Tea and me
Oct. 23rd, 2008 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt's quite peculiar, what's happened with tea and me, and I wonder if it isn't in some way symptomatic. Something to do with globalisation, or with the spectral nature of branding, or with the ironies of snobbism, perhaps?
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Basically, I started by drinking PG Tips -- for "PG Tips" read any generic supermarket black tea, blended and sold in bags -- and I've come back full circle to drinking PG Tips again. Now, coming full circle either means I've repudiated the quest for novelty, refinement and exoticism which has marked most of my last thirty years of tea-drinking, or it means that I'm somehow drinking an old tea in a new way, and that I've come back to monopoly in a self-consciously "post-diversity" way. I wonder if anyone else has done the same thing -- ridden the diversity ride and come back to where they started?
Basically, when I was about 20 (ie in 1980) I discovered my first "exotic" tea, Twinings Earl Grey. It was a time when Twinings were expanding their range, and a time when British supermarkets were diversifying their stock. People now would probably be appalled at the British supermarkets of 1980 -- at how little there actually was on the shelves, how industrially toxic the stock was, and how British they were. (Morrissey would pretend to love it, but escape at the first opportunity to a deli.)
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Earl Grey became my staple tea, and in my mind at the time (this was, after all, the dawn of New Romanticism) it made a statement about me: that my "standard" was slightly more perfumed (with bergamot, as it happened) than yours. That there was no "normal" in my world, mate. No PG Tips monkeys for me, thank you, but, instead, aristocrats and discrimination. I may have been a euro-communist, but I drank an imperial and aristocratic tea with a little text on the box about Earl Grey, a British prime minister of the 1830s said to have been gifted the perfumed blend by a grateful Chinese mandarin whose drowning son had been saved by British soldiers.
While others experimented with drugs, my next-door neighbour Simon Artley and I experimented in halls of residence with the Twinings range. Simon would call me out of my tiny room into the communal kitchen with "Cup of tea, Nick? Earl Grey? Darjeeling? Lapsang?"
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For quite a while I stuck to Earl Grey, with occasional cups of smokey Lapsang Souchong. But in the early 90s -- about 1993 -- I remember noticing that Earl Grey had become a standard tea in Britain. A posh computer consultant came round to my flat in Covent Garden that year and specifically asked for Earl Grey tea. You'd go to an estate agent's office and they'd bring you Earl Grey without even being asked. It seemed that the fruity taste of Earl Grey appealed to the British sweet tooth. I began to see it as part of the sweetening and over-flavouring of everything, and I suppose I began to tire of it.
In 1994 I was married, and living in Paris with Shazna. One day we were walking up the Rue Sainte-Anne, the Japanese street near Opera, and we went into Voyageurs du Monde, a cross between a cultural centre and a travel agency, a place specialising in high-end cultural tours of exotic Asian lands. Voyageurs du Monde was -- in a very French way -- unapologetically orientalist, exaggerating Asia's otherness and selling it to bourgeois tourists. The day we visited there was a rickshaw exhibition and cups of Yunnan tea were being handed out in little earthenware cups.
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The Yunnan tea was subtle and dark and mature and authentic. You drank it without milk, and I'd long ago stopped taking sugar in my tea. From then on Yunnan became my ideal tea, though it was hard to find; you had to scour through Chinese groceries, trying to decipher packs with Chinese-only lettering.
[Error: unknown template video]
This was also the time of my first trips to Japan, indelibly marked by the taste of hot and cold Japanese green tea. At first green tea tasted sort of wishy-washy to me, but, back in Europe, I began to crave it. In Japanese shops I bought boxes of green tea in bags. I remember being shocked, at Toog's house in Pigalle, to find that he and Flo made it quite differently, with raw green tea leaves just dropped into a pot of boiling water. It tasted miles better made that way, so I too began to buy loose sencha leaves rather than the industrial bags.
[Error: unknown template video]
The other revelation of the 90s came from that notoriously tea-unfriendly power, the United States. I began visiting the US annually from 1996, and the cool drink in Lower East Side cafes like Lotus Club (and alternamalls across the nation) was chai. Iced or hot, dairy or soy, American chai was a sort of sweet, industrial drink (the concentrate slopped out of a pail) with a malty flavour under the sugar. When I got back to Britain I started buying a rather different drink that bore the same name, the chai sold in Bangladeshi supermarkets on Brick Lane. This I drank hot and unsweetened. It was different from the American syrup, more authentic than "sweet white hipster chai".
But the most authentic chai I ever had was in a shabby hole-in-the-wall cafe in Camden Town market. Here the tea was infused in hot milk with cardamon, cinnamon and cloves, in the real Indian style.
[Error: unknown template video]
Twinings -- the bastards! -- were never far behind me; they added Yunnan and Chai to their range (the specialty teas were by now ghetto-ized under the category heading "Aromatics"), and for a while I drank Twinings Chai, which had a dry, subtle, nutty flavour; it wasn't too Christmassy, and didn't go over the top with the spice, as some of the Bangla-brands did.
Soon I noticed that most Indian groceries didn't stock chai per se, they stocked the constituent parts, which made it much cheaper. So I started buying masala chai powder, which I'd sprinkle into ordinary black tea (the Indian and Thai grocery stores I frequented mostly stocked PG Tips in catering-size boxes), sometimes adding a real cinnamon stick for good measure. And somehow the chai powder got less and less each time, until it disappeared completely, and there was only the PG Tips.
That's too neat -- I also drink Japanese green tea (maybe two cups a day, with loose leaves and sushi-restaurant-style powder blended) and Chinese Pu-Erh tea, which gives me a strong caffeine buzz. My whole day is just endless tapping away on a computer, and endless cups of tea. In fact, I aspire to the Asian style of having constantly-hot water available, either in an iron pot over an open fire (the ancient, lyrical way) or in an electric denki poto. I brought a denki poto back from Hokkaido in 2005, but it felt wasteful to have it on all day (my electricity bills are already ridiculous), with a hot step-down adaptor converting the current. So that's still an aspiration.
I've gone through two cups of Pu-Erh writing this, loose Yunnan Pu-Erh shaken into an open-topped coffee filter bag, and I'm feeling quite buzzy now. We need to stock up on PG Tips -- I must buy a big €8 box next time I'm at the Thai grocery on Alexanderplatz.
[Error: unknown template video]
Basically, I started by drinking PG Tips -- for "PG Tips" read any generic supermarket black tea, blended and sold in bags -- and I've come back full circle to drinking PG Tips again. Now, coming full circle either means I've repudiated the quest for novelty, refinement and exoticism which has marked most of my last thirty years of tea-drinking, or it means that I'm somehow drinking an old tea in a new way, and that I've come back to monopoly in a self-consciously "post-diversity" way. I wonder if anyone else has done the same thing -- ridden the diversity ride and come back to where they started?Basically, when I was about 20 (ie in 1980) I discovered my first "exotic" tea, Twinings Earl Grey. It was a time when Twinings were expanding their range, and a time when British supermarkets were diversifying their stock. People now would probably be appalled at the British supermarkets of 1980 -- at how little there actually was on the shelves, how industrially toxic the stock was, and how British they were. (Morrissey would pretend to love it, but escape at the first opportunity to a deli.)
[Error: unknown template video]
Earl Grey became my staple tea, and in my mind at the time (this was, after all, the dawn of New Romanticism) it made a statement about me: that my "standard" was slightly more perfumed (with bergamot, as it happened) than yours. That there was no "normal" in my world, mate. No PG Tips monkeys for me, thank you, but, instead, aristocrats and discrimination. I may have been a euro-communist, but I drank an imperial and aristocratic tea with a little text on the box about Earl Grey, a British prime minister of the 1830s said to have been gifted the perfumed blend by a grateful Chinese mandarin whose drowning son had been saved by British soldiers.
While others experimented with drugs, my next-door neighbour Simon Artley and I experimented in halls of residence with the Twinings range. Simon would call me out of my tiny room into the communal kitchen with "Cup of tea, Nick? Earl Grey? Darjeeling? Lapsang?"
[Error: unknown template video]
For quite a while I stuck to Earl Grey, with occasional cups of smokey Lapsang Souchong. But in the early 90s -- about 1993 -- I remember noticing that Earl Grey had become a standard tea in Britain. A posh computer consultant came round to my flat in Covent Garden that year and specifically asked for Earl Grey tea. You'd go to an estate agent's office and they'd bring you Earl Grey without even being asked. It seemed that the fruity taste of Earl Grey appealed to the British sweet tooth. I began to see it as part of the sweetening and over-flavouring of everything, and I suppose I began to tire of it.
In 1994 I was married, and living in Paris with Shazna. One day we were walking up the Rue Sainte-Anne, the Japanese street near Opera, and we went into Voyageurs du Monde, a cross between a cultural centre and a travel agency, a place specialising in high-end cultural tours of exotic Asian lands. Voyageurs du Monde was -- in a very French way -- unapologetically orientalist, exaggerating Asia's otherness and selling it to bourgeois tourists. The day we visited there was a rickshaw exhibition and cups of Yunnan tea were being handed out in little earthenware cups.
[Error: unknown template video]
The Yunnan tea was subtle and dark and mature and authentic. You drank it without milk, and I'd long ago stopped taking sugar in my tea. From then on Yunnan became my ideal tea, though it was hard to find; you had to scour through Chinese groceries, trying to decipher packs with Chinese-only lettering.
[Error: unknown template video]
This was also the time of my first trips to Japan, indelibly marked by the taste of hot and cold Japanese green tea. At first green tea tasted sort of wishy-washy to me, but, back in Europe, I began to crave it. In Japanese shops I bought boxes of green tea in bags. I remember being shocked, at Toog's house in Pigalle, to find that he and Flo made it quite differently, with raw green tea leaves just dropped into a pot of boiling water. It tasted miles better made that way, so I too began to buy loose sencha leaves rather than the industrial bags.
[Error: unknown template video]
The other revelation of the 90s came from that notoriously tea-unfriendly power, the United States. I began visiting the US annually from 1996, and the cool drink in Lower East Side cafes like Lotus Club (and alternamalls across the nation) was chai. Iced or hot, dairy or soy, American chai was a sort of sweet, industrial drink (the concentrate slopped out of a pail) with a malty flavour under the sugar. When I got back to Britain I started buying a rather different drink that bore the same name, the chai sold in Bangladeshi supermarkets on Brick Lane. This I drank hot and unsweetened. It was different from the American syrup, more authentic than "sweet white hipster chai".
But the most authentic chai I ever had was in a shabby hole-in-the-wall cafe in Camden Town market. Here the tea was infused in hot milk with cardamon, cinnamon and cloves, in the real Indian style.
[Error: unknown template video]
Twinings -- the bastards! -- were never far behind me; they added Yunnan and Chai to their range (the specialty teas were by now ghetto-ized under the category heading "Aromatics"), and for a while I drank Twinings Chai, which had a dry, subtle, nutty flavour; it wasn't too Christmassy, and didn't go over the top with the spice, as some of the Bangla-brands did.
Soon I noticed that most Indian groceries didn't stock chai per se, they stocked the constituent parts, which made it much cheaper. So I started buying masala chai powder, which I'd sprinkle into ordinary black tea (the Indian and Thai grocery stores I frequented mostly stocked PG Tips in catering-size boxes), sometimes adding a real cinnamon stick for good measure. And somehow the chai powder got less and less each time, until it disappeared completely, and there was only the PG Tips.
That's too neat -- I also drink Japanese green tea (maybe two cups a day, with loose leaves and sushi-restaurant-style powder blended) and Chinese Pu-Erh tea, which gives me a strong caffeine buzz. My whole day is just endless tapping away on a computer, and endless cups of tea. In fact, I aspire to the Asian style of having constantly-hot water available, either in an iron pot over an open fire (the ancient, lyrical way) or in an electric denki poto. I brought a denki poto back from Hokkaido in 2005, but it felt wasteful to have it on all day (my electricity bills are already ridiculous), with a hot step-down adaptor converting the current. So that's still an aspiration.
I've gone through two cups of Pu-Erh writing this, loose Yunnan Pu-Erh shaken into an open-topped coffee filter bag, and I'm feeling quite buzzy now. We need to stock up on PG Tips -- I must buy a big €8 box next time I'm at the Thai grocery on Alexanderplatz.
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teafortwoandtwofortea
Date: 2008-10-23 10:49 am (UTC)"I HAVE to drink 20 cups a day" - Glasgow Journalism student (actual quote)
It's all of a sudden 'cool' to love a traditional cup of tea. See Nevermind the Buzzcocks jokes and references to cups of tea being consumed...(no not winehouse)
There has been nothing said about the subject which has inspired me to fall in love with it though.
Gladstone was quoted as saying something like, "Thank God for tea, what would the world do without tea. How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea."
For such a man, such a statement turns him into a simpleton in my eyes. Of course he loved the drink, but asking how the world existed.... I know it's just a joke, but it's not even funny.
Yet what about the cultural impact a lack of tea would deliver....I don't drink it, mainly because the hot water burns my virgin lips and tongue, and I am fully aware of the faux-pas I conduct every time I refuse a cup.
I wish tea was left as the cultural beverage and traditional drink, for now that it has become the latest toy for the E4 masses we will no doubt have to put up with quotes like that of Gladstone's yet from today's rabble of drinkers...yourself of course not included.
Re: teafortwoandtwofortea
Date: 2008-10-23 10:51 am (UTC)Re: teafortwoandtwofortea
Date: 2008-10-23 10:52 am (UTC)"E4 is a digital television channel in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, launched as a pay-TV companion to Channel 4 on 18 January 2001. The "E" stands for entertainment, and the channel is mainly aimed at the lucrative 15 - 35 age group. Programming includes US imports such as Friends, ER, The O.C., Smallville, The Sopranos, What About Brian?, Desperate Housewives, Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, Scrubs, and British dramas such as Shameless, Hollyoaks, Skins and Nearly Famous. Some of the imports, e.g. The O.C., Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, are screened on E4 up to one week ahead of their Channel 4 broadcasts."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:04 am (UTC)Despite being a late-bloomer, I'm now quite into it and excited about trying different kinds, and have developed a little fascination with the wide variety of cute teapots, kettles, mugs, and other tea paraphernalia out there.
Any tea recommendations welcome!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:06 am (UTC)Before the onset of an an eating disorder ( specifically anorexia nervosa) i despised hot drinks, my mother and father would try and try to make me see their benefits, my father with his coffee on the hob and lapsang, and my mum with her endless cups of darljeeling. I hated them however, no matter how much sugar or milk they dumped in them i always thought it tasted simple of hot water, thus very wrong
However having lost a lot of weight i was always casting around for new ways of keeping myself warm, one of which was hot drinks. It was in this way that i slowly forced myself into tea, coffee, chai,, hot chocolate ( diet of course) fruit teas, herbal teas...basically hot water with a flavour. I did begin to really enjoy them and it was only when i went into a hospital based in the asian area of Tooting Beck in London that i was suddenly made aware of this huge range of teas. I became obsessed and would hardly be seen without a mug of something hot in my hands. This in th elong run, did get me into trouble as excessive water consumption is not good for someone meant to be recovering, and so my tea was rationed.
Through this rationing i was weened back onto just PG-like tea and bog-standard coffee, and i'm afraid that since recovering i haven;t really been able to bring myself to go back to my huge stack of tea boxes.
Ironically for someone who has had difficulty with their intake of calories, i have always been a 'sweetner' fan.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:21 am (UTC)Tea, exoticism and Anglophilia
Date: 2008-10-23 11:23 am (UTC)It's much like aspects of British culture (Ben Sherman shirts, indie lad-rock bands) which are a bit declassé in Britain get a new meaning abroad. A young American or Japanese drinking a pint of Carling and listening to the Pigeon Detectives is quite different from a lad from Essex doing the same, though both the drink and the music remain awful.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:26 am (UTC)Or perhaps just simply too much of a good thing haha.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:35 am (UTC)I used to drink a lot of chai when I was in Australia; they do good chai mix there (Byron Chai, from Byron Bay, was my favourite). I haven't drank much of it here, despite having a few packets of it which were sent over in care packages.
More recently, my tea consumption has tended to consist of either genmaicha (i.e., Japanese green tea with roasted rice) or various exotic blends (I quite like some of the ones from Mariage Frères, a French tea shop with branches in Paris and Japan but nowhere else); their Marco Polo and Sakura blends are quite good.
Then again, I drink more coffee than tea. It has to be coffee made with an espresso machine, though.
Btw, it just occurred to me that, literally speaking, "builder's tea" in today's Britain would probably have to be served without milk, in the Polish fashion.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:49 am (UTC)Matcha?
I'm surprised nobody has caught on and started serving matcha with okashi here in the UK. Because of the froth it has a creamy smoothness to it the British would appreciate (no need for milk), and the side okashi would appeal to the British sweet tooth.
Tea etiquette doesnt really exist anymore in the UK, except for when it comes to the use of sugar.
As a general rule you're supposed to grow out of wanting sugar in your tea. Is that just a British thing? Anything over 2 teaspoons is generally regarded as greedy and childish. There's also a class distinction -- "builder's/truckers tea" is sweet and milky and is associated with laborers and the working class. An acceptable amount of sugar for an adult is 1 teaspoon, and no sugar at all is more refined and for people who really appreciate the flavor of the tea.
When Yaohan Plaza was open, one thing I always noticed was the popularity of Pearl Milk tea with the young Chinese community, it's a Taiwanese import invented in the 80s. It's sweet and milky (almost malty because of the use of evapourated milk... infact it's pretty much cold ovaltine with tapioca balls) there's no reason why it couldn't become popular here. Someone should open a teahouse that sells matcha with okashi and Pearl milk tea.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:52 am (UTC)The British builder is supposed to say "I like it like paint, me!", ie very strong, with the bag left in. The same man eats vindaloo curry in the evening, which he also likes to taste like paint. And of course vindaloo and tea both come from India. So if there's been a swing to Polish tea-drinking customs, it's actually brought tea-drinking customs closer to Britain rather than further away, as the crow flies.
jonesing
Date: 2008-10-23 11:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 11:57 am (UTC)Matcha I associate with temple visits in Japan. I have some at home, but mainly to sprinkle into Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream. One little tin lasts all year.
The bubble pearl tea part of my life is 2000-2002, when I lived in NY Chinatown and went often to Saint's Alp and the Green Tea Cafe on Mott Street to quaff the tapioca bubbles through the thick straws. You can buy it in Soho Chinatown, I'm pretty sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 12:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 12:25 pm (UTC)I don't know how I could cope without tea! Excellent article!
Re: jonesing
Date: 2008-10-23 12:26 pm (UTC)I drink about 9 large mugs a day. I like it to be strong enough that the spoon virtually stands up by itself. I also like curry.
I think I may actually be a repressed builder.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 12:33 pm (UTC)By the way, Roobios is becoming so popular that the store where I get my tea got several flavors: Cinnamon, lemon and some other. I want mine natural though.
A thai grocery store here got some ginger tea as a powder.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 12:53 pm (UTC)There's a new teahouse called Maccha which is set to open near the Japanese restaurant Soseki which is next to the Gherkin. The sign on the door says "open soon" but without a date. You can see through the window, though, and it looks interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 01:12 pm (UTC)I have not, however, managed to try Pu-Erh. I only read about it, and watch lovingly crafted videos on youtube by pioneering Chinese cultural exporters. I think I may have even come across them first through you. Here's one:
There's something very viscerally calming about the way the video is put together - the tea-maker and the person holding the camera, the editing, all seems very particular and lovingly done - tea otaku.
Every action seems deliberate, concise, meaningful. It reminds me a bit of tai chi.
Perhaps that's why I like tea. I think once I get back to Vancouver (which seems to be home, lately) I will finally get myself together and head down to Chinatown to find Pu-Erh.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 01:15 pm (UTC)I don't like any fruity herbal infusions which masquerade under the name "tea", in fact.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 01:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 01:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 01:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-23 01:47 pm (UTC)