Cinco de mayo 2010 Revelation Tea?

[Chip]

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone. Sounds like a TeaPartay is in order! Please be sure to stop in and share what is in your cup throughout the day! And check out what everyone else is sipping as well!

REMINDER! The TC newbie (less than one year member of TeaChat) who posts/shares the most teas cupped this entire week will win a prize!

Yesterday we discussed "breakthrough teas." Pretty interesting topic. You can still vote and discuss yesterday's topic.

Today's TeaPoll and discussion topic. Yesterday it was breakthrough teas, today we go to the next level. Did you have a Relevation Tea, a tea that revealed your TeaPath more clearly then it was previously, AND revealed your fave type of tea? Details, details, details!

I am looking forward to sharing this Teaday with everyone. Bottoms up!

[debunix]

Unlike yesterday's breakthrough question, where the catalyst for me was the absence of a tea, this one is easy, because the tea and the moment were quite clear. It was less than a year ago, drinking a spring 2009 Alishan oolong from Norbu, part of a tea tasting in another forum, it was my first green oolong.

All this, and my favorite toasty dark oolongs too? Of course my favorite type of tea is oolong!

But that's different than saying that my favorite individual tea is an oolong, because as I've discussed before, that shifts frequently between some wonderful oolongs, and puerhs, and green teas, and white teas, and even a yellow or three. But right now nothing could be better than the green Tie Guan Yin in my cup.

[omegapd]

Pu-erh...not sure which one, but my old buddy Salsero sent me a gift box with a pile of samples and I was in Heaven. I miss that guy...

[Trey Winston]

Ahh, I remember it as clearly as if it were several years ago. I brewed my first batch of white, specifically Silver Needle. It was wonderful in its subtlety, just the way I like it. I realized then that whites were it for me. And so it has proved.

But I'm having White Peony today, for some reason. It's fine.

[LauraW]

This one took a bit of reflection, as it wasn't something that I'd stopped to think about until.... I read the post this morning. I've tried many different teas on my journey so far, most of which I have greatly enjoyed, some I have absolutely loved. But a couple months ago, Victoria here realized I knew next to nothing about oolong (except that I like the Wuyi from the place in the mall - NOT Teavana, just fyi), and she was gracious enough to send me a package of some samples. I loved them all. Couldn't get enough. So sign me up for oolong!

On the way out the door... so no tea yet.

[Victoria]

Awww thanks Laura!!! I guess my revelation tea was finding Taiwanese high mountain greener oolong.

In my cup this morning 2010 FF Maribong Estate Darjeeling.
Yum!

Have a nice day everyone!

[Chip]

I could say Chinese greens, but there was no one tea or time where I received a revelation per se, telling me that this was the tea for me.

Oddly, it was a Japanese green from SpecialTeas of all places. One year they offered a Sencha Very Fine. This came in the Japanese nitro flushed bag. The tea really blew me away and definitely showed me what a Japanese sencha could and should be! From that point, it became a mission to replicate that experience, which at the time in the USA was not an easy feat!

It literally took years and many barely passable sencha including the same name sencha from SpecialTeas, but I kept searching and finally found the reliable sources for Japanese teas as the market slowly opened up to the West. But this one tea clearly revealed the path that would bring me the most enjoyment in tea! It really was a revelation moment.

Began the TD with the very last of the "under the car seat for 11 months shincha 2009." It was passable, but now what??? There is NO sencha in da house!!! SweeTea had final sips of this sencha while Wulong and Shincha visited the TeaTable.

[Chip]

OH ... I changed the number of votes that you can cast to two which was my original intent.

[David Duckler]

This is a tricky question for me, but I'll give it a shot.

My revelation tea was "Other," a hei cha (pronounced like "hay/hey," literally black tea in Chinese, but I've seen this translated as "dark tea" in English to avoid confusion with hong cha, red tea, our black tea). Hei cha is a fermented tea from Hunnan province with a surprisingly light, sweet, floral taste that lingers in the mouth like ginseng and licorice, combined with something that is almost tangy. I was visiting one of my tea friends (affectionately called "Ayi" or Auntie by all), and she set me a challenge.
"Ask for any tea, any kind of tea you can think of, and we'll drink it. I guarantee I have it here in my store."
I took the challenge, and asked for hei cha, a tea I had only learned about for the first time a few days before.
"Hei cha!" she exclaimed with a triumphant look in her eye. She was grinning ear to ear, and produced something from the private collection beneath her shelves. Finally, a worthy test of her teas!
The hei cha she tasted with me had been aged for 30 years in a tree root; the pressed tea still held that gnarled shape. She called it a competition tea. Families and branches of families would meet for reunions, each challenging each other to produce the best, most unique kind of tea they could find in their collections. This tea was a classic example of something that would always win. After the tea was steeped out, she actually broke off a chunk the size of a child's fist and insisted on giving it to me to have at home.

This experience was the culmination of a point of view that has been growing in me for years. This pushed me over the edge to the revelation of my tea drinking life: I have no favorite tea. There is no favorite tea. There is no best tea. Black is no better than green is no better than wuyishan is no better than dong ding is no better than tieguanyin is no better than 40-year-old sheng.

Why? Tea, in the end, is an entire experience. It is taste, it is color and aroma, it is the sound of boiling water and the clinking of cups. It is the company you share it with, the location, the weather outside. The highest quality tea can be soured by ruinous company, hard tap water at the wrong temperature, poor storage, or a simple lack of attention.

For me, each tea holds the potential to become a favorite. Each tea and each flavor profile certainly has an ideal (each different, and absolutely great in those differences), but even more importantly, every single cup is a new and unique tea. For example, I've tasted Dragonwell green tea from a chipped glass on the porch of a farmer and her wonderful family in Longjing village. If I think about all of the green teas I've had in my life, it was honestly not the best in pure taste. However, the experience of drinking it, overlooking the plantation, the smell of tea roasting in the air, with water drawn from the famous Dragonwell itself, absolutely makes that a favorite tea.

It is a favorite tea, but it is not my favorite. To choose only one, to cling passionately to a year, a vendor, or a flavor profile, is ultimately limiting. I don't want to choose only one. I cannot. To do so would be to shut the door in the face of everyone who dedicated their lives to the production of those teas, who said to themselves" "I will create the best jasmine I can; I will create the most fantastic Lapsang Souchong there ever was." There is a life and a story in every leaf, and I want to taste and be a part of as much of that as I can.



Currently drinking: Ya Bao tea (a subset of sheng puer, made from buds picked off of ancient tea trees and aged; spicy sweet flavor profile, creamy with notes of cinnamon or nutmeg; seventh steeping, still going strong)

[olivierco]

No real revelation tea for me but I definitively remember ,the first time I had gyokuro (with the right leaf/water ratio) and the first time I had koicha.

Golden needles after dinner.

[TubbyCow]

My first lightly-roasted Anxi oolong. In that moment I knew oolongs were for me.

[David Duckler]

My first lightly-roasted Anxi oolong. In that moment I knew oolongs were for me.

Roasted oolongs sure are hard to resist. Marvelous choice of gateway tea.

Just finished some 2003 golden needle grade Meng Hai shou puer; dark, definitely taking on an old puer taste, with a classic smooth creamy caramel base, overlaid with some great camphor-wintergreen flavors. Set aside after steeping 15; maybe we'll pick it up in the afternoon.

[entropyembrace]

no real revelation for me...I´m still drinking basically like I did when I first got into tea...sampling as many different teas as I can My brewing and leaf quality has gradually increased over the years but not much else has changed

My gf and I don´t really do anything special for Cinco de Mayo but her great grandfather fought in the Battle of Puebla...on the French side xD After the French were driven out of Mexico many of the soldiers, including her great grandfather decided to stay rather than return to Europe because he´d fallen in love with a Mexican woman...I can totally understand how

[AdamMY]

I still need to think about the Poll Topic, but my tea for today, and actually my first tea in a few days.





Its O-Cha Sae Midori Shincha's second infusion.

[CynTEAa]

There have been so many. One that stands out in memory is the first time I had a Tung Ting Oolong... It was an "OH MY" moment I'll never forget. The complexity of that particular tea that year and that harvest lot. Damn. I was never the same after that!