Talking Tea

We're exploring pairing tea and chocolate today with Debbie Raab, co-owner and co-founder of the unique and delightful Tea for All in Lawrence, New Jersey. One of the things that makes Tea for All unique is its location inside the Trenton Farmers Market, the longest-running indoor farm market in New Jersey. Before delving into the pairings, Debbie shares with us a bit of the history of Tea For All and the tea journey she and her husband Mike Raab (Tea For All's other co-owner and co-founder) have taken, as we discuss Debbie's approach to teaching about tea and to creating and experimenting with pairings. Debbie chats with us about her view of the importance of trial and error in exploring and experiencing tea and tea-chocolate pairings and her preferences for choosing chocolates for pairing , and then begins the pairings themselves. We taste six tea and chocolate pairings in all. During the pairings, we talk about the differences between pairings that contrast, pairings that complement and pairings that enhance the flavors of the tea and the chocolate, different methods for tasting the teas and the chocolates, and how tea and chocolate pairings can lead to new discoveries about the flavors and textures of our teas. And Debbie also tells us about some of Tea For All's ongoing and periodic events, classes and tea practice sessions. For easy reference for trying these or similar pairings at home, the time marks for the teas and types of chocolates (by cacao percentage) we paired are: 11:05: 58% cacao paired with a gyokuro kukicha (Tea For All's Kukicha Supreme), followed by the same chocolate paired with Doke Black Fusion, a black tea from Bihar State, India. 21:21: 60% cacao paired with Ganesha Green, a Nepali green tea from the Kanchanjangha Tea Estate, followed by the same chocolate paired with Chota Tingrai Assam black tea from Assam, India. 30:50: 71% cacao paired with a black tea from the town of Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii (Tea For All's Hawaii Volcano Premium Black). 36:25: 72% cacao paired with a Bao Zhong from Taiwan. During the pairings we took some time between tasting the chocolates and tasting the teas to allow Debbie to brew the tea and to allow the flavors of the chocolate to settle in the mouth, and sometimes to take a palate cleanser (Debbie used small tidbits of celery). You won't hear these gaps in the podcast, but you may want to take these pauses if you're doing the pairings at home. Tea for All is located in the Trenton Farmers Market, 960 Spruce Street, Lawrence NJ. Hours, event information and Tea For All's online store are on its website, tea-for-all.com. You can find Tea For All on Instagram and and Facebook feeds at Tea-For-All Tea Shoppe. Follow Talking Tea on Facebook or on Instagram at talkingteapodcasts Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. more about Talking Tea The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original.

When a listener requested an episode about teapots. we realized that this was a topic we haven't really delved into on Talking Tea. And having attended one of tea blogger, writer and teacher Scott Norton's incredibly comprehensive seminars on yixing teaware, we invited Scott to join us for an in-depth overview of teapots, their design elements, their history and how to best match your teapots with your teas. You may remember Scott from our episode Glimpsing Tea's Past, Finding Tea's Presence, at New York's Floating Mountain. Today we begin by chatting a bit about Scott's "teapot journey" and his background collecting, curating and teaching about teapots. And then we begin to explore various styles of Japanese and Chinese teapots. We start by comparing two very different teapots from 19th century Japan, a larger blue and white porcelain teapot and a small lotus-leaf design kyusu, and we discuss the advantages offered by small teapots in control over the brewing process and obtaining more pronounced flavors from our teas. As we move to Chinese teapots, we compare porcelain, glazed ceramic and unglazed clay teapots and the relative advantages and disadvantages of each. Scott chats with us about how to tell if an unglazed clay teapot is highly fired or low fired, and how the levels of firing and coarseness of the clay can create distinct differences in flavor and the results of our brewing. We also touch on the history of teapots and the influence of the Silk Road trade on teapot design and evolution in China. Scott has some rather large teapots in his collection, and we discuss when we might want to use a larger teapot and how to best use a large-size pot. Finally we chat with Scott about the questions we need to consider in matching our teapots to our teas, and Scott gives us tips on buying teapots and how shopping for a teapot can and should be an extension of our tea practice. Scott Norton's blog is at scotttea.wordpress.com. You can find Scott on Instagram @cutechajin, and videos of a number of Scott's workshops and seminars are available on his YouTube channel. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken. more about Talking Tea Sign up for our email list to get updates on new episodes and events. The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. All images on this episode page, other than the header image, are courtesy of Scott Norton. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original. Header image "Raw Puerh mid 1980 Menghai" by Cosmin Dordea, used under a Creative Commons CC By-SA 2.0 license. Adapted from original.

We're delving into some sticky topics today on Talking Tea as we look at the roles mass marketing, gender, racism and modern British history have played in shaping tea markets and tea culture in the West. Joining us is historian Erika Rappaport, author of the recently published book A Thirst For Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. Erika's work as a historian focuses in the areas of gender, consumer culture and British history, and "A Thirst for Empire" delves into all of these areas in looking at the forces that shaped tea culture and tea markets in the West. Erika talks with us about how tea can shine a spotlight on the role of mass marketing in shaping modern tastes and trade. We discuss the origins of her book, exploring the long association of tea with women and feminine culture in the UK and the US. We chat about the influence of the "temperance" movements of the 19th century, promoting tea and tea culture as a healthier and spiritually beneficial alternative to alcohol, and the role of industry lobbies in promoting sweet tea in the West and especially iced tea in the US. We look at the reasons for the shift in Western consumer preference from green tea to black tea in the 19th and 20th centuries. And we look at the disturbing use of racism and nationalism in advertising by British tea planters to promote "Empire" tea over Chinese tea, and how this eventually led to the widespread preference in the West for industrialized, mass-produced commodity tea. A Thirst for Empire is published by Princeton University Press, and is widely available at retailers. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken. more about Talking Tea Sign up for our email list to get updates on new episodes and events. The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original. Image of British soldier drinking tea in 1944 India, © IWM (IB 1882), courtesy of the Imperial War Museum. More information on the photo is available at https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205193624 Header image "Raw Puerh mid 1980 Menghai" by Cosmin Dordea, used under a Creative Commons CC By-SA 2.0 license. Adapted from original.

Most everyone is familiar with pairing wine and cheese, but pairing tea and cheese is much less well known and less understood. (By the way, that's tea in the glass in the photo above, not wine.) Some tea drinkers may even find the idea of tea and cheese pairing a bit counterintuitive, if not a bit, well, odd. But at Talking Tea we've experienced some delicious pairings of tea with cheese, so we wanted to explore the issue more in depth. Joining us today to talk about pairing tea with cheese, and to do some pairings with us, is Lisa Boalt Richardson. Lisa is a tea writer and educator who has written and taught on the subject of pairing tea with cheese and other foods, making tea and food pairings accessible and easy to understand. We begin our chat by looking at the basic premises behind tea and food pairings from a common-sense perspective, and then we start to look specifically at pairing cheese with tea. Lisa explains why cheese and tea can pair very well together, and we chat about the importance of identifying levels of fat in cheese and astringency in tea, as well as other elements in the flavor and mouthfeel of each, in order to create excellent pairings. We discuss different goals in creating pairings, as well as different methods of tasting the tea and the cheese we're pairing. And then we do two pairings together: a triple-cream cheese paired with a first flush darjeeling, and then the same cheese with an assam, as we talk about the reasons Lisa suggested these pairings, the results of the pairings and why some pairings are likely to work better than others. More information about Lisa Boalt Richardson, including info on her book Modern Tea: A Fresh Look at an Ancient Beverage (referenced in the episode), is at her website, lisaknowstea.com. You can also find Lisa on Facebook at lisaknowstea. Lisa is also an instructor at the World Tea Academy; info on their courses and programs is at worldteaacademy.com. The cheese used by Talking Tea was St. Stephen's triple-cream, made by Four Fat Fowl and purchased at DiBruno Brothers in Philadelphia. The teas Talking Tea used in our pairings were purchased at Camellia Sinensis Tea House and at Tea Dealers. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken. more about Talking Tea Sign up for our email list to get updates on new episodes and events. The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original. Header image "Raw Puerh mid 1980 Menghai" by Cosmin Dordea, used under a Creative Commons CC By-SA 2.0 license. Adapted from original.

Today we're chatting with Zhen Lu and Phil Rushworth of Zhen Tea about a category of tea that's not widely understood outside of China or even within China, and that's heicha, or "dark tea", hailing from outside the pu erh region. You may remember Zhen and Phil from our earlier episode "Lapsang Souchong - Beyond the Smoke", and today we're chatting at the Zhen Tea headquarters in Ottawa, Canada. Now pu erh (at least shu pu erh) is a dark tea, and plenty of people know plenty about pu erh. But the many wonderful non-pu erh dark teas don't enjoy the same celebrity status as pu erh, and those teas are what we're focusing on in this episode. (We're intentionally avoiding the highly controversial issue of whether sheng pu erh is properly called heicha, which could be a topic for an entire episode on its own.) Zhen and Phil carry a varied selection of dark teas, and they chat with us about the sometimes confusing nomenclature of heicha, its somewhat murky history, its regions of origin and terroir, and "wet piling", the fermentation process that makes heicha unique among all teas. We sample and discuss two dark teas - an aged Fu Zhuan from 2013, and a new experimental take on traditional Tibetan tea - as we talk about the variations of flavor and mouthfeel in non-pu erh dark teas, how the flavors differ from typical shu pu erh flavor profiles, and how these variations are influenced by terroir and growing conditions. Zhen and Phil also brief us on some of the innovations we're beginning to see in heicha and the delicacy and difficulty of the wet-piling process, and we talk about the relaxing, almost meditative, physical and mental sensations many of us experience with heicha. Zhen also gives us some tips on storing dark teas at home. More on Zhen Tea, including its teas, teaware, online store and new online magazine Charen, is at zhentea.ca. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken. more about Talking Tea Sign up for our email list to get updates on new episodes and events. The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original. Photo of Zang Cha-Gan Hong courtesy of Zhen Tea. Header image "Raw Puerh mid 1980 Menghai" by Cosmin Dordea, used under a Creative Commons CC By-SA 2.0 license. Adapted from original.

As December comes to a close and winter deepens here in the northern hemisphere, we're continuing our turn inward as we conclude our two-part series on the spirit of tea as reflected in chado, the Japanese way of tea. Today we're focusing on chabana, the art of flowers so integral to Japanese tea ceremony. To chat with us about chabana we're welcoming back Drew Hanson, an instructor in the Urasenke school of chado and founder/owner of the Boukakuan Japanese Tea House in New Jersey. (You may remember Drew from an earlier chado-related Talking Tea episode, Tea, Heart to Heart.) We're with Drew in the tea room at Boukakuan, and Drew talks with us about the guiding principles of chabana and how the flowers in the tea room relate to us as humans, mirroring our own constant state of transition and transience. Drew gives us specific guidance on how to choose and present flowers for tea, and we discuss the history of chabana and its relationship to Buddhism in Japan. We chat about bringing nature into the tea room in a very focused way, relating the flowers and their container to the season and the differences between chabana and Western traditions of flower arranging so vividly pointed out in Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea. For more info on the Boukakuan Japanese Tea House, including info on Japanese tea ceremony classes and demonstrations, go to the Boukakuan website at njgreentea.com. Ken Cohen's audiobook edition of Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea, published by Spoken Realms, is available at Audible.com , Amazon and iTunes. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken. more about Talking Tea Sign up for our email list to get updates on new episodes and events. The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original.

Today on Talking Tea we're doing something a little different from our usual format. A few weeks back we were invited by the folks at Tea Dealers and the 29b Tea House (featured in our prior episode Ambassadors of Tea) to join them in conversation at an evening of tea and alcohol experiments they were planning and record the event for Talking Tea. We did just that, and we're pleased to bring you the event as a Talking Tea episode. We join Andreas Vagelatos and Graham Pirtle of Tea Dealers, Jesse Ferguson of Interboro Spirits & Ales and a crowd of about 30 guests at New York's Hotel on Rivington for this evening exploring new approaches to tea and mixology. Graham, along with Stefen Ramirez of Tea Dealers, had come up with three innovative cocktails for this event, and Graham chats with us about their unique approach to tea in mixology, borrowing pairing ideas from the culinary world, and the challenges of leveraging the flavors and textures of the teas and the other ingredients in the drinks. We also chat with Graham about the long history of tea in cocktails and its current revival. The cocktails used three teas - matcha, hojicha and rou gui - and as Andreas guides us through the tastings he talks with us about each of these teas and their use in the cocktails, the philosophy behind 29b's tea cocktail programs and the similarities between the nomenclature, flavors and other sensory experiences in tea, wine and spirits. Jesse chats with us throughout the evening about Interboro's spirits and how they interact with the other ingredients of the cocktails, and we discuss the overall flavor profiles and sensations resulting from the pairings and the various flavor components in each of the drinks. Andreas and Graham point out how the flavors and aromas of tea, spirits and mixed drinks can sometimes be nostalgic, and how Tea Dealers crafted these cocktails not only to bring out excellent results in flavor, aroma and sensation, but also to highlight some of the nostalgic and evocative qualities of the teas and the spirits. The episode also includes comments and questions from the guests at the event. More info on Interboro is at its website interboro.nyc and at its Instagram feed. Info on Tea Dealers and 29b is at tea-dealers.com/pages/29b and Instagram feed. For info on the Hotel on Rivington, visit hotelonrivington.com. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken. more about Talking Tea Sign up for our email list to get updates on new episodes and events. The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original.

Today we welcome back to Talking Tea Shiuwen Tai of Seattle's Floating Leaves tea to chat about one of our favorite teas, Taiwan's celebrated Dong Ding oolong. Shiuwen believes that Dong Ding represents everything that Taiwan has to offer in terms of producing tea, and we chat about the qualities that make Dong Ding unique in this capacity. We discuss three basic styles of Dong Ding – traditional, fragrant and charcoal roasted – and together we taste and compare both a traditional and a charcoal roasted Dong Ding. Shiuwen points out that Dong Ding is a very "physical" tea, and we talk about the tea's physical sensations as well as its flavors and aromas. We discuss the impact of Dong Ding's terroir (particularly its soil) and oxidation levels, and Shiuwen tells us about a continuing controversy over Dong Ding's cultivar. When we move from tasting a traditional Dong Ding to a charcoal roasted Dong Ding, Shiuwen chats with us about the effects of charcoal roasting, both for Dong Ding and for oolongs in general, and how a good charcoal master can focus and amplify the complexity and beauty of a tea. More info on Floating Leaves, including its online store, shop hours and classes, can be found at the Floating Leaves website, http://www.floatingleavestea.com, and at its Instagram feed. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken. more about Talking Tea Sign up for our email list to get updates on new episodes and events. The views and opinions expressed by guests on Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its staff. This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original. Photo of charcoal Dong Ding by Payton, available under a Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 license.