. But the sweetened original Tea Drops have between 1-2 teaspoons of sugar each, so it’s not a huge amount of sugar. Just enough to give a pleasantly sweet cup of tea.

Now, I don’t drink a lot of sweetened tea, so these fit into a specific part of my life: namely lattes and after-dinner drinks. In the mornings, I will often have a lightly-sweetened tea latte instead of a solid breakfast. Sadly, the Rose Earl Grey Tea Drop didn’t have quite the right balance of sweetness, rose, and Earl Grey flavor for me. I had hoped that it would be a quick and easy way to recreate my favorite Rose Earl Grey latte from the local coffee shop. Plus, the tea is actually finely powdered tea leaves, not dehydrated brewed tea like the Pique Tea crystals. So there was a fair amount of sediment in the cup.

But the Matcha Green Tea Drop was made from a good blend of sugar and matcha powder. It wasn’t the best quality matcha powder, but it was certainly comparable to what you’d get at a Starbucks. In fact, a Matcha Tea Drop mixed into a cup of hot milk with my electric frother is probably the easiest dupe of a Starbucks green tea latte (I get mine “unsweetened” — that is, without the additional syrup on top of the sugar in their green tea powder). And the matcha mixes into the latte with little to no sediment.

The two caffeine-free flavors I tried were good for the other time I drink tea with sugar: when I want something sweet after dinner, but don’t want to eat a full dessert. Since Elliot started on solids, I’ve been watching how often I eat sweets, and we’ve largely stopped eating dessert most nights of the week. But once in a while I want a little something sweet, and while I love a hot chocolate, I don’t always want the dairy right before bed. So I’ve started having one of the caffeine-free Tea Drops as an after-dinner treat. It’s the perfect level of sweetness for me. The Citrus Ginger is a little heavier on the citrus and a little lighter on the ginger than I prefer (although I do drink straight sliced ginger in hot water, so I like it spicy). The Sweet Peppermint one is my favorite. It’s the perfect mix of peppermint tea and sweetness. These also have a sediment problem, but it’s fine enough not to be unpleasant, and it doesn’t detract from the experience.

Tea Drops also makes some other flavors that look interesting, such as their Cardamom Spice and their Dessert Collection, so perhaps I will keep exploring. All in all, I enjoyed this foray into sweetened, portable tea. If you like your tea a little sweet and want something that you could toss in your purse and take with you for when you have hot water or milk, these are definitely worth a look.

NB: These were sent to me free of charge in exchange for my honest thoughts. Links may be affiliate links, which are marked with an asterisk. If you’re interested in my other affiliate links, you can find them here. If you’re interested in contacting me for a collaboration, please read this page.

Tuesday Tasting: Two Dongfeng Meiren Teas

Today, I’m doing another comparative tasting, this time of two Dongfang Meiren (or “Eastern Beauty”) teas I got from two different sources. I got the first in my Floating Leaves Tea order that I mentioned last week, and the second I bought at Ching Ching Cha in Georgetown after Nazanin of Tea Thoughts mentioned that it was good. After trying them both separately, I thought it would be interesting to try them side-by-side. I’m continuing to use my cupping sets because it’s supposed to be a good way to evaluate teas quickly.

I used 3 grams of leaves for each 125-ml cupping set, with 95C water. I did warm the vessels before adding the dry leaves, but I didn’t rinse. I ended up steeping each three times. The dry leaf aroma on the Floating Leaves (FL) tea was of toast with honey, while the Ching Ching Cha (CCC) tea smelled of floral honey.

The first steeping was for two minutes. The FL wet leaves smelled of clover honey and yielded a medium-dark gold liquor with a light hay or alfalfa flavor and a light mouthfeel. The empty cup smelled of muguet. The CCC wet leaves smelled of buckwheat honey and yielded a lighter gold liquor with a honey aroma. It had a sweet fruity flavor and a honey-water mouthfeel. There was a lingering cereal sweetness and the empty cup smelled of hay and honey.

The second steeping was for two and a half minutes. The CCC wet leaves smelled of honey with a touch of smoke. The liquor aroma had a slight incense-smoke quality to it. The mouthfeel was thicker and juicier with a more pronounced straw flavor and less sweetness. There was a mild tannin. The empty cup smelled of honey and sandalwood. The FL wet leaves smelled of sweet grain. The mouthfeel was syrupy with floral and mild tannins. It tasted a bit like red raspberry leaf tea. The empty cup smelled faintly of caramel.

The third steeping was for three minutes. Both teas were obviously past their best flavors. The FL wet leaves had started to smell a bit like wet paper, and had a light honey sweetness but was obviously fading. The CCC had a sweet aroma, but fading, with a fruity honey sweetness. The spent leaves were similar in appearance, though the CCC leaves seemed a bit bigger.

NB: No affiliate links or promotional samples to disclose. To learn about contacting me for a collaboration, click here.

On Affiliate Links, Collaborations, Sponsorship, and Making Money as a Blogger

So this comes up more often in the beauty community, but every review blogging niche has some sort of relationship with brands and affiliate networks. While I’m a relatively small-time blogger, especially by beauty-and-lifestyle measures, I’ve accepted products in exchange for review and used referral links in the past. I’ve never done a fully sponsored post and video, but I would be open to it, and my contact information gives the guidelines I set out for such a collaboration. But I see people all the time either belittling bloggers and social media users who accept sponsorship or review samples, or else proudly proclaiming that they don’t accept products for review or sponsorship, and I thought I’d share some thoughts I have on the subject.

On the face of it, it seems like refusing to accept any compensation, whether in product or currency, for your blogging is admirable. You can’t be bought, and there’s no worry that you’ll give a product a good review because you feel bad criticizing it when you got it for free. Well, Tracy at Fanserviced talked about that a while ago, and, as she points out, concrete “stuff” is not the only “compensation” bloggers and social media users get for mentioning products in their spaces. It can feel warm and fuzzy when a seemingly-unapproachable brand notices you because you said something nice about their product. Getting mentioned by a brand can be a fantastic way to increase your visibility on some channels, and mentioning their products is a good way to do that.

But that discounts something even more insidious about blogging, particularly review blogging: it can be a really expensive hobby. I mean, if I still reviewed beauty products, how much readership would I still have, given that I haven’t really added a new product to my routine in months? I certainly wouldn’t be able to post every week, since I just don’t buy that much new product. And if I did, even if it were a moderately-priced range like The Ordinary, I would still probably be spending at least $100 per month to keep posting twice a week, if I were just reviewing products. Even as a tea blogger, I spend a lot of money on tea, but I’m fortunate enough to consider that “fun money” rather than something I need to do (I have plenty of fodder for Tasting Tuesday from my own stash and haven’t bought anything special for it yet). But someone who doesn’t have as much disposable income as I do wouldn’t necessarily be able to showcase as many things on a blog. And that means they wouldn’t get much traffic.

Now, as I said when I talked about switching from reviewing to tasting notes on teas, taste is subjective, just as beauty products are often intensely personal. So I’m not here to tell anyone they should or shouldn’t buy a specific tea. But because I spend my own money on tea, I’m looking at things like “value” from the perspective of my personal budget. So while I might not be willing to spend $150 on a cake of raw puerh, I would be perfectly willing to spend $65 on the same size cake of aged white tea. But let’s be honest with ourselves: these are luxuries. And $65 is solidly out of the budget of plenty of people. So me saying that a $65 cake is “worth the money” doesn’t mean much to someone with $5 a week to spend on nonessentials. And my honesty that I loved the $150 cake, but it’s too expensive to repurchase if I hadn’t gotten a sample for review, might actually be more applicable to more of my readers, especially since it leads me to talk about ways to try the tea for less money (i.e., samples).

So given that review blogging can be an expensive hobby, do we really want to make income a barrier to entry for the people we trust as “more authentic” sources of reviews? Would you rather read a review of a $100 face cream from someone who has hundreds of dollars of discretionary income to spend on luxuries each month, or a review of a sample of a $200 face cream that someone got for free and wouldn’t have been able to try otherwise? Do you want to limit blogging to a hobby for relatively wealthy people, or would you rather support bloggers who try to earn some income from their blogging so that there is more socioeconomic diversity in the field? These aren’t questions I can answer for anyone but myself, and it bears thinking about all sides of this. But, given that there is already a recognized correlation between financial wealth and good skin, I’m concerned that limiting beauty blogging, in particular, to those with the independent means to support it will limit reviews to those who might already have good skin to begin with (or at the very least, more access to other ways to improve their skin besides over-the-counter products).

And then, for me, there is the fact that not everyone who reads this blog has my exact tastes in tea, and I’m not only writing this blog for myself. Let’s be honest, if I were only writing for myself, I would keep it as a private journal, not a public blog. And as I dive deeper into the tea community, I’ve realized that the snobbery that sometimes underscores a lot of specialty tea writing doesn’t do us any favors. So why not feature some products that offer convenience or variety to those of my readers who aren’t looking for the funkiest puerh or the most obscure yancha? Which is part of the reason I accepted my recent review samples from Tea Sparrow — as a North American-based company that offers high-quality flavored teas, they’re poised to appeal to a larger variety of people and can help me bring quality loose leaf tea to more of my friends and family (I have already gotten my mother and my coworker hooked on their teas). Would I buy myself a box from them? No. I am not generally a fan of flavored teas. But was it probably helpful for some of my readers who enjoy flavored teas? Hopefully. And apart from that, I hope that sharing notes from teas like that helps foster a sense that there isn’t a hierarchy of tea purity where you’re not a “real tea lover” if you’re not drinking a specific level of tea. I’m not a fan of that attitude. If you want to drink pina colada tea with sugar and milk (coconut milk might be fun), you do you.

Plus, there is the idea of compensating creators for what they create. Apart from the monetary outlay of purchasing products for review posts, writing takes time. I’m fortunate to have a reasonable amount of free time and a talent for writing quickly, but I still probably spend at least a few hours every week writing content (and that’s not even getting into the time I spend on my YouTube channel) and promoting it on various social media channels so people actually see it. Yes, I write because I love it, but it still takes time, and I’m a firm believer that if you appreciate the work a creator makes, you should support it monetarily, either by donating to them (as I do to my favorite podcast and my favorite radio station) or by supporting their efforts to monetize their work through ads and affiliate links. You wouldn’t expect an artist to give you their art for free (don’t answer that; I know many people do), so why is a blogger less worthy of receiving compensation for their time, effort, and talent?

I suppose all of this rambling is also a bit of an introduction to my own affiliate practices. While I’ve used referral links in the past (for Glossier, most notably), I’ve recently decided to start using some affiliate links to see if I could offset a little of the cost of running this blog. I currently make exactly zero money from blogging, and even if I could start making enough money to support my half of the bread that I currently win for my family, I probably wouldn’t quit my job. I like my day job. But I still sometimes feel compelled to buy things specifically for a blog or YouTube idea I have, and this might help offset that (especially with my historical videos). And, at the end of the day, I don’t really think that having the money to spend on a blog should be a badge of honor.

Tuesday Tasting: Taiwan Ruby 18 Black Tea from Floating Leaves Tea

I ordered a few teas from Floating Leaves Tea a little while ago, but I’ve been remiss in showing them the love they deserve. So, to remedy this, I decided to do a tasting of the Ruby 18 black tea this week. I’ve also started exploring tea cupping using a cupping set I got from Camellia Sinensis (or, if you want a US-based store, Art of Tea has a similar one*). I’m still learning the ropes of tasting in this style of brewing vessel, so I played around a bit. I suppose I might want to take an actual course in tea cupping, but that’s not really my style, so for now, I’m experimenting.

I used 3g of leaf in a 125-ml cupping set with 99C water. I did not rinse or preheat my cupping set before starting the tasting, but I did smell the dry leaves after adding them to the vessel. I got aromas of dried fruit, like prunes and sweet cherries, from the dry leaf. I did not rinse the tea.

The first steeping was for two minutes, after which, I got sweet aromas, almost like the glue on the back of old postage stamps, from the leaves. I know this sounds like an odd note, but it’s actually a very positive and comforting aroma for me because it reminds me of helping my mother at the office on snow days when my school was closed. The liquor was a rich mahogany brown color and really exemplifies why the Chinese refer to this kind of tea as “red tea” rather than “black tea,” as the West calls it. The liquor had a light fruity and smoky aroma. The body was medium-rich and had a lightly syrupy mouthfeel, with a hint of dryness afterwards. There was a light, smooth tannic flavor, followed by caramelized onion and dark stone fruit. This developed into a sweet-acidic flavor that reminded me of dried tart cherries and amaretto.

The second steeping, I went for two and a half minutes. The wet leaves smelled of caramel and wood. The liquor was slightly lighter in color, with a sweet smell that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, like some sort of sweet-smelling herb. The mouthfeel was richer and juicier with no dryness. The flavor had a sweet cereal taste, like barley syrup or toasted soybean powder with brown sugar. I still get stamp glue from the flavor. The cup aroma after finishing the liquor was pure caramelized sugar, and I noted that I was starting to sweat.

The third steeping was for three minutes, after which I got aromas of wet paper from the leaves. The liquor was a similar color to the second steeping, with a faint sandalwood aroma. The mouthfeel is the same round, rich feel, but there is an acidic note, almost like a tomatillo, on the taste. The liquor was starting to taste a bit papery, which is often a sign that the tea is about finished. The fourth steeping, for three and a half minutes, was the last. The liquor was lighter — a dark apricot color — and the leaf aroma was exhausted. Only the acidic notes seemed left to the flavor with a bit of woodiness.

The spent leaves were surprisingly large. I actually took a photo after the second steeping, but was surprised by how much more they expanded over the next two steepings, so I had to photograph it again. I’m definitely going to have to explore more Taiwanese red tea cultivars.

NB: Tea was purchased by me and all thoughts are my own. Links may be affiliate links (affiliate links noted with an asterisk). If you’re interested in supporting the blog by using my affiliate links, you can find them here. If you’re interested in collaborating or providing tea for tasting, you can find my contact and collaboration information here.

On Tea Blending and Herbal Teas

A little while ago, I posted a picture on Instagram of a pot of tea that was a seemingly-random mix of things I tossed into a teapot and steeped in hot water and that tasted good. I got a comment asking if I’d consider making a video about blending herbal teas and sourcing herbs, but on thinking about it, I decided that it really fit a written post format better. I have gone into herbal tea blends a bit in the herbal tea section of my Tea Primer, but I thought I’d expand a bit on how I blend teas, since it really applies to so many things I make in my life. So this post is an attempt to expand on how I source and blend herbs.

Sourcing Botanical Ingredients:

Now, I’m going to refer to “botanical ingredients” or “botanicals” instead of “herbs” because there is some ambiguity about what makes a plant an “herb” versus a “spice,” and other categories of botanicals. And I use all kind of plants to create my botanical blends. It’s important to remember that herbal tea doesn’t just need to be botanicals from the herb store, and that everything we ingest has some effect on our body. So distinguishing between medicinal and culinary herbs or herbs and spices is largely arbitrary and meaningless.

So my first recommendation is to see what you can get from your local grocery store. I’m fortunate that my grocery store has a large selection of bulk botanicals, so I can buy small amounts of things I need for my herbal studies, as well as botanical ingredients for my kitchen (although all my herbs live in the kitchen). But I recognize that that’s not the norm, at least in the States, so I wanted to remind people with more traditional grocery stores to search the spice aisle of their grocery stores, too. And the produce section! I get fresh ginger root every week from the produce section, and lately I’ve always been grabbing a couple citrus fruits for their peels. Your store may even have fresh sage or mint in the produce section, and these make lovely teas.

In the spice aisle, I get cardamom, cinnamon sticks, star anise pods, fennel seeds, allspice berries, and other spices I might use once in a while. If you’re interested in flavoring your own rooibos, a whole vanilla bean split and buried in a jar of rooibos leaves is supposed to be amazing (I am not a fan of vanilla-scented teas). I’ve also used dried, rubbed sage from the spice section for sage tea when I can’t find fresh. I don’t recommend using powdered spices for teas, as they’re usually of dubious freshness, and can make an unpleasantly gritty cup of tea, but if you don’t mind a bit of sugar, some chopped crystallized ginger makes a nice substitute. Some stores even sell dried orange peel. And I’ve been known to use black peppercorns in some of my blends (even better if they have that fancy multi-colored peppercorn blend because each color has a subtly different flavor).

Once you’ve exhausted the offerings at your grocery store, I highly recommend you look around and see if there is a local herb shop near you. Before we moved house, I lived near the fabulous Smile Herb Shop (I’m still not far from them, but it’s not walking-distance anymore, which makes me sad), so I could go there and get things in person. Going to a shop in person not only gives you the opportunity to see and smell the botanicals before you pay for them, but also gives you a community of herbal experts and enthusiasts with whom to connect and discuss favorite blends. Plus, they may even offer classes. So go to Google and see if there’s an herb shop near you (be aware that you may end up getting results that sell CBD, kratom, or cannabis, if that’s legal in your area!). The Herbal Academy also has a list of farms and suppliers by region, that might help, as does Living Awareness.  And if you’re in the DC area, stop by Smile, and then go next door and say hi to my acupuncturist, Jared!

Now, at a certain point, you’re going to need to source something online. I mentioned in my Tea Primer that my two favorite stores for online sourcing were Mortar and Petal* on Etsy and Mountain Rose Herbs, and these recommendations still stand, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail about how I use each of them.

Mountain Rose is my favorite place to get excellent-quality botanical ingredients, as well as other things like oils, butters, and some seasonings. The botanicals are always incredibly high-quality and they are transparent about their sourcing practices. Plus they have amazing customer service. But for most of their botanicals, the smallest quantity they sell is 4 oz. and the shipping costs make it more cost-effective to only buy rather large quantities at a time anyway. So I don’t prefer buying from them when I’m creating a new blend of exploring new botanicals because I’ll have to buy too much at once. But most of my standbys and favorites come from Mountain Rose. I have big bags of chamomile, oatstraw, red raspberry leaf, and lavender from them, as well as some things I can’t really find anywhere else of as good quality, like linden (one of my recent favorites!). Back when I still forced myself to drink nettle infusion regularly, I bought nettles from them, and I’ve waxed rhapsodic about their fabulous dried peppermint in the past.

But when I’m developing a new blend or I want to try a small amount of a botanical ingredient I can’t find at my local store, I turn to Mortar and Petal. They sell small quantities, maybe just a half an ounce to two ounces, so I can try a bit and not waste things if I don’t like it, and they ship things simply in a padded mailer to keep shipping costs down, rather than sending a whole box. When I was developing my pregnancy tea recipe, I knew I wanted it to be mostly red raspberry leaf, with other botanicals primarily for flavor, so I ordered small amounts of the flavoring ingredients from Mortar and Petal and got a pound of red raspberry leaf from Mountain Rose to make it. They’ve also been wonderful as I’ve been going through my herbalism course to try small amounts of botanicals that I might not normally use for my Materia Medica.

Finally, don’t forget about your tea sellers! I got a package of gorgeous large chrysanthemum flowers from Yunnan Sourcing, and some delicious chrysanthemum buds from Seven Cups. Mountain Stream Teas has a roselle hibiscus that is amazing (it really does taste like biting into a fresh strawberry). Often tea sellers come across other botanicals in their sourcing missions and decide to buy some of those as well, so don’t discount a seller just because they primarily sell C. sinensis. And tea sellers can be an excellent place to find ingredients that are not common in western herbalism, like chrysanthemum or other botanicals common in traditional Chinese medicine.

Storing Your Botanical Ingredients Properly

Now that you have your botanical ingredients, you want to keep them in tip-top shape so they last for you. Most botanicals I buy come in a zip-top bag. I like the bags from Mountain Rose because they’re nice and thick and they close reliably, but if I get botanicals in a less sturdy bag, I will usually move them to a glass jar. Mason jars are wonderful, as are just any jar you’ve saved from pantry goods or jams or such. I’ve written in the past about my love of jars and botanical storage is an excellent reason to start your own collection.

Keeping botanicals air-tight is not the only concern, however. You also want to keep them away from heat and light. Now, my kitchen is reasonably well-set-up so that I can keep my botanicals in a kitchen cabinet away from my stove so they stay fresh (I do keep culinary spices near the stove, but those don’t generally last too long before I use them up!). Because my pantry is open, I prefer to keep things in a cabinet to keep them in the dark. Storing your botanicals in jars also makes for a more organized presentation when you’re storing them, although I do still have to dig around in the back of the cabinet to pull things out when I’m making a complicated blend.

Other than that, the other important storage thing to keep in mind is to label the date that you either purchased or opened the botanical ingredients. I use the purchase date for botanicals I buy locally from a bulk store, and the opened date for botanicals from Mountain Rose that were in sealed bags, once I break the seal. Having the date on your botanicals is important because they do lose potency over time, no matter how good quality they are and how carefully you store them. That said, there’s no general rule for how long you can keep botanical ingredients. I have some red raspberry leaf that I got almost two years ago that’s still fragrant and delicious. So use your nose, eyes, and tongue to tell if your ingredients are still good.

Blending Delicious Herbal Teas

Alright, now you have your botanical ingredients and you’ve given them a lovely place to live. But how do you make them taste good together? Well, the short answer is that they taste good or they don’t; the only way to find out what tastes good to you is to experiment. But there are some culinary ideas that might help you reduce the error portion of “trial and error.”

First of all, understanding balanced flavors can be important. When I make a salad dressing or a marinade, I know that it’s important to balance flavors like salty, sweet, spicy, and tart. So if I add too much soy sauce to my marinade, I know I need to balance it with something like vinegar, and then if the vinegar is too sharp, I might add some honey or sugar. So I can translate that to tea, and if I’m making a tea blend with roselle, I know that can be quite tart, so I might want to tone it down with something sweeter or more fragrant. Perhaps I want to punch it up with some ginger, or tone it down with a sweet floral like chamomile.

On the flip side of that, you’ll also want to think about things that go well together. Contrasts are nice, but so is coordination. It’s why carrots and dill are often paired together — they’re both from the same botanical family, so their flavors meld particularly well. Now, I happen to despise dill, so I will use something like fennel in dishes that call for dill for a similar effect (fennel is also from the family Apiaceae). In herbal teas, the two main families to know about are Apiaceae and Lamiaceae. The first has your carrot relatives, including fennel, dill, cumin, parsley, anise, and many other herbs. The second is the minty family, with mints, as well as things like sage, lavender, thyme, and other fragrant botanicals. A very large portion of our catalog of botanical ingredients come from these two families, and knowing the plants in each can help you create harmonious blends. It’s why lavender and peppermint go so well together. Using botanicals in a similar family is a good starting point for a blend.

Another place to go for inspiration is, again, your grocery store and local shops. Perhaps you see a bagged tea that sounds interesting, or even that you already like, but you want a loose-leaf version. Or maybe there’s a tea that seems pretty good, but you think it would be better slightly different (I feel this way about pretty much every blend that uses licorice or stevia). Look at the back of the box and see what’s in it, and then play around with your own blend. Or look at a caffeinated blend and see if the flavors in it might be a good caffeine-free blend, such as the Jade Citrus Mint at Starbucks. The combination of peppermint, lemongrass, and other citrus is pretty classic. Personally, my go-to bedtime tea grew out of loving the Lavender Chamomile tea from Traditional Medicinals and wanting to make it with less trash from packets and teabags.

Ultimately, the best way to tell what blends taste good is to taste them. It’s important to taste pure botanicals to know what they taste like so you can see if you can guess what they might taste like in a blend. It’s similar to how I might taste plain honey or vinegar to remind myself how sweet or sharp it is to decide how much to add to a marinade or dressing. The other inspiration for my lavender chamomile blend was the fact that I wasn’t originally a fan of chamomile, but I thought the sweet floral flavor would pair nicely with the sharper, more camphorous floral of the lavender. And they do. Plus, I recently tasted some valerian root infusion (which smells like feet) and was surprised at how sweet it was, so that will inform any future blends in which I use it.

So feel free to start with single-note teas, I like to use at least a heaped teaspoon per 8 fl. oz. of water, with boiling water, steeped covered for 10-15 minutes, and then strained (some herbs get unpleasant if steeped too long). My favorite single-ingredient teas are fresh sliced ginger, fresh peppermint (I use a handful for a 16-oz. pot), chrysanthemum, and roselle. I use all of these ingredients in blends, but I originally started out with the simple infusion.

Many of my most complicated blends started out as single-note teas that I played with, kind of like writing a melody and then adding flourishes and harmonies to create a full choral piece. I couldn’t decide between chrysanthemum or ginger the other day, so I mixed them, and then added things as they sounded good. The result was the very complicated blend that I posted on Instagram the other week. Play around. Don’t be afraid to make something strange. Tastes are subjective and I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum.

So by way of an example, I wanted to go into detail about a blend I made recently. As I said, it started with indecision about whether I wanted ginger tea or chrysanthemum tea. Then, I wanted something to pump up the florality. Inspired by the classic Chinese “Eight Treasures” tea, I decided to add roses for a different floral note and some goji berries for their earthy sweetness. Finally, I added cardamom because 1.) I love cardamom, and 2.) it has a slight citrus note and I didn’t feel like peeling citrus. I could have added some orange peel if I felt like getting out the peeler. As far as sources, the roses, ginger, goji berries, and cardamom all came from my grocery store, while the chrysanthemum came from Yunnan Sourcing. I weighed out each ingredient as I added it and made a note so I could adjust it later. I think I could use a little more ginger and a little less rose next time.

Probably the most important part of tea blending is to take notes. Whether it’s a notes file on your phone or a dedicated tea blending journal, write down what you’re doing, or else you’ll never be able to replicate it. I like to use weight when I’m designing a new blend in a focused way, but I’ll also use a volume measurement, like the lovely wooden spoons my mother gave me. I’m terrible about writing things down, and there is a certain meditative sense of ephemera in creating a blend that you’ll never have again, but usually we want to be able to reproduce our delicious efforts. AND you’ll especially want to write down the fails so you don’t repeat them!

Finally, I want to encourage you to include C. sinensis in your blending experiments, if you drink it normally. Tea is just another botanical ingredient, and was originally considered an herbal medicine. In fact, when it first came to the western world, it was viewed as a remedy for gout, rather than a pleasure drink. So go ahead and blend some Tieguanyin with roses or some chrysanthemum with puerh. Botanicals love to play together.

A Note about Herbal Safety

Now, I am not an herbalist or a medical professional. But it is not an exaggeration to say that plants have effects on our bodies, and you would do well to keep that in mind as you blend botanicals. Especially if you take medications or have a condition that might make your health a little precarious, it’s important to know what the constituents of different plants might do in the body. So even if you’re not going to take an herbalism course, it would be a good idea to keep a reference collection of books on botanicals. I primarily use three books in my studies right now: The Way of Herbs, by Michael Tierra; A Modern Botanical, by Mrs. M. Grieves (also available online for free); and The Modern Herbal Dispensatory, by Easley and Horne. They are a good mix of science and folklore information, and have a pretty good variety of information. I always look up an ingredient, at least in Grieves, before using it in a blend to double-check that it’s not going to interact in an unexpected way.

So I hope that was an interesting introduction to my thoughts about blending botanicals. Let me know if you find any favorite blends!

NB: I am not a medical professional and none of this should be taken as medical advice or intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any disease. Additionally, everything mentioned in the post was purchased by me and all thoughts are my own. Some links may be affiliate links (marked with an asterisk), which will support the running of this blog if you make a sale through them. Please read my contact and collaboration information if you are interested in working with me.

Tuesday Tasting: Dragon Claw Oolong from Tea Runners

This Dragon Claw Oolong tea was part of the free Pure Teas box I received last month from Tea Runners that I unboxed on my YouTube channel recently, and I’ve been curious to try it. I finally opened it (I have a plethora of oolong right now) and decided to give it a taste. This is a rolled Nepalese oolong that looks semi-oxidized and was harvested in Summer 2018.

I used 5 grams of tea in a 120-ml gaiwan with 87C water. The dry leaf is dark green-brown and rolled into loose spirals. I get an aroma of cream and roasted nuts from it. I did not rinse it, but instead went straight into steeping it.

The first steeping was for 20 seconds. The wet leaf aroma was roasty with an undertone of hazelnut liqueur. The liquor was reddish amber brown and smelled of amaretto. It had a smooth, milky mouthfeel and almost tasted like black tea with maple syrup and milk. It has a jammy and sweet fruity aftertaste, maybe like prunes. It also had a lingering flavor of roasted nuts. The second steeping was also for 20 seconds and yielded a slightly darker liquor with more roast aroma on the wet leaf and a fruity aroma on the liquor. It had a similar tea-with-milk flavor, with a hint of Frangelico.

By the third steeping, also for 20 seconds, while the liquor was a similar color, I noticed the flavor becoming milder, with some tannin coming through. I left the fourth steeping for 45 seconds and for some cherry and firewood aromas from the wet leaves. The liquor had a lovely maple sweetness. The fifth steeping, also for 45 seconds, had lighter flavors and tasted of cherries, almonds, and tannin. By the sixth steeping, for a full minute, the tea seemed done.

The spent leaves were interesting, as they were quite narrow and small, despite being a whole-leaf tea. I’m used to oolongs have big fat leaves, but these were different from other oolong leaves I’ve examined. All in all, this was an intriguing oolong and makes me curious to try other non-black Nepalese teas.

NB: This tea was sent free of charge in exchange for my honest thoughts. All thoughts are my own. To learn more about the format of my tea tasting posts and why I switched from reviews to tastings, please read this post. For more information about collaborating with me, please read my collaboration information.