Calling all Tea Geeks, Opinionated Snobs and Lab Rats...

[tenuki]

Lastly if you could output an entry in HTML, then we could use it for our blogs when reviewing a tea.

I was actually thinking along the lines of adding blogger support..

[bearsbearsbears]

love the aesthetics of your green pot!
making the timing optional would be good. I only time my teas when i'm having difficulty reviewing them.

tea and wine reviewing will by nature differ too much to make a similar standard system. each bottle of a particular vintage/label of wine is roughly the same. while temperature, opening, glass shape, and pour affect the taste and aroma, they don't markedly change the substance of the liquid in the glass.

Tea on the other hand...ambient temperature, water temperature, mineral content, brewing vessel, time, etc. change the nature of the tea entirely. BUT such a program is a great way to keep track of what you did last time you brewed a tea so you can attempt to repeat it or fiddle with the parameters, regardless.

[tenuki]

Well, decided I'm gonna do this - so anyone who wants to volunteer to help out PM me with what you'd like to help with.

• Testing
• Feedback
• Translation (would like to see a chinese and japanese version. )
  {*] ?

If you have other skills you wanna contribute let me know.

Essentially I'll probably just release versions every so often and notify people on my list with a URL, you click on that and get the app, links will be on the app to file a bug, request a feature or go to the discussion forum. You don't have to be technical to help out, just web savy enough to use a web browser and smart enough to have useful opinions. Don't expect a blistering pace either, this is my spare time project afterall.

[Salsero]

No tech skills, but if there is anything I can contribute I will.

[CynTEAa]

Ditto!

[brandon]

I started something sort of similar to this as a web application recently.
My inspiration was basically all the ideas that came out here for a TeaCritic site. The site by that name materialized as a useful addition to Adagio's lineup, but quite different from the ideas in my own head.

Features:
*) Add new teas from any vendor -- somewhat strict requirement on including all the appropriate metadata.
*) Comments/star ratings
*) Tracebacks from blogs (eg, you link to Rou Gui page from your blog, it is picked up as a comment with an excerpt of your post automatically)
*) personal wishlist for each user based on the teas (and teaware?) on the site
*) restricted application targeted at better managing our tea tasting schedule and participation
*) More general teas will link to Wiki
*) Wiki will display a box showing the average rating of a tea, and possibly the most popular sources for it

All it really does so far is let you create entries for teas. I need to work on a consistent way to make teas "roll up" to a parent as well -- a lot of users will want to see "Rou Gui" as a composite, rather than digging through "Dragon Tea House 2005 Super Imperial Awesome Grade" and "TeaCuppas Hand Monkey Picked Yummy". (Most of us here, on the other hand want some huge comprehensive tasting of all offers as ABx has provided )

On the other hand, my ideas are much more "social" and based around reviewing teas -- versus Tenuki's more personal PC tea journal. It lacks details around brewing parameters used in a number of particular sessions and their comparative results for example.

[hop_goblin]

I think in general it is a good concept. It will be fascinating to keep a record of your fave teas as their profiles are subject to change from year to year. However, personally don't like the idea of a timer. Although it may give the novice a general guide to brew, for most, it may produce undesired results. For instance, I adjust each additional infusion according to how the previous tasted. But all in all, i think it is a dandy idea!

[Salsero]

Is the Tenuki concept a private tool? I had understood that it was also planned to reside on the interwebz.

"Dragon Tea House 2005 Super Imperial Awesome Grade" and "TeaCuppas Hand Monkey Picked Yummy"

Clearly ITD is here to protect the innocent from those who are crazy enough to appreciate this joke!

Do you know if the monkeys use gloves or at least hand sanitizer?

[hop_goblin]

Is the Tenuki concept a private tool? I had understood that it was also planned to reside on the interwebz.

"Dragon Tea House 2005 Super Imperial Awesome Grade" and "TeaCuppas Hand Monkey Picked Yummy"

Clearly ITD is here to protect the innocent from those who are crazy enough to appreciate this joke!

Do you know if the monkeys use gloves or at least hand sanitizer?

Sal, are you referring to Monkey picked TGY? lol If memory serves me correctly I believe Chip had mentioned that he is so 'hardcore' about tea that he alone has trained an army of monkeys to pick tea for him! Forgive me if it were not you Chip

[tenuki]

It _is_ monkey picked, great hairless apes are operating the machinery!!

[tenuki]

I think in general it is a good concept. It will be fascinating to keep a record of your fave teas as their profiles are subject to change from year to year. However, personally don't like the idea of a timer. Although it may give the novice a general guide to brew, for most, it may produce undesired results. For instance, I adjust each additional infusion according to how the previous tasted. But all in all, i think it is a dandy idea!

The timer can behave however you want, if you care to share your ideas on that. Including not timing.

However, I do imagine having a 'start/stop brew' functionality either way so you can mark different infusions easily, right? 'New brew' creates a new comment field and counts the number of brews. And having a record of how long you didn't time those infusions may be a good thing, right? It's in the 'imagine' phase, so how do you imagine you would like it to behave?

[Proinsias]

Before I begin it might be handy to be aware of the fact that I know absolutely nothing about software development and have no idea of the possibility or workload involved in creating what I'm suggesting, but you did ask.

I would like something I could use to review and access the reviews of other easily.

It would be useful to have some sort of forced tagging system: Year, class, country etc with plenty optional extras.

If blogger can be supported is it possible for the search function to include hits that come from blog posts already in existence. Eg if I'm reading an old post by Hobbes on a specific young sheng would it be possible for me to add a tag or two to it so it could be located by others through the search function of the proposed software.

I think being able to search reviews easily would be of paramount importance with the name of the author displayed - I find myself scanning down the reviews at teaspring to find a name I trust before reading through the whole list.

The idea of timings, infusions and all sorts of other handy tools could be good to have available but some of the finest tea reviews online are a simple flow of a few paragraphs with no, or very sparse, mention of quantitative data. It would be a great shame if some reviewers were put off by the idea of having to fill in a spreadsheet.

I suppose I would like it to range from something like the Teachat posting window with a couple of forced tags before it is published all the way up to accommodating someone who wants to record the time between each infusion, include a video of how they performed each brew and ascribe a rating of 1-1000 for every attribute of the tea they can think of.

• Is there a 'standardized' way of rating tea? (example of what I'm talking about from the wine world).
  
  The wine sheet fills me with dread. Everyone seems to use 1-10 in a different manner no matter what guidelines are put in place.
  An oolong I would have rated a 9 a year or two ago is probably not an oolong I would rate a nine today. I love to read thoughts on tea, I cringe when opinions are whittled down to numbers. If I search for Rou Gui and I see twenty sheets of numbers and one short written review I will go straight for the written review. I could possibly cope with an overall 1-10 rating if reviews become very numerous.
  
  I'm passionate about tea and don't have much interest in it being reviewed quantitatively, I moderately enjoy video games and thus usually don't read the full review and skip to the score out of ten.
• If not, what sorts of things would you recommend be there?
  
  Something like flickr springs to mind, with reviews of tea in place of pics:
  
  Search for something eg. Aged Tie guan yin
  
  Click on the first hit and a review appears with links to other teas reviewed by the same poster, access to their classifications(albums), other tea with matching tags, tea from the same vendor etc
  
  Comments enabled below the reviews to allow Chip to remind readers that Ian's review of Konacha above may be slightly skewed and for entertainment purposes when disagreements occur.
  
  A rating system for content would be preferable to a rating system for the tea, although both in a minimal form might be best of all. If I'm looking for some oolong tea and I click the 'oolong' link it would be nice if it could display the top rated reviews, if the top rated review happens to be the greatest review of the shittiest tea it would be good if I could then view other oolong reviews by that contributer and see how they describe what they like.
• Does anyone write down brew times, etc?
  
  I tried it a few times and found it sort of ruined my tea session. If I'm reviewing I like to have a few sessions to get to know it and try to come up with ways to describe it whilst drinking, the correct wording often hits me hours or days later, I often review a tea whilst drinking something else. Many reviews come from the fact that I can't stop my brain mulling over a tea I drank some time ago.
• Does anyone keep a written inventory of their teas and notes?
  
  My blog is my attempt to do this, I figure if have notes accessible to the public I'll be more inclined to keep them coherent and they'll probably make more sense to me if I need to read them in a few years.
• Are you happy with your current tea timer? Does it track multiple brewings?
  
  I tend to use myself as a tea timer, I'm the only tea timer I have access to that actually improves with time.
• Do you brew near a computer?
  
  Yes
• What would you think of software that would manage all of the above and also include a tea timer and ability to share your brewing/notes/rating/vendor data with others?
  
  The timer wouldn't really interst me atm, as I mentioned above, but if I begin to lessen my chinese gong fu a little more and start to lean towards Japanese green, as many appear to do around here, then there is chance I'll be eating my words about timers soon - although I kind of hope I won't.
• Do you think you would use it regularly?
  
  I would check in every day or two and I would look to be contributing as I blog - hopefully a few times a month.

I have no expertise to lend to the project.

However.

My brother-in-law is a graphic designer with perhaps the most cutting and critical eye I've ever come across when it comes to design and utility and his brother is currently writing payment processing software for a rather large online gambling site. As a pair they are rarely complimentary but it can be quite handy for someone to let you know what's a bit rubbish - I'll happily relay their opinions, once I've toned down the language, if it comes to pass.

[Proinsias]

or, what brandon said.

[tenuki]

Proinsias, very useful comments! Thanks for taking the time to write them. It's gonna take a day or two to digest em.

[Chip]

Sal, are you referring to Monkey picked TGY? lol If memory serves me correctly I believe Chip had mentioned that he is so 'hardcore' about tea that he alone has trained an army of monkeys to pick tea for him! Forgive me if it were not you Chip

That sounds like Alex or Wes material. But after 1800 posts, maybe I did.

Tenuki...awesome. There is some great stuff coming out of this ITD group!!!! wikiCHA, this project, even the TeaTastings.

Great TeaMinds gather here.

I will consider how I might be able to help.