Photography Blog | South | Africa

By Ctein

When I first wrote about the art of tea, I mentioned pu erhs, and several people asked me what they were.

It's no wonder. Pu erh teas have only been freely available in the U.S. for a score of years, and so are little-known and even less understood. Some of them have a unique flavor most commonly (and accurately) translated as "dirt," but describing all pu erhs that way would be no more accurate than describing all cheeses as being cheddary. The variety of flavors available in pu erhs makes them perhaps the most diverse of the groups of teas.

A new pu erh may be drinkable, but it is as likely to be bitter or astringent. Pu erh teas, though, are not merely dead dried leaves; they are chemically and biologically active. Pu erhs are supposed to age. Think cheeses and wines. The leaves continue to undergo oxidative and enzymatic changes, and they harbor microflora that further digest and ferment them. Pu erhs are eminently drinkable within a few years, but it can take anywhere from 10 years to 60 years for them to become truly brilliant. And, just as with cheeses and wines, many of them become totally forgettable.

Pu erhs come in four major types. Each type has its own broad flavor characteristics. Uncooked is traditional. The leaves are packed together, either loosely or compacted into bricks and bings (discs), where they start to age. Over the long run, uncooked pu erhs are more likely to produce the most spectacular teas.

Cooked pu erh is either gently heated or allowed to heat more from fermentation. This greatly accelerates the aging process producing a mature beverage much more quickly, but also denatures some of the chemical/biological components, so a cooked pu erh ages much less later. Like the uncooked versions, it can be aged as loose-leaf or compacted.

When it comes to brewing, pu erhs are practically bulletproof and thrive on vigorous brewing. They are one of the few teas where the universal recommendation is to start with boiling water. Brewing times range from 1 to 5 min., typically, but it's pretty much impossible to overbrew these teas. A half hour steep may produce a brew stronger than one would like (and so need a bit of dilution), but it will be flavorful, not bitter.

Pu erhs are designed for multiple infusions. I had one very nice pu erh that was only good for three brewings and I felt kind of, well, cheated. Another one was still doing well on the eighth pot. The flavor can change with each successive brew. A pu erh may be intensely dirty and smoky on the first pour and by the fifth be so grassy and fragrant that you'd think it was a floral tea. I can have one pu erh pot that I'm drinking from for the entire day, and it's like I'm drinking a whole bunch of different kinds of tea.

This unique characteristic, combined with the wide variety of flavors that pu erhs have to begin with, makes it pretty much impossible to characterize them as a group.

The ongoing aging process that makes pu erhs so fascinating is responsible for my comment last time that they are simultaneously some of the best bargains you can buy and an easy way to go bankrupt. For proper aging, the leaves are kept slightly warm (room temperature or a bit above), definitely dry, away from light, and open to air, because many of the reactions are aerobic ones. Paper's a common wrap. If you find a bing that is sealed in airtight plastic it's likely to be very cheap and of low quality.

Do not judge a bing by its cover. These are all very cheap pu erhs, colorful boxes notwithstanding. Entirely drinkable, entirely uninspiring. But with time, who knows?

Low grade but entirely drinkable bings in the 12 ounce range are available for prices between $5 and $15 in many Chinese markets. At that price, one can afford to experiment. Jon Singer picked up a very cheap bing in a market a dozen years back. Some of it was put aside and forgotten until about a year ago. When brewed up, it was so complicated and subtle that Jon and I couldn't describe it. We could pick out a slightly lemony flavor note, but it was like trying to pick one single instrument out of a large orchestra. It was as far from smoky and dirty as you could imagine.

Jon sent me a couple of these very cheap bings. They are drinkable, if uninspiring, and I've put one of them in the back of the cupboard to see what it is like in another decade or so. It'll probably be lousy, but what the heck, it was $6.

Three excellent and promising pu erhs. The two on the left came from Cha Guan and are no longer available, while the small bing on the right is one I just acquired from TeaSource.

Excellent bings and bricks go for $30–$60 when relatively young; my absolute favorite pu erh is a 500 gram brick that cost me $40 (that's enough for the better part of a year's worth of steady tea drinking). Daniel at Cha Guan (see my earlier tea post) was so proud of this find that he made it his shop's signature tea until it ran out. It's so smoky on the first pour it's like drinking a campfire, and it changes wonderfully with successive infusions. I was suffficiently impressed that I ordered a second brick and that is in the back of a cupboard. I'll see what happens to it in another decade. Truth is, I'm only a third of the way through the first brick after a year and a half.

Here's where financial madness can set in. You can acquire huge numbers of bings at individually reasonable prices. Before you know it, you have a substantial fortune tied up in dried camellia leaves (with the risk of finding down the line that you have the caffeinated equivalent of vinegar.) Happily, I do not have the collector allele in my genome. Still, one is tempted, especially when someone like Roy Fong comes back with a taster's set of eight bings, designed to appeal to a variety of palates and situations and which he has even greater hopes for when aged. A mere $350. I resisted. But I thought about it.

You don't want to know what will happen to the prices of some of these when they are fully aged, if they turn out to be as good as hoped. Really, you don't. Small amounts of the very best aged pu erhs sell for princely sums. I've never tried them; I never expect to. Fortunately, I am entirely happy with my modestly priced, delicious brews.

Ctein

Sometimes, Ctein's off-topic columns on TOP grow on you, and get better with age. If you don't like them now, set them aside for a little while. Who knows what might happen?

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Featured Comment by Mano: "Here in China (hello from China), puer tea is widely considered to be top dog, though a few years ago there was a scandal that this prized symbol of Chinese culture was actually being produced in Africa and sold in the country with fraudulent credentials. Back then you could spend the typical worker's entire year salary on a quarter kilo brick of the tea; after the African issues and other problems with hoarders and speculators the price of the tea dropped like a rock. Now anyone can get a decent aged tea for an affordable price, and it has become very common. In fact I may have a few bricks of it sitting in the back of some cupboard in my kitchen. People like to give it to each other as gifts, which get given again to other people because no one can drink all of it."

Featured Comment by Fabian: "I will check back in a decade or so, to see if I hate this article by then. Today, though, I found it to be a very interesting and inspiring read. 'Drinking a campfire' certainly sounds like something worth testing! Thanks, Ctein!"

Featured Comment by Bob Rosinsky: "I never did get the 'tea' thing. My grandfather used to drink Lipton Tea. He'd plop the tea bag into a cup and add a couple of little saccharine tablets to it to sweeten it up. He was an odd man."

Featured Comment by Jerry Lewis-Evans: "Pu erh, or a phrase sounding phonetically similar, was a phrase that cropped up on various live Frank Zappa albums. It seemed to be one of those band 'in' jokes, but being from England I always took it to be a phrase that you would say while holding your nose to indicate an unpleasant smell! Maybe he was just indicating that it was time for a tea break!"

By Ctein

Okay, so my "keeping the 'X' (as in, the unknown) in 'Xmas'" column normally appears the week of the solstice. There's a good reason it's a week late this year.

I forgot.

When I did remember, I had already done my "Art of Tea" column and didn't want to run two off-topic columns in a row, so I put this off another week. Consequently, a somewhat delayed Salubrious Solstice to you all. Now off we go, into the wild blue yonder.

The title of this column is a quote from Enrico Fermi, infamously referred to as the "Fermi Paradox." The infamy lies in the fact that it is not anything like a paradox; it is simply a statement of utter ignorance. Why that is so will be the topic of this week's column.

The Fermi question concisely goes like this: there are tens of billions of planetary systems in this galaxy alone, thousands of quintillions in the observable universe. Even if only 1% of those develop life, even if only 1% of those life bearing planets develop intelligent life, even if only 1% of those intelligent life forms develop advanced technology, that's a heck of a lot of technologically-advanced, intelligent species out there. Furthermore, based upon the single data sample we have, it takes less than one third the age of the universe to go from a coalescing cloud of gas to an advanced technological intelligence. There's been plenty of time for other intelligences to evolve, several times over, and to advance far beyond us.

So far, though, we've seen no broadly-convincing evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence—and it ought to be pretty obvious. Hence the paradox.

Except it's not really a paradox. That word assumes we understand the situation well enough to see a logical contradiction. Let me illustrate. If I become reasonably convinced that millions of people every year travel by airplane, but every airport I visit and every airplane I inspect is empty of people, then I've got a logical problem. I understand air travel well enough to know that these two observations—millions of travelers, and empty airports—aren't compatible. Something must be wrong in my assumption.

But try this one on: if a god (or gods) exists, she can certainly work miracles. Yet, as I walk through the world, it does not seem to be lousy with self-evident, irrefutable miracles. So, obviously there are no gods.

Well, anyone above the grade school level can poke holes in that logic. It assumes you actually have some idea of what a god would think, what she would want to do, what would be her motivation for having created the whole shebang in the first place, etc. Most everybody with a lick of sense, whether or not they believe in a god(s), full well understands that there is no possible way they could have any idea how a god would think. You can't disprove the existence of deities by looking at an absence of miracles, because you have no way to conclude that commonplace miracles are an inevitable consequence of godhood.

The Fermi question is much more like the second than the first. To assume that advanced technological intelligence leads to either a signal, or interstellar travel, that we would recognize as such (that's important) requires making a huge number of unproven and untested assumptions about the physical universe and about what intelligence wants and does. You can create almost any scenario you want to imagine to explain the lack of observable data and at our current level of knowledge it is just as probable as any other scenario. Anything could be true. No thing in particular is very likely to be.

There is one data point we do all know something about: almost everything humans do makes no sense in any abstract, logical way. The overwhelming majority of our time, energy, and resources go into activities that cannot be explained as a consequence of intelligence. They aren't even behaviors that are typical of all species on Earth (although they aren't necessarily unique to ours). We are chock-full of species-specific behaviors that can be explained after the fact but couldn't be predicted purely on the basis of intelligence and certainly weren't inevitable on the basis of biology or evolution. They are just how we work.

Not every human being is subject to all these impulses. A sufficient majority are, across time and space, that it's pretty safe to say they're characteristic of human beings as a species. Individual exceptions noted: Dear Reader, this is not about you. Let me regale you with a short and highly incomplete list. (I intentionally leave out a couple of very obvious biggies, because I don't need them to make the point; I can do it entirely with "trivialities.")

1) Body ornamentation and decoration. Not limited to such things as jewelry or tattoos; includes hairstyling, makeup, clothes or fashion sense of any sort, whatever. All the stuff that goes into making you decide that you "look good" when you face other people.

Imagine how much time and money are expended by every man, woman, and child because they don't feel it is sufficient to simply wash up occasionally and throw on a gunnysack.

2) Food "composition," for lack of a better term. Cats find food that they can play with appetizing, but they sure don't seem to care much how it looks; we'd rather it sat still but are terribly sensitive to the aesthetics. At the high end we have things like sushi; that the low end we have the wonderful cliché movie images of slop being splashed into a tray in a military mess or high school cafeteria line. Makes you lose your appetite just thinking about it, doesn't it?

3) Acquisitiveness. The packrat instinct. Collecting, acquiring, hoarding of any sort far beyond what one can reasonably use within a reasonable period of time. It may be all those books you don't throw out, even though you're hardly likely to read them again. Or all the music you own, regardless of form and format; videotapes, DVDs, stamps, coins, barbwire, cameras or lenses that you haven't picked up in years but you might, you think. Clothing you never wear, furniture stored in the attic along with an extra set of dishes because, well, you never know. Think of how much smaller (and less expensive!) a living space you could dwell in if you limited your ownership to things you might reasonably need in the foreseeable future.

4) Pets. 'Nough said?

5) Real property/territory. Lots of species seem to do just fine without the concept of my/your real estate. Not humans. (Yes, a minority of cultures have explicitly rejected the concept of land ownership but (a) they are not the norm and (b) if the impulse weren't there, there wouldn't be a need to reject it.

6) Religious impulse. Note that this is not the same as theology. The existence (or not) of gods and the inclination to believe in (or not) gods are entirely separate. Humans are intelligent and humans have religious impulse but we have no special reason to think that one is a consequence of the other. It just is.

Now tally it all up. How much of your life, of the totality of society, is consumed and defined by satisfying one or more of these species-specific impulses?

Overwhelmingly, almost every aspect of our lives is driven by this arbitrary set of inclinations that have no connection we understand to technological intelligence. We imagine that the nature and actions of hypothetical advanced civilizations can be rationally discussed and analyzed, yet most of our own is based upon characteristics that have no rationally-predictable basis for existence. They simply are.

We think we can even start to talk sensibly about the Fermi question as being a "paradox?" We don't know enough to make sense out of ourselves. We certainly don't have clues about anyone else.

To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met the X and he is us."

Ctein

Every year around this time, TOP columnist Ctein (it's his only name, and is pronounced "kuh-TINE") puts the X in Xmas.

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Featured Comment by icexe: "Our great advancements in intelligence and technology might simply be meaningless to any far more advanced civilizations out there. Here's an example: There may be a colony of ants living under a rotted tree stump somewhere in the Amazon jungle who consider themselves the master of all they see around them. They have conquered and controlled the world they know. They may even be on a quest to find other 'intelligent' beings like themselves, but so far to no avail. Yet, unbeknownst to them, they share an entire planet with humans, who are thousands of times more intelligent and advanced, who are fully aware that such a thing as ants exist, but who simply don't care enough to ever bother looking for more of them under some random tree stump in some random corner of the world. And even if by the greatest of random chance some humans did stumble upon their nest, any attempt to communicate would be on a level completely unknown and undecipherable to both humans and ants."

Featured Comment by Alastair Smith: "As so often, XKCD put it nicely."

Featured Comment by Trevor Small: "No paradox. The reason we've seen no signs of intelligent life is that Earth is under quarantine. Out there, somewhere, is a whopping great sign that says 'KEEP OUT. INFECTIOUS DISEASE RISK. EARTH HAS HUMANS. HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS.' Or the alien equivalent. Kind of makes you feel proud of our virility, doesn't it."

Featured Comment by Mark L: "There is no doubt that there are more advanced civilations. The odds are stacked against this not being the case. The only questions are: 1) Do they know we are here and 2) what will their intentions be when they know. Let's hope that deep fried human being is not some advanced alien delicacy. And hope that a Canon 1DS can split their exoskeletal big cranium in half if they come for us!"

Featured Comment by Zeeman: "Since this is a photography site, the following begs to be added to Ctein's list of human impulses: 7) The aesthetic impulse, which drives us every day to seek or create what is beautiful. However, given the acquisitiveness of current shutterbugs, it might be that this will eventually converge with #3. Also, given the propensity of acquisitive shutterbugs to worship one among a limited pantheon of deities named Canon, Nikon, etc., the aesthetic impulse might also be headed towards convergence with religion. Now that is scarier than most alien invasion stories."

Featured Comment by Wil: "Jeez, I read to the end of that long article only to find, I don't give a damn."

Featured Comment by Skip Davis: "Sorry I am so late to comment, I was just so taken by this post that I had to think on it a bit. This one post was worth reading this site all year.... There are a lot of things to think about because of it. I am going for a long bike ride today just to enjoy this paradox called life."

This is my tea shelf. You can only see about half of what I have; the jars are ranked three rows deep. The cardboard and paper packages contain my
pu-erh bings; the rest are various looseleaf teas in airtight jars.

By Ctein

Once again, we wander far afield from photography. If my off-topic columns are not your cup of...(oh, I can't say it), skip this column and tune in again next week.

My off-topic topic is tea. Expect several columns on this, because I'm a real tea geek. No, I'm not an expert, just a geek. I do not have a seriously refined palate and I don't know most of the descriptive vocabulary. I just really, really like my tea, and I insist upon good tea.

Tea's my major extravagance (other than living in the San Francisco Bay Area). I live on the stuff. Don't like coffee (except iced, when it's hot out). I can't abide the taste of alcohol, I don't smoke, and I've not used any drugs except theobromine. I am an effete, intellectual, elitist teetotaler, and I raise my pinky in your direction.

Lipton's, or one of its brethren, packaged in little tissue paper bags, thrown in a cup, boiling water poured over it, and steep until it's dead? That's the tea equivalent the coffee that's been sitting in the pot at your local gas station since ungodly-A.M. in the morning. It's no wonder you have to load it with mega-amounts of lemon or milk and sugar to make it palatable.

Good tea, properly brewed, is another matter. For a start, "properly brewed" generally means no boiling water (unless it's a pu-erh). Pouring boiling water on tea is a lot like making coffee by tossing the grounds in a saucepan of boiling water and cooking it for a while.

Depending on the tea, the proper brewing temperature may be anywhere between 140 and 190°F (60–90°C). Not that there's one right way to make tea. In my various books, I've seen brewing instructions for the same delicate green tea that went from 140° for 90 seconds up to 165° for 3–5 min. Still, a far cry from boiling water.

Speaking of brewing, here's a handy trick if you're caffeine-sensitive. My housemate, Paula, is very much so, as are several friends. They testify that this works. Take those unbrewed tea leaves and pour hot water on them for 30-45 seconds. Pour off that brew and toss it. Ninety percent of the caffeine goes away in that first infusion.

(Important: the results may vary considerably with the tea. While I have found this to work reliably, if caffeine is severely contraindicated for you for medical reasons, do not rely on this!)

My tea preferences lean towards the Japanese and Chinese teas, mostly greens, wulongs, and pu-erhs. Most of it costs real money. Tea prices have skyrocketed this century. Ten years ago I had an absolute upper limit of $100 a pound for tea. These days I often spend several times that, although I've discovered some wonderful and excellent teas in the $10–$50/lb. range.

Even at double digits per ounce, tea is still a remarkably cheap beverage. I describe it as an extravagance, but I'd be surprised if I spend over a dollar a day on tea and I drink about a liter a day. I need only a gram or two of high-quality tea in an individual infuser; 20 portions from an ounce is normal. I get anywhere from three to eight infusions from one portion. Compare that to the price of Starbucks, or even your local gas station coffee.

This just has to be the world's greatest tea infuser. The owners of Aroma gave me one after making a large purchase at their shop; it changed my life.

How do I brew tea? I am like a total fan of the individual PIAO 1 infuser. It makes brewing a fresh cuppa easy, no fuss and very little muss, and it's fun to play with. Measure in a teaspoon or so of leaf. Pour in water of the appropriate temperature. Let it steep for the appropriate time. Push the little button on the top and a ball valve at the bottom opens and filtered tea flows into the container. The leaf remains in the top part of the infuser.

Where do you get good tea? There are some good mail-order companies, especially ones that specialize in certain types of teas. For general offerings of all varieties and nationalities, I think Uptons is by far the best. Their catalogs are wonderful and informative. That's where I learned the decaffeination trick. You'll also learn what all the terms of art mean (Lipton's famous "flowery orange pekoe" is not some fancy varietal, it merely denotes a rather low grade of tea quality).

Unfortunately, while they're really quality teas, their tasters just don't have the same palette as I do. Consequently, I don't buy a lot from them. The very best thing about Upton is that they have small sampler packs (good for 2–3 pots) for just a few dollars apiece, so for not very much money I can try a whole lot of different teas. I regularly get samples from Upton to check out and every so often I hit on a winner, like their gyokuro kenjyo.

Most of my buying is from local fine tea shops that I visit, using the word "local" rather loosely. Here are my personal favorites:

San Francisco—Aroma—Haymen Da Luz and Ying Wu

San Francisco—Imperial Tea Court—Roy Fong

St. Paul—Tea source—Bill Waddington

Montréal—Cha Guan: La Maison du The—Daniel Ng

They all do mail-order, but the nice thing about shopping in person is that you can smell teas, often order a pot of something you want to try out, and discuss your tastes and preferences with the clerks and proprietors. Mail order, you're kind of working blind, until the proprietor gets to know your tastes. Look for one in your own city and you'll discover that a good tea shop is like a good bookstore; the proprietor will be knowledgeable, helpful, and enthusiastic about finding teas that you will especially like.

When I revisit this topic, I'll clue you in on those mysterious pu-erhs I mentioned. They are among my favorites. They were illegal in the U.S. 20 years ago and most people still don't know about them. They're simultaneously the biggest and most affordable bargains in the tea world along with being the easiest way to blow your entire family fortune. How's that for a teaser?

You must buy this holiday music. What does this have to do with the subject of the column? Well, Franks's first major album was "The Art Of Tea."

And now a quick free-associational, seasonal segue.

"The Art of Tea," from which I lifted this column's title, was jazzy singer-songwriter Michael Franks' second album. His "Watching the Snow" is my favorite.

Best. Holiday. Album. Ever.

Not even close to your usual psuedo-carolly, excessively-treacly fare. It plays well year-round. Check it out.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Emily Cartier: "Sad, we can't share a pot. I much prefer black teas. I'm not terribly fussy about which exact tea garden grew it. If it's black, chances are there will be interesting flavors, and I'll be happy to drink it. Maybe we could share some herbal tisane instead? I am pretty flexible in my tastes there as well, tho' I have an abiding fondness for chamomile."

Featured Comment by KeithB: "I would have thought that you would like 'Tea, Earl Grey. Hot.'" [The favored drink of Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." —Ed.]

Featured Comment by Benjamin R. George: "I have to take exception to this generalization that 'properly brewed' tea generally means no boiling water. Green, white, and oolong teas are often ruined by boiling water, but many non-pu-erh black teas are great with it. Since you don't drink a lot of black tea, this is of little interest for you, but your readers should know that your advice is not fully general."

Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "I have to have two cups of tea every morning to raise my I.Q. above single figures."

Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "Another good Holiday album is 'The Bells of Dublin,' by the Chieftains, on which they host many guest artists."

Featured Comment by Gavin McLelland: "Mmm..I prefer the darker teas—I have always loved Lapsang Souchong—the smokey flavour goes so well with dates. Quite a treat."

Featured Comment by Richard Man: "Ctein, as you may remember, I drink a lot of tea myself. I'm glad to see a refreshing cup of, um, article this morning :-). As for the vast fortune wasted on Pu Erh, that's indeed quite a story. I won't spoiler it. Capitalism at its 'finest.' There are lots of stories about tea of course, but this is a fun one: all the tea, whether it's green or black, are from the same species of the plant. Green is unroasted while black tea is roasted and sometimes fermented (pu-erh). One of my favorite is Jasmine gunpowder. Strong and bold flavor. I confess that there is one tea that I could not like—the Lapsang Souchong—too much like drinking burnt BBQ wood, which is pretty much what it is :-)."

Featured Comment by Arne Croell: "Throwing away the first short brew was actually the standard procedure during several tastings in Chinese tea shops (Shanghai and Tunxi) that I had last year. The explanation at that time was not the reduction of caffeine but that the first infusion has a rough taste and the best flavor comes out actually in the third steeping (both for green teas and Oolongs). We could taste test side by side the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th steeping of several teas and the change of the flavors was certainly there. Personally, after trying out many teas in the last 39 years (I became a heavy tea drinker at 15), I've settled on Darjeeling first flush teas from certain plantations as my favorites."

Featured Comment by Willem: "This book really was my cup of tea: The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide by Heiss & Heiss."