The NW Tea Festival
The weekend was focused on the NW Tea Festival. It was a fabulous experience and everything I'd hoped for. I'll make entries with the details on the Tea LJ communities, but in a nutshell:
1. Our tea demonstrations (four 20-minute gongfu cha speed-tastings) went extremely smoothly, thanks to my wife's ability to coordinate and improvise. They were a hit with all attendees and the festival manager was impressed. Other tasting hosts, tea professionals all, were far less coordinated and started late, ran over time, made messes, and generally needed hand-holding. They want us to come back again next year.
2. The wu wo tea ceremony introduction was an eye-opener (why have I never heard of this cool school of tea before?). I really want to find a group of people who want to partake of wu wo next year when the weather turns warmer!
3. The professional tea tasting methodology class was both instructive and run by an extremely cute tea instructor with Frida hair (but not Frida eyebrows) -- immediate crush fodder!
4. Suzette, the instructor with the Frida Hair, waved me into a back room where some of the tea event presenters were holding a private "guerrilla tea tasting" of Yunnan teas (a white, oolong, red, and pu-erh). Felt great to be included among the elite, drinking alongside Michael Coffey (the Tea Geek), and tea shop owners from the region.
5. I attended a class on matcha whisking, also taught by Suzette, and learned that I rather like the way we've been doing it at home. Formal matcha is sooooooooooo thick and cloying, and that's "thin matcha", not the yoghurt-consistency ceremonial "thick matcha"!
6. I attended a tea tasting held by Brett Boynton, the professional gongfu cha demonstrator who served me my first true Chinese tea many years ago. His wife and 19-month old daughter were there too. Neat to reconnect!
7. I attended a lecture on the history of English tea production in India and Sri Lanka taught by James Norwood Pratt. I knew most of what he had to say, but he's a very good presenter and has amusing anecdotes. A later presentation on guided tea meditations by another presenter was interesting, but plagued by PowerPoint problems.
8. There weren't as many tea vendors as expected, but the ones there were diverse. We got two bamboo-root scoops from a Korean vendor, some yixing filters, and a couple or rare Nannuo Shan pu-erh tuochas. We also found some loose-leaf raw pu-erh that was seven years old and well aged.
The one disappointment this weekend was the LEGO convention that we'd hoped to take our son to, so he wouldn't be bored out of this skull by the tea festival. The lines to the LEGO con were a mile long, even an hour before the con closed for the day. We tried to make up for it by finding a good sale on LEGO sets elsewhere. Staying at a beach house for the weekend and sleeping on a boat were probably more effective at making the weekend a highlight of the month for him -- thanks D!
1. Our tea demonstrations (four 20-minute gongfu cha speed-tastings) went extremely smoothly, thanks to my wife's ability to coordinate and improvise. They were a hit with all attendees and the festival manager was impressed. Other tasting hosts, tea professionals all, were far less coordinated and started late, ran over time, made messes, and generally needed hand-holding. They want us to come back again next year.
2. The wu wo tea ceremony introduction was an eye-opener (why have I never heard of this cool school of tea before?). I really want to find a group of people who want to partake of wu wo next year when the weather turns warmer!
3. The professional tea tasting methodology class was both instructive and run by an extremely cute tea instructor with Frida hair (but not Frida eyebrows) -- immediate crush fodder!
4. Suzette, the instructor with the Frida Hair, waved me into a back room where some of the tea event presenters were holding a private "guerrilla tea tasting" of Yunnan teas (a white, oolong, red, and pu-erh). Felt great to be included among the elite, drinking alongside Michael Coffey (the Tea Geek), and tea shop owners from the region.
5. I attended a class on matcha whisking, also taught by Suzette, and learned that I rather like the way we've been doing it at home. Formal matcha is sooooooooooo thick and cloying, and that's "thin matcha", not the yoghurt-consistency ceremonial "thick matcha"!
6. I attended a tea tasting held by Brett Boynton, the professional gongfu cha demonstrator who served me my first true Chinese tea many years ago. His wife and 19-month old daughter were there too. Neat to reconnect!
7. I attended a lecture on the history of English tea production in India and Sri Lanka taught by James Norwood Pratt. I knew most of what he had to say, but he's a very good presenter and has amusing anecdotes. A later presentation on guided tea meditations by another presenter was interesting, but plagued by PowerPoint problems.
8. There weren't as many tea vendors as expected, but the ones there were diverse. We got two bamboo-root scoops from a Korean vendor, some yixing filters, and a couple or rare Nannuo Shan pu-erh tuochas. We also found some loose-leaf raw pu-erh that was seven years old and well aged.
The one disappointment this weekend was the LEGO convention that we'd hoped to take our son to, so he wouldn't be bored out of this skull by the tea festival. The lines to the LEGO con were a mile long, even an hour before the con closed for the day. We tried to make up for it by finding a good sale on LEGO sets elsewhere. Staying at a beach house for the weekend and sleeping on a boat were probably more effective at making the weekend a highlight of the month for him -- thanks D!