I grew up in places that consume a lot of tea.  First it was Russia, where tea is pivotal to practically any gathering (at least this is how I remember it).  Then it was Israel, where tea is also important, even if it was a slightly different kind of tea.  In both cases I experienced the tea, but never had a chance to think about it and reflect on it as a cultural practice.  Now, living in Singapore, I had a chance to get exposed to the Chinese approach to tea in a somewhat more systematic fashion.

Last weekend, Veronica and I were to the Tea Chapter, an organization that aims “to promote and enhance the understanding of Chinese heritage” through “tea appreciation”.  I think they started as kind of a society and have eventually grown into a serious commercial enterprise.  The place we’ve visited had a shop where they sell teas and (very expensive) tea accessories on the first floor, and a coffee shop combined with sort of an educational center at the upper levels.

The place has three kinds of seating: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese; we are in the Chinese seating space.

The woman who brought us tea spend half an hour explaining us about the process of brewing and appreciating the tea, which was a lot of fun and quite educational.  She kept referring back to the need to enjoy and value the tea just the way we appreciate wine (a comparison that is probably the easiest to comprehend for Westerners like us).  According to her, the idea behind tea drinking situation is primarily to relax.  She explicitly avoided the word “ceremony” and said that in the Chinese culture it is not as ceremonial as it may be in the Japanese or Korean cultures.

The tea set (from left to right): on the tray you see fair cup, the tea cups, and the fragrance cups; hot water kept hot on a burner; and a set of wooden utensils including tea scoop, tea spoon (not to steer the sugar, but to clean the tea pot from leaves that prevent the water flow), and tea clip (used to drain the cups after heating them with hot water)

But there is a process that is generally followed.  First, you warm up the cups and the tea pot (missing from the picture above) by pouring hot water on them.  This is something I remember was also done in Russia, however there it was done to prevent cracking the vessel from pouring really hot water into it.  Here this is done to enhance the flavors of the tea.

After preheating, you put in the tea leaves using a wooden tea scoop.  We had the house tea, which was semi-fermented (we heard a lot about the different levels of tea fermentation) and we filled a third of the tea pot with leaves.  After adding the leaves you add the hot water, but you poor it out immediately.  This is done to clean the leaves and also to let them open, so that they would give the most flavor when you add the next batch of water.   The temperature of the water is decided according to the type of tea you are having.  As a rule of thumb, the lighter (read less fermented) the tea is, the cooler the water should be and the longer the brewing time.  It reminded me of the use of exposure and diaphragm in photography – they balance each other to create the best final outcome.

The teapot full of leaves that opened from the hot water: The teapot itself is the central technological peace of this arrangement; it is made out of a porous clay, which absorbs the water; with time it also absorbs the flavors of the tea, so usually people who care about their tea have separate pots for different kinds of tea (decided primarily by the degree of the tea fermentation).

After pouring the second batch of water into the pot, you let it brew for some time depending on the kind of tea.  In our case we had to wait for about 20-25 seconds before we transferred the tea into the tea receptacle.  Transferring the tea from the pot to the receptacle stops the brewing process.  According to the lady who explained the process to us it allows the tea to give us all the taste, aroma, and the vitamins (did you know that green tea has vitamin C in it?), but not the caffeine and other unhealthy stuff.  This last point is not completely clear to me, because in one tea-drinking sitting you may refill the tea pot a number of times before you change the leaves.  So, what happens to the caffeine on the fourth and fifth iteration of brewing?

Pouring tea from the fragrance cup (look how small everything is).

Transferring the tea from the pot to the receptacle also assures that when poured into cups, the tea is evenly brewed.  Otherwise, when you pour directly from the pot, the tea will be brewed to different levels depending on how long it remained in the pot.  Once in the receptacle, the next  step in the process is pouring the tea into the fragrance cups.  Those are tall narrow cups that remind shot glasses in the West.   Unlike the tea pot, the fragrance cups (as well as the receptacle and the tea cups) are made of porcelain so that they would not absorb any flavors and could be used with different kinds of tea.

As their name suggest, the fragrance cups are used to appreciate the aroma of the tea.  This part really reminds fancy wine tasting, but at least as we were told, there is no pretension to explain the tea based on that – just to enjoy it.  In addition, the white color of the cup allows you to appreciate the color of the tea.  Not sure if there is anything to it more than the aesthetics, but that is the purpose.

Finally, after you are done appreciating the aroma and the smell, you can pour the tea into the tea cup.  In fact, once you did this whole process once, you can skip the fragrance cup, but it is still fun to do that and it also cools the tea down, which can be nice in some cases.  The small size of the tea cup assures that you won’t drink its entire content at once, but instead would sip it slowly while enjoying the flavors, the natural sweetness (no sugar is added), and the warmth of the tea.  Again, this part does remind of wine tasting.

The tea is served - enjoy! Together with the tea we had sugared peanuts, which was something I have never tried before.

Whether or not we were sold a touristy version of tea drinking or this is really close to the actual thing, both Veronica and I found it really relaxing and enjoyed this quality time together a lot. I personally found it pretty interesting how the simple act of having tea embraces so many cultural influences.  The idea of focusing on the little things and appreciating the details seems very traditionally Chinese to me (sorry if it sounds stereotypical and please feel free to correct me) and is very different from how we used to drink tea back in Russia (or in Ithaca for that matter) – a large cup of super hot and lengthily brewed black tea, which you drink many times to get warm.  Also the communal aspect of tea drinking is very nice, but that I think is commonly found in the way tea is consumed both in Russia and in the Middle East.

"Mmm... so good...."

Anyway, on the way back we bought a bunch of teas to take with us back to the States and are now pondering about whether we need/can have a Chinese tea set (those in the coffee houses are really expensive and we do not trust those sold in the touristy market).

That was our experience of the other side of the tea :)