Green Tea in Canada
Thursday February 08th 2007, 12:15 pmFiled under: General
For the past two weeks, I’ve been travelling through Ontario and Quebec, meeting with friends in the Chinese community, and establishing links for tea, import, and freight forwarding. Now, being a native San Diegan, many have asked me if January and February were the natural choices for me to visit Canada for the first time…
Needless to say, I have discovered entirely new levels of cold, sometimes in the order of 33 below zero (celcius). Not a pleasant feeling when your winter gear consists of heavy boots and a leather jacket. Jeans and sweaters are not quite up to the task, and I have found myself craving saunas and hot, sandy beaches.
Which made my discovery of the numerous Canadian Chinese teahouses so much more pleasant. I have visited quite a few now, as I find myself running from steaming hot cup to cup, discovering a whole lew level of appreciation and tolerance for less orthodox or traditional forms of tea preparation.
My first discovery, that tea snobs do not exist when the sky and ground are equally white, was actually less painful than I had anticipated. Mind you, my own tea shop is less than 150 feet (around 45m) from the beach, in San Diego, with more than 300 days of sun per year, and my own personal selection of (currently) over 126 kinds of pure, traditional Chinese tea.
In Canada, the most important consideration for tea is that it is hot. And plentiful. By the time your face unfreezes, and your brain realizes that it actually posesses five senses, taste is already a long-forgetten concern. I found myself greedily gulping pot after pot of commercial-grade loose pu’er, unnamed random oolongs, and goodness knows what else. I’m quite sure that my friends were also filling me full of Cantonese cold medicine, as I quite recall the taste, something like soap-flavored turpentine. Definitely not green tea. But hot, so it was quite alright.
My second and third discoveries were corallaries of the first, groundbreaking realization, and took even less time to assimilate. The second discovery is that it is in fact possible to make bagged (sachet) green tea that tastes like…green tea. I am quite accustomed to the “sour, sour, bitter, bitter” (suan suan ku ku) taste of green tea bags, and I have developed the art of disdain for them to an acceptably French level (I learned wine in Bordeaux, so I disdain even my native Californian wines).
Finding that it is possible to brew a–good–yes, I said good, cup of tea from a tea bag was even less painful than drinking unknown loose tea. And in fact, because of the original quality of the tea and the manner in which it was processed, I found it thoroughly enjoyable despite only getting three real cups (still better than average) out of each bag. The tea in question was a Taiwanese Dong Ding (Tung Ting) oolong, grown in superb conditions, and of which I happen to have a great deal in loose, whole leaf form in my personal stocks (even from the same farm).
The third discovery would have been even more impossible (the French have degrees of impossible, which explains much) than the second, back home: bottled green tea. From the same producers as the famous bagged green tea, and from the self-same Tung Ting oolong leaves, comes bottled green tea made with unprocessed and organic ingredients. Nothing else. The color and taste actually come from tea. As in, you could pour it in a cup, heat it, and think that it was tea. Quel surprise!
I have tasted four varieties, all of them flavored (oh well), such as green apple, lemon, jasmine, and ginger. I have even visited the factory and packing plant, and showed appropriate awe and reverence. Even a die-hard Gaulist would have been moved…
So, we enter the dawn of a new era at The Whole Leaf (My French snobbiness insists on the proper Chiense name, Yi Pin Xiang), one which includes–gasp–bagged tea and bottled tea. So, for all of you die-hard tea lovers and snobs (we must never forget our Gallic friends), soon our home page will feature the world’s best–and only–real green tea in some other form than loose leaf. Check it out and enjoy!
