A Golden Morning

The community building in Darstetten, Berne, Switzerland, my

grandfather's boyhood home

 

I read a good article in Cooks Illustrated this morning.  It was about the immediecy of sensory input when we are young and how it stays with you.  Many of you know I grew up on a farm and many of my referrents to how tea tastes and smells come from that time in my life.  For breakfast I had a small red plum that instantly transported me to Gramma 'Duffee's backyard in the hot August sun, with the mist just rising off Schoharie Creek and the grass still wet on my bare toes.  It's a good memory, filled with love and thoughts of breakfast, if I would just go and gather the eggs.

This morning I am having the Chicago Tea Garden's Golden Bi Luo.  This is a black tea from Yunnan Province, China.  I reviewed it last year and I am interested to see how this year's crop is.  This is in the style of the green Bi Luo or Snail Spring.  The leaves are tightly wound and look like small snails.  The can is covered in a rich golden dust from the buds.  They smell of wet hay after a rain.  I brewed it in one of thos bottom draining pots, so I could watch the dance of the leaves as they unfurl.

This is a tea that really deserves multiple infusions, but it is morning and I can't quite manage that, so it is 3.5 minutes with 212 degree water.  The tea smells rich and earthy, a bit like fermenting corn.  It is so smooth and rich , with great depth of taste, which is earthy and slightly spicey, so good.  I think it may be even better than last years.

Not all of life has to be related to our personal experiences in the past and I think we should strive to appreciate things on their own merits, whether it is tea, sunrise, the downy woodpecker on the suet or friends and family.  We just need to acknowledge that we are all inexorably tied to our past, good or bad and go on from there.  Each day is an opportunity to enjoy what is before us.  Doesn't always work that way, I know only too well, but then, tomorrow is another day.  May your day be one of deep appreciation of life around you and may you find joy in it.

Gold on a Gray Day

This is St. Barbara, for whom many of my ancestresses were named. I have to applaud the museum for painting the walls red. Color is appreciated today as it is very gray and grim, with snow, rain, and lots of wind.


Since it is so nasty today I really wanted a black tea and fortunately, I remembered I hadn't tried the Golden Bi Luo from the new Chicago Tea Garden that I bought a few weeks ago. This is an unusual, to me at least, tea in that it is a black tea made in the style of a green or Oolong tea, namely Bi Luo Chun, which I think translates as Green Snail Spring. It is from Yunnan Province, China and is hand-formed into loose golden spirals in a heated wok.


The dry leaves smell lovely, something like ripe corn or fresh tomatoes that are just starting to cook. They had released a fine yellow dust on the inside of the can. Tony Gebley's wonderful instructions, which come with each of his teas, say to infuse it for only a minute and then you can get up to 8 one-minute brews. I did not have the patience for that today, so I did a two minute infusion and then 2 more while I was drinking the first. The tea almost instantly released a lovely yellow into the water and was a dark, deep gold by the end of two minutes. The color was pretty much the same in the other two infusions.


What a very nice tea this is, The brewing tea gives off that wonderful fresh wash scent I love and the liquor is thick and hearty, but very creamy seeming. The taste has a bit of the usual Yunnan, but with maybe some vanilla and maybe some old mellow wood, with a touch of some sort of piquancy at the end. The second and third cups seemed to be about the same in taste, but they felt much thinner somehow. On a day when I feel I have more time and patience, I will do the 8 steepings and report back on how they were. I put the leftovers of the 3 brews into one pot and that was quite good, also.