Searching for Tea Mind
And everything I learned about tea.
I’d never thought much about tea. It always seemed like hot brown water. Herbal teas were pleasant, in a bland sort of way.
In 1996, when Petroglyph was looking for advisors and investors, we were introduced to Will Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig had a deep understanding of consumer retail and branding. In the early ’90s he had discovered tea, and just how difficult it was to get premium quality tea. So he founded a company: The Republic of Tea.
The Republic of Tea introduced new audiences to whole leaf teas, beautifully branded in unique airtight containers. Will taught me about branding and brand value. I wasn’t ready to fall in love with tea.
A year later, when Petroglyph was getting ready to expand more rapidly than either Jen or I had experienced, Rosenzweig introduced us to the guy he had hired to take over from him at his tea company, Gordon Maybury. Gordon had built The Nature Company from its late infancy into national stature, and more recently had helped with the sale of The Republic of Tea. Jen and I brought Gordon into Petroglyph to help us grow. Every week he’d drive from his home in Marin down to Santa Cruz, and stay with us for a few days, before heading back.
Gordon was a tea master. Certified by the International Tea Masters Association, relatively uncommon for westerners in that day, he was a guy who knew tea. As a certified tea master, he was able to get his hands on grades of tea that were not generally available to the public. He introduced us to Roy Fong, the San Francisco tea impresario of The Imperial Tea Court, and Gordon’s main supplier for the finest quality tea.
When tea is harvested, it’s spread out and graded — from pristine unbroken leaves to the relative lawn clippings of tea. You simply cannot get enough quantity of the best stuff to economically sell through large retailers. People get lesser grades. And in many cases, manufacturers have to create blends. Think about blended wine— blended tea is blended because you are buying seconds and thirds from the tea growers, and some of it is pretty good, and some of it is pretty bad, and they often mix them together, chop them up, and create an easily reproducible average that they can continuously deliver from year to year.
Rip open your classic Lipton tea bag. It is hardly recognizable as a plant, let alone camellia sinensis. I had been clueless — it would be like never realizing that good wine comes from good grapes. When I was a kid I didn’t even realize that hamburger was actually ground up steak, and that better hamburgers could be made if you ground up better cuts of meat. Okay, I wasn’t the brightest.
And until I was 35, I didn’t know that pretty much all the tea I had ever been offered was blended, and marginal at best. I knew that it was marginal, but I assumed that the problem was with tea in general.
Every week when Gordon would arrive, he’d show up with a few different rare teas, and he’d prepare them for us and we’d stop working and enjoy them. Tea comes from gardens the same way that wines come from vineyards. In fact, tea is a lot like wine. There are good years and bad years. There are great gardens and lesser ones. I discovered that a cup of tea from a great year from a great estate, brewed exactly right, would taste like something I had never imagined might be called tea. Even as we were trying to build this ceramic company, I was getting seduced by tea.
Gordon opened a bag of dried leaves that was vaguely reminiscent of an excellent batch of sinsemilla, richly aromatic and beautiful… I placed my nose in the bag and inhaled deeply. It was intoxicating.
Then he poured it into his hand:
This tea is grown in a small estate outside Hangzhou. When it is ripe, a person walks into the field and plucks the newest leaves off of each bush — perfect in shape, color, size.
All tea is from the same species of plant, but there are two variations — a small leaf Chinese one (“sinensis”) and a large leaf Indian one (“assamica”). All the “flavors” of tea happen in post production — they might be oxidized (a little for oolong and a lot for black), and they might be dried along side other aromatic plants —like roses or jasmine. They might be specifically shaped. Each kind of tea product is processed in its own way. For this one, Jade Rings, the leaves are hand-rolled into little loops, and dried for two weeks.
My favorite tea is called Dragon Well. It is a green tea (unoxidized) and when poured into your hand looks like perfectly flat little dagger-shaped leaves. After the leaves soak in water they unfurl and you can see what they actually look like — a very neat pair of leaves and a bud. And it tastes, to me, like spring time.
If you’re good, each time you pour water over the leaves you get a different taste experience, not better or worse necessarily than the one before it, just different.
Gordon also explained the value of whole, unbroken, tea leaves.
Tea Biology
A leaf is full of chemical compounds that come out of the leaf when is soaked in hot water — different chemicals “effuse” out of the leaf at different temperatures. So by controlling the temperature and time, you can guide the chemicals, and thus the taste.
Now, a leaf has a waxy membrane on the outside, called the cuticle. It’s thick, but again, different temperatures will force certain chemicals through the cuticle. But if the leaf is broken, there is a new surface that has no waxy covering, and chemicals will effuse from this broken side very easily, quickly, and with little control possible. So whole leaves will produce a controllable taste, and broken leaves are increasingly random and often more bitter.
Cream and sugar will mask the bitterness, and most English teas are prepared this way. But whole leaf tea connoisseurs will not add these masks, and prefer to savor the unique taste of the particular tea. Adding cream to this tea would be like putting ice in a rare Bordeaux.
Gordon explained about the different temperatures of water for different teas, and how to gauge the temperature from watching the “crab-eye” bubbles form in the teapot, or watching the steam waft off the surface of the water. In no cases did we boil the water we added to the leaves — it would scald them. Nor did we leave the leaves hanging around in the water — they would stew. I even persuaded myself that Petroglyph should bundle teas with teapots you’d paint — and we produced a little booklet of information on tea, basically outlining everything I had learned.
Interest in tea was not the same as an interest in the Zen ceremony of tea, which held little attraction for me. This was about the sensibility and savoring of tea— and I was drawn to how The Republic of Tea contrasted enjoying tea to coffee culture. Tea sensibility was not about “movers and shakers” and getting charged up for the day. It was about slowing down. Appreciation. Time. Rosenzweig shared eloquently about business and tea in his book “The Republic of Tea: Letters to a Young Zentrepreneur”, an epistolary dialog. I read it often as I worked on Petroglyph.
Part of my personal tea practice is not to do it every day, I don’t want it to be habit or routine. I’m aiming for conscious tea.
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