Issue #5: Drinking Tea At Home

Big Drinks is a bi-weekly newsletter about the beverages we drink, where they come from, and how we enjoy them. Each issue hopes to approach a topic and explore it from a new angle with help from experts. Subscribe to get each new issue directly to your inbox.

The most important sip of the day.

There was a distinct moment I can remember when my favorite hobby, coffee, became a chore. For years I had been the guy lugging a french press in to my office job, and when visiting my parents I would frequently drive the extra 40 minutes into St. Paul, MN to get coffee from the shop there that had this brand new machine that could revolutionize by-the-cup service. About a year into being a trainer at arguably the most prestigious coffee roaster in America, that joy started to slip.

When it became my job to de-mystify the thing that I had been chasing for years, it longer held any romantic sway over me. While I had spent countless afternoons detail cleaning brew equipment and tweaking minor aspects of brewing technique in the past, I was now paid a full time salary to strip every finicky element out of that process in order to make it more approachable to a wider audience.

Coffee is fickle. The quality of unroasted green coffee changes over time, every new roasted batch is in its own way unique, every coffee grinder breaks down roasted coffee in ways entirely specific only to that machine on that setting on that day. And then it’s up to the person brewing it to manipulate how water extracts the nearly 1,000 chemical compounds that make up what we taste and smell in the cup. You might have nailed every aspect of brewing only to be sorely disappointed in what you end up drinking, and you’ll never actually know that, well, it turns out that on this day the roaster had a small fire catch in the airflow duct and it essentially smoked the entire batch of coffee being roasted, making it taste slightly burnt. Or that the roaster opened up a new green bag of coffee that actually was harvested from a different part of the farm that had issues with soil erosion, making those coffees absorb fewer nutrients and taste flat compared to the previous bag.

Constantly analyzing every cup you brew starts to feel like a chore. Picky tweaks become pointless: why worry about a slight stir while the coffee is draining if your grinder slid slightly out of alignment after you adjusted it coarser?

Tea, for me, offers something of a respite. According to tea expert Rich Avella:

That last part is what really defines the attractiveness of tea: anything that overcomplicates it to the detriment of your enjoyment is unnecessary.

It’s a straightforward sentence that really drives home what should be our relationship to, well, anything in life. And while that may be hard to apply to my relationship to coffee, it represents how I would like to approach my relationship to tea — which, in turn, made me curious about how other coffee professionals have a a relationship to tea.

Trish Rothgeb, a massively influential coffee roaster and quality control specialist, generally brews tea for herself five times a week:

Talking about tea as a monolithic beverage is somewhat tricky. Not only do processing methods create major categories of tea, but cultivar and terroir have major impacts on what we taste as well. And, unlike coffee whose history is deeply rooted in colonial farming and export, tea’s history comes from a consuming culture. Whereas many coffee farmers didn’t necessarily have access to tasting their own coffee for decades (maybe even centuries), tea has been cultivated, harvested, and processed specifically for producing specific flavors for centuries in places like China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan*. While certain cultivars in someplace like Yunnan, China have been grown specifically to produced a deeper oxidized, baked black tea that develops malty sweetness from developing the plant’s polyphenol content, some teas in Japan are specifically force-fed nitrogen based fertilizers and harvested early to highlight their amino acid content, which produces deep umami characteristics that are better preserved as the tea is steamed. You could give someone a golden needles style tea next to a shincha from Kagoshima and they might not even know that they’re both products of the tea plant.

With the amount of information available to learn about tea, researching processing styles and preparations methods can be intimidating. I spoke to another coffee professional, Meghan-Annette Reida, about tea research:

Trish, too, spends time reading up about processing methods and preparation styles: she has a signed copy of Tea Basics by Rhinehart and Rasmussen.

Meghan-Annette has invested time in traditional brewing wares:

Trish’s approach lately has been more utilitarian:

This also brings up the burden of cost: tea can be expensive, and so can the myriad of traditional tea wares. Meghan-Annette has felt that pressure at times, too:

My own collection of teawares has also benefitted from discounted pricing — at my previous job, I was able to pick up a few pieces with an employee discount. Combined with a few pieces I purchased as souvenirs when visiting my brother in Japan, I now own two gaiwan, a ming cha teapot, three kyusu, a hohin, and a modern glass teapot. I feel tempted to explain the steep methods tied to each one along with posting detailed diagrams of how these teapots are designed, but that seems antithetical to underlying point of this newsletter. And Rich doesn’t think that teas always need specific brewing equipment, except one:

Rich’s perspective on what he enjoys about tea paints a calmer, more relaxing time:

It’s the aroma that particularly draws him in, along with the simplicity:

As much as I fuss with precision scales and digital temperature water kettles, I think back to some of the best tea experiences I had in Japan, at a modern tea studio on the 5th floor of an arts building in Tokyo. While tea to water ratio, steep time, and temperature are majorly important (especially in Japanese style green teas, which usually brew rather quickly with water closer to 165ºF rather than boiling), the preparation methods usually involved a traditional bamboo tea scoop to measure the tea, a series of cooling bowls to cool down the water temperature, and a basic hourglass to time the process. The precision in the preparation was in the movements and process of the person preparing the tea, and less in trying to scientifically control all available variables.

To be honest, I’ve brewed better tasting teas at home than I experienced at Sakurai Tea Experience, but I’ve made a point to visit Sakurai three times over two trips to Japan in the last four years. While the precision of scales and thermometers can actually make precision tea brewing less complicated with a higher success rate, adding tools to the process can sometimes take away from the overall experience. Rich has a simpler approach when helping people find enjoyment in tea:

Rich’s sentiments seem to be echoed in Meghan-Annette’s experiences:

But Trish’s appreciation for tea, like my own, can sometimes still be clouded by coffee analysis:

For most people, though, Rich’s recommendations for getting the most out of your tea experience at home has less to do with researching preparation methods or palate development:

Re-reading this last paragraph has helped me re-organize my pursuit of enjoyment. Finding pleasure in a warm cup is more about setting an intention: if your goal is to pursue palate development in a tasting exercise, you’re likely looking for a different process than if your goal is to have a nice afternoon with something tasty. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and they also don’t have to follow a specific set of guidelines. There are multiple paths that will get you to the same destination, and it’s up to you, really, to decide what you want the scenery to be along the way.

* In a quick footnote, tea also has a colonial history as well. The British demand for tea created massive colonial farming system full of atrocities that looked to exploit the warm weather and local populations of places like Kenya and India to produce a heavy, more astringent style of black tea for export that’s often taken with milk and sugar. In fact, the horrendous colonial coffee system that was rife with slavery and abuse was modeled after earlier success with tea plantations run by trading companies. But this style of tea production exists entirely separately from traditional tea production by consuming countries, which makes using the word “tea” as a monolithic beverage category even more disparate.

Big thanks to Trish, Meghan-Annette, and Rich for providing their answers.

Trish Rothgeb is Co-founder and Roastmaster for Wrecking Ball Coffee roasters in San Francisco, California. Her experience in the industry spans over 30 years as a coffee roaster, taster, green buyer, frequent lecturer at conferences, and teacher of all things coffee. She is also credited with coining the term "third wave coffee" and identifying its relevant concepts.

From 2013 to 2016, Trish worked for The Coffee Quality Institute as the Director of Q in addition to her work with Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters. She is a continuing contributor to CQI’s Q Grader program content in a volunteer capacity. Trish has been a Q Arabica grader since 2006 and is a credentialed Q Arabica Instructor. She has served on the SCAA’s Roasters Guild Executive Council, was a charter member of the World Barista Championship Board of Directors, head judge for Taste of Harvest African Coffee Conference and The Philippine Quality Coffee Contest, among others. She was awarded a fellowship to The James Beard Foundation’s Women in Entrepreneurial Leadership in 2019.

Meghan-Annette is a beverage professional based in Milwaukee, WI where they have happily been serving and drinking a range of beverages including coffee, tea, beer, and wine for the last 5 years.

Rich Avella first encountered specialty tea in 1990 as a job requirement. Though hisfocus was on becoming a rock star or at least recording music for a living, he wasexpected to develop expertise in this bitter beverage made from camellia sinensisleaves. While he initially couldn’t see what others enjoyed, once he tasted his firstoolong there was no turning back. Rich’s “a-ha” moment that tea could be deliciouscaptivated his curiosity and sent him on the path to learn more, and to help othersfind their way to tea.

Rich pursued the path of trainer, with an emphasis on helping individuals connectwith their own sensory experiences and put them into words. He helped peopleunderstand the reasons why teas tasted the way they did, from terroir to process,building knowledge and experience to connect them to the leaves and the customerswho sought them. Rich ultimately developed a multi-level coffee and tea educationprogram and led a team of inspired and inspiring trainers.

Rich co-founded Highwire Coffee Roasters and Highwire Tea in 2011. In 2016 helaunched 4track tea, with the intention to make delicious tea easy. Rich rememberswhat it was like to know nothing about tea and to think that it wasn’t for him, and hefirmly believes that anyone can find the right tea for them. His challenge is to helpeach person find their own way.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.