On the broadcast of my Twitch.tv/vul100 stream, tea leaves under black light revealed their many hidden beauties. Here are some images taken from that stream. To highlight what you can see with UV light, here the same Ali Shan leaves under regular and black light: On the left you can see gradations of green to yellow, but under black light on the right, the same leaves burst with color. Red corresponds to chlorophyll, yellow and green correspond to a number of different compounds, primarily the grassy and jasmine derivatives of membrane fatty acids, but also amino acids, aldehyde compounds ..read more

On February 5th 2020 I'll be going live on twitch.tv/vul100!  Here are answers to questions you may have: What is twitch.tv? — Twitch.tv is a service for live streaming. Live streaming is a way of broadcasting live video over the internet, and of recording the broadcast so that people can watch later. You will be able to watch my channel by going to twitch.tv/vul100. What will you do on twitch.tv/vul100? —I’ll be talking, demonstrating, carrying out experiments, interviewing, and best of all, chatting with you.  It’ll mostly be about tea, but we can chat about coffee, wine, beer, and ..read more

Note: all photos in this post are courtesy of Yan Chen, Yan Chen, Professor, Louisiana State University Agricultural Center Hammond Research Station. Such fun to give the talk “The Aromas of Wine and Tea: a Sensory Adventure!”  with the help of Marzi Pecen. Here we are talking with attendees before the start—Marzi is standing on the right: In the Sensory Theater of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science we could have a true sensory adventure—we could experience directly how the aromas of wine and tea shift and change as we alternatively sniffed individual chemicals and ..read more

Such fun at the 5th Annual Colloquium of the Global Tea Initiative—“Tea & Wine - The Great Debate”—at UC Davis under the leadership of Katharine Burnett! Some highlights: People who know me know that I am not really fond of puer…but I was entranced by the dialog between Roy Fong of The Imperial Tea Court in San Francisco (https://www.imperialtea.com/Default.asp), and James Norwood Pratt, tea writer and connoisseur (https://jamesnorwoodpratt.com). Norwood asked the questions and Roy answered, all about how Roy produces his puers in his warehouse in San Francisco. He imports his r ..read more

Yet another except from my upcoming book: Tea: a Nerd's Eye View. Tea serving temperature Fun question: at what temperature to serve tea?  The first systematic study I found to answer this question was provided by Ragita Pramudya and Han-Seok Seo, which studied liking and emotional response to coffee and green tea.* They used bagged pan-fired Korean green tea which can be expected to have a roasted flavor. They prepared the tea by brewing the bags with boiling water for 5 minutes. Under these conditions they had a greater chance of leaching out indole with its animalic quality, and catechins ..read more

Another excerpt from my upcoming book "Tea: a Nerd's Eye View:" Tea is served in glasses, bowls, and cups that come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, made from an amazing array of materials.  The effects of these different containers has not, to my knowledge, been explored in a systematic and scientific way, where (for example) shape is matched to the qualities of a tea.  However, there is a growing body of evidence that the shape of a glass influences the aroma  of wine as you drink it. A tulip shape seems to do best for all types of wine. * The tulip shape allows more aroma volatiles to ..read more

Another excerpt from my upcoming book, "Tea: A Nerd's Eye View:" You may see Tie Guan Yin tea advertised as having a “Yin Yun” or “Yin Rhyme” aftertaste, and Wuyi rock teas as having a quality called “Yan Yun.” “Yun” in this context means “rhyme.”  What would a rhyme have to do with a tea’s aftertaste? With respect to rock teas, “Yan” can mean “rock,” but it also refers to the “male” principle—saying that rock tea has “Yan” is really a pun. To understand the many layers of this play on words, it is important to know that Chinese singing and by extension Chinese poetry have a Yan (masculine ..read more

Here is an excerpt from my upcoming book "Tea: a Nerd's Eye View." Victor Mair, whose work is the source for this blogpost, is Professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. I had the privilege of meeting him first through my brother-in-law, who was his classmate as they were working on their PhDs in Chinese at Harvard, and subsequently at the extraordinary exhibit of the Tarim mummies at the University of Pennsylvania (Here's a Youtube video of his talk about the mummies). Since the publication of his book with Erling Ho, "The True History of Tea," he has been in demand as a speaker ..read more

Jason McDonald and Timmy Gipson were responsible for this fascinating 2-day workshop on green tea processing. I take the liberty of saying ”fascinating” even though I wasn’t physically there because it fascinated me from the start of the concept to the finish when I “attended” via iPhone. The idea behind this workshop was to show how each kill-green process works and what each process brings to the cup. Kill-green is the phrase the Chinese use to describe the processes whereby the enzymes in the leaf are denatured and no longer play a role in the tea’s flavor development. The Great Mississippi ..read more

One of the burning questions people proposed to me in my survey is: why are mountain-grown teas so often more flavorful than teas grown in the valley? A tea garden on high altitude slopes in Munnar, Kerala, India, with dramatic clouds in the background.Photo by Bala Karthikeya Pavan Guda on Unsplash. Of course there are multiple factors involved in the flavor of mountain-grown teas, including increased drainage of the soils, increased fog, which increases ambient humidity, and an increased chance of experiencing the stress of a cold snap.  One of the most fascinating set of effects of high ..read more