Tea Interview Prep!

Personal:
Where did you learn?
I’ve learned what I know from books, blogs, forums, and of course a lot of focused tasting.
teachat.com
hojotea.com
marshaln.com
The Tea Companion by Jane Pettigrew
Tea by Camellia Sinensis Tea House in NYC
Tea Sommelier by Gabriella Lombardi

I started doing a high-end tea program at the end of 2013, maybe 5 months into my studies I got an email from Guylaine (whom I think you will also speak to in your article). I met up with her, went to a couple events, we even hosted our first tea event at Q together, a 6-course high tea sort of thing. Since then I have basically lived in immersion. I am constantly surrounded by amazing tea, so it’s easy to retain information and build on that foundation.

What is a tea list like?
Literally, in our case it details the untranslated tea name, translated name, special notes (which would be things like the harvest time, harvest conditions, etc), the area it’s from, flavor profile, and price per pot.

Conceptually, I think a good tea list has to be broad enough to include what anyone could want but focused enough to represent the taste person who made it.

I think the goal of a list needs to be to show many different flavor profiles within the archetypes of tea (black, green, etc). Each country in the world produces really different tea, and even more so inside of each country, there are so many variations on production and flavor. Japan alone has around 28 variations of green tea. Most people have tried sencha, but not usually any of the other 27. Our list is usually around 20 tea’s long, and each are great examples of what that particular tea can taste like. It’s of course, nice to have obscure things as well. People with experience really seem to enjoy curve balls. It took a long time and a lot of sampling to gather those teas. I had to try 7 white teas before I was able to commit to putting one on our list.

Do you have a favorite tea producing area?
Probably Yunnan, China. I’ve had amazing tea from all types there. Our list has a large representation from Yunnan.

In your opinion, is tea catching on in the city?
Frankly — in restaurants no, in cafe’s somewhat, and in shops yes.

I think the demand is there.
As a business, a tea list is hard to execute without dedicated staff and has a pretty poor return on investment. For most people, tea comes at the end of the dinner. This time spot is shared with cognac and other digestifs, which economically are a much better for the restaurant to sell. I [somewhat jokingly] get scolded for pushing tea on customers over spirits.

If it’s a tea list for passion (like ours) that’s a different story. We operate within a bubble, we sell an experience. Our dining room is very slow paced, scenic, and I have all the time in the world to chat about the teas if the customer wants.
Tea is something that has to be prepared. It’s not rocket science, but there’s a little bit more to it than pouring water on leaves. Temperature, ratio of leaf to water, steeping time are all important factors. Some tea is really finicky and hard to make well. In a sense, you have to trust the person making your tea as you would trust a chef preparing a dish.

So much about tea is the experience, if your tea is made out of sight and delivered to you, you’re missing out on nearly all the experience. People want the romance, the legend, the facts, the science. They want the affirmation that the tea they ordered is going to kick ass, and you need a person who can tell them all of that. It was hard to get momentum in the beginning, but it’s been great these past couple years.

What has the reaction been to high-end teas?
It’s clear that unless you trust the person making the tea for you, you won’t order an ultra high-end tea. We’re fortunate that in our dining style, guests spend a lot of time with us, giving us this opportunity. Over time we’ve built a reputation, it’s allowing us to introduce tea at a level that was a really hard sale 3 years ago.

I spend a lot of time with the teas that I want to show people, I want to know them inside out, and if there are tricks to making them better, to learn them and teach those to our guests. I believe my taste palate is pretty alright, and because of that, we’ve had a lot of success with doing tea pairings for our dinner menus.

Of course, the reaction has been fantastic. Most people have never tried tea of this quality before, it’s always nice to expand people’s horizons. Drinking tea with dinner is something that isn’t a part of our culture, and it’s nice to not only show that culture to people but at the same time give them a delicious alternative to alcohol.

What do you think of tea as a pairing?
Some styles of food are just better with tea. Like fish and chips is great with beer, Thai food with riesling, cookies are good with milk. It’s a pain in the ass to pair soups with wine, tea fares much better. Chocolate, really rich desserts, etc. Things that are on the extreme ends of the flavor spectrum (really subtle, or really aggressive) also seem to be nice with tea.

Where do you buy your tea?
Currently, I deal with 5 sources.
Hojo tea, Tea Monde, Matsu Kaze, Ippodo, and The Tea Trader in Inglewood. I will start to work with yunomi.us and taiwaneseteacrafts.com in 2017 I hope.

If there’s anything I want to say to the people reading this magazine.
You could try some of best tea on the planet here in Calgary, what’s stopping you?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions, almost nobody knows anything about tea in this part of the world. It’s really my pleasure to try and help answer them.

What was the best tea you’ve had?
Phoenix Oolong Lao Cong Ba Xiang King. It’s the ‘mother tree’ of this cultivar of oolong, over 500 years old. Tried it blind a couple years ago, blown away. It was the same price as saffron, so I guess I’m satisfied to have liked it so much.

My favorite tea is probably gyokuro but it’s not something I would want every day. They make a really simple type of tea in Kyoto called Kyobancha, I’d say that would be an everyday tea for me. Chinese/Taiwanese oolong teas are almost always ‘my type’, I wouldn’t mind drinking those every day either.

Favorite tea pairing: gyokuro and seared scallops

Comments:
Price is funny, in a restaurant, people won’t hesitate to spend $60 on a simple bottle of wine, and you could be paying well over $500 to have one of the best examples of an area or varietal.
But for the same price as that simple bottle of wine, you could drink from Long Jing (Dragonwell) China’s legendary green tea appellation, from the most sought after harvest cycle, and trees over a century old.

We live in a protected society, pretty high up on a horse. The world of tea, especially in places like China is very frustrating for us. Good tea is expensive for a reason. There are costs in production, supply and demand, shipping, in some cases aging, and of course fame. One of the great aspects of wine is its protection of appellations, which tea kind of has, but not really. Only so much tea can be made in an area each year, and those figures are often toppled by what is officially sold, especially in famous Chinese regions.

You have to trust that the tea was imported by someone who knows he actually got what he paid for. As an importer you taste a tea at an auction, tell them you want 20KG of it, and they send you 20KG of something similar. Can you tell the difference? You need to be able to do that. Next, you have to trust the merchant the importer sold to, as they could swap it for whatever they want. Next, (in our case) you have to trust us that we are selling what we claim we’re selling, not only that — but almost more importantly, be able to make it properly. In tea, you have to have a long chain of trust, which I think is its unique hurdle. It’s a big mess, so my advice is trust in your personal taste. When buying loose tea’s from merchants, try the tea as a sample before you buy it, if you can’t have a sample and have to commit to buying it in order to try it, don’t buy it.

I keep a ‘fake’ version of Long Jing handy to easily show people the difference between the true version and its copies. I got the fake version as a gift, from a good friend who just didn’t know better, and how could she? It’s a sealed and packaged product, and we’re used to iconic names meaning something. The area where authentic Long Jing is made isn’t very large, especially the exceptional ones. Drawing parallels to wine, it would be similar to producing white wine in Armagnac, putting it in a dark bottle, and labeling it as a red blend from Margaux.

Are there health benefits to tea?
Sure, caffeine is great for your blood flow. There’s debate about the value of anti-oxidants but I don’t feel qualified to get into it. I understand the gist of it and could give my opinion but it’s far from professional. One of the first articles I wrote on my blog called the health benefits of tea touches on all of that.

What is the process of pairing a tea with food?
I would say it starts with understanding the flavors of the dish and what do you want to accomplish with the pairing? I think it’s best to give an example. We recently did a chicken noodle soup pairing with stem tea from Japan. Chicken noodle soup is a savory intense dish which herbs and the consommé dominate, and our highlight flavor other than chicken was garlic. Consider the teas available, Chinese green tea? Too Fruity. Taiwanese oolong tea, too fresh or floral. Japanese green tea? Herbal flavors dominate, ok that sounds good – but which one? Do we want a refreshing or savory tea? Well the dish isn’t refreshing, so unless you want to draw attention to refreshing parts of it, you should use the savory option. Which teas are savory? That comes down to having to try them. Once you have a list of possible options, look at the list and choose the best choice. The stem tea we chose had a particular quality of green onion and dried herbs. We’re adding new flavors in the same direction the dish is going in, without overlapping anything in the dish.