Tim Nunn

All my life I’ve been a coffee drinker. I would even confess to a certain amount of disdain aimed at the ‘tea’ drinkers around me. I could never understand the appeal of ‘tea’ when the oportunity for coffee was also present. As instant coffee began to fade from common practice around the 90s my loyalty to the juice of the roasted bean gods was ingrained even further with the fun of learning about beans and roasts. I am salivating as I write this.
It was in the early 90s that I began to drink green tea with work associates. At the time I was working and mixing with Chinese activists who were in the tail spin of the Tiananmen Square protests. I would sit in Chinese restaurants and meeting rooms with debates politely starting in English and turning into shouted Mandarin and Cantonese arguments as the tempers and caffeine levels rose. And gallons of green tea were consumed, literally gallons.
I got a taste for the green tea but it faded as I moved on from the campaigning with the Chinese activists. I was never able to recreate the delicious green tea I was served before and, I suppose, got lazy.
In recent times I’ve been less lazy about my hot drink consumption, particularly as my tolerance for caffeine has dwindled. A cup of coffee in the afternoon will often cost me a night’s sleep nowadays.
I still can’t drink ‘builders’ tea. Does nothing for me. It might be to do with the reliance on milk, which I can’t stomach mixed into a hot drink, no matter what. But now I’ve become almost obsessional about many other kinds of tea. And, damn, it’s good. Here are some:

Jasmine Silver Needle White Tea – at any given moment it’s not unlikely this is what you’ll find in my cup. It is being on an Asian hillside in a cup. Every mouthful has fragrant white flowers and fresh, young, crisp tea leaves sharing their flavour. Not much caffeine but lots of uplift, refreshing and just damned nice.

Oolongs, lots of them – known by some as the champagne of teas. Perhaps to the horror of those people, Oolong teas very often remind me of fine hand-made beers. Complex flavours with cereals and fragrant maltiness or herby hops, that sort of thing. Not big beefy beers maybe, but with character and history to them. Oolongs have lots of varieties and I’m just starting on my journies around them.

Gunpowder – yum. It’s a bit bitter and a bit, sort of, rough. But drink lots of it. It becomes a good friend.

Genmaicha – Japanese peasants made their tea last longer by adding roasted rice. This is a woody, smell your skin on a sunny day, flavour that is unique. Not for every day but when it happens it’s fantastic. Some of the rice pops completely during roasting so there’s the occasional little popcorn – some people call this popcorn tea.

Puerh – the fine vintage red wines of the tea world. In China there Puerh teas that are centuries old that sell for thousands of pounds per ounce. One day I will try one of those teas. I drink a Taiwanese Puerh tea that has been prematurely ‘aged’. First time is an incredible experience – the water turns black. The eyes tell you this is going to rich and strong, then the nose finds something different, and then the taste. It is mult-layered and fragrant and light. It is rich but in the complexity and not in the weight. It feels like a story, a long fable, in a cup. Then, the second cup from those leaves is different, and the third is different and the fourth is a reminder of what’s gone before.

I’m heading for the (special temperature controlled 60º-100º) kettle.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.