What I learnt from my 'tea a day' project

Have you got an overwhelming stockpile of old loose leaves? Try a different tea each day and you'll travel the world via brews.

Why I relish tea. Source: Supplied

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Tea: Scandal water, life saver, yum cha essential

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25/10/202325:20

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There's a Japanese word for owning too many books that you haven't yet read: tsundoku. I wonder if there's an equivalent term for hoarding too much tea – and finding yourself with unfinished boxes and tins from many, many years ago?

If that word existed, I'd need to use it, because I've found myself accumulating quite a library of loose leaf. I've still got a peppermint, fennel and liquorice blend from Pollen Tea Room, which is so old that it's outlasted the Hobart venue it's from (the Battery Point eatery closed in 2020; I bought this brew more than eight years ago). 

In the same way I keep optimistically buying more paperbacks and hardcovers, despite having a towering stack of unread books at home, I have a habit of adding to my tea stash, despite having so many loose-leaf varieties I could already brew.

Last year, I made a resolution to correct this: I planned to drink a different brew every day and finally use up all that neglected tea. Like most bright-eyed resolutions, I failed at consistently pulling it off. But over many months, I enjoyed drinking the loose leaf I'd hoarded – and being transported to different growing regions and tea shops I'd visited in the past. 

I started my 'tea a day' project with a mellow Tsuyuhikari ('dew light') planted in Kagoshima, Japan, and bought in the country's capital, at Tokyo Saryo in March 2019.

During my visit to this ultra-modern venue, known as the "world's first hand-drip green tea shop", each poured brew was presented with a smartly designed card, listing the tea's sweetness, bitterness and umami levels, and a QR code I could scan for its back story. 

In 2022, when I opened the now three-year-old packet of Tsuyuhikari, it sent me back to this Tokyo encounter in 2019 – as did the just-as-old Yutaka Midori I also purchased from the store. With a name that translates as 'rich green', the tea produced an incredibly umami, seaweedy aroma when I finally brewed it. The instructions said to allow 10 minutes of steeping, but the drink quickly developed an intense colour – so I removed the strainer and sipped the tea soon after. It was so boldly flavoured, with sweet and bitter flourishes, it would've been "blow-your-lid-off" levels of strong at the recommended 10-minute mark.  

I used to follow tea-brewing steps more strictly, and always assumed the beverage had to be just-boiled levels of hot to have flavour. But a visit to Tokyo's Sakurai Japanese Tea Experience in 2018 completely altered my thinking. I remember owner Shinya Sakurai – who spent 14 years training to be a tea master – offering me gyokuro at a barely warm temperature, which unlocked the green tea's incredibly savoury taste. Sipping it was like savouring a plate of rich vegetables. Adding slightly hotter water to the same leaves created a more bitter brew. Then he used the tea again as the base of a citrus-infused cocktail, before finally serving the leaves like a salad you could enjoy with sauce and salt. This radically shook up all my assumptions.  

Nowadays, I'll let tea steep in cold or lukewarm water for a long time, or let it brew quickly at a hotter temperature for a strong, punchy intensity. The cooler drink might be mellower, but the flavours have more dimension from developing over a greater timespan. 

Digging up forgotten batches of loose leaf for this 'tea a day' project sent me across diverse terrain. Sun-dried Gurạdji tisane from Lore Australia was an Indigenous tea that evoked a sunny bushwalk among gum trees.

That tin of 'Flowery Jasmine Before The Rain' I bought in New York in 2016, from a Greenwich Village tea shop that's existed since 1895? It somehow tasted like every leaky pot of jasmine tea that's comforted me at yum cha tables in Sydney. 

As for the bag of wild-crafted white peony from Tea Craft from 2019? I'd been saving it for a magical moment because it sounded so exceptional. You need to be incredibly familiar with the decade-old tea trees in Fuding's forest in eastern China to know where to pick the buds, and you have a very short time to harvest them. I remember Tea Craft's Arthur Tong saying it tasted "like sticking the forest straight in your mouth". When I finally brewed it, it turned the colour of golden sunshine slipping through trees and reminded me of drinking chrysanthemum.

I've never visited the misty mountains of China, but the closest I get is via the tea selection of Sydney's Ms Cattea. The shop is run by Cathy Zhang, who has been an international tea judge and was left with "totally green" fingers after picking leaves from Guangdong's Phoenix Mountain, a place known for its oolong. After interviewing her for SBS Food in late 2019, I enthusiastically bought an assortment from her store and kept half for a 'special occasion' that didn't happen until three years later.

My 'tea a day' project became that occasion. I take her Golden needle Bulang, and leave it to bloom in hot water; its twigs generate a dark, earthy kick when brewed. It's like they want to say, "hey, I'm a black tea, don't forget!" The drink is nice, knotty and strong – like a bitter chocolate. Its punchy smell is, like the tea itself, a brisk wake-up call. Bonus: the long twigs are easy to fish out from the strainer, so its easy-clean state makes me even more of a fan.

Like sticking the forest straight in your mouth.

There's a box of Musica Oriental Blend Earl Grey tea I bought from d47 Shokudo in Tokyo on the day Donald Trump got elected in 2016. I remember my friend, Blake, showing me how red the American electoral map was, and how we drank smoky serves of this complimentary iced tea in shock. When I prise open the metal lid to the tea box three US elections later, back in Sydney, the polarising leader is no longer in power. By coincidence, I try the tea on the day of the 2022 US mid-terms, and the tea's scorched smell hits me instantly, like strong fumes. I infuse an iced soda water with its roasted, dark leaves.

Musica Oriental Blend Earl Grey tea. Source: Supplied

The history of this tea intrigues me: Musica is named after its founder, a music critic called Kenkichi Horie who started the company in Dojima, Osaka, 70 years ago. It's currently run by his grandson, Yuma Horie, and I dream of one day visiting its tea room in Hyogo.

Even though the tea is six years old, it's dark and brooding and strangely persistent, like an emo teen drama. Steep it for ages in fizzy water and it's like drinking a smoky grown-up Coca-Cola. I suspect it tastes better than the balsamic vinegar version that went viral, too.

There are also aged teas too, which when kept properly get better with age due to natural and slow oxidation.

I imagine tea professionals would never recommend drinking loose leaf that's been kept for over half a decade. So I wonder if an expert like Tea Craft's Tong would be offended by my very belated approach to drinking my stash of old tea?

"I hate waste and love resourcefulness," he says. "Also, best-before dates for tea are mostly arbitrary anyway; they are dried leaves and if you keep them out of moisture, sunlight and heat, you could be sweet forever. There are also aged teas too, which when kept properly get better with age due to natural and slow oxidation."

Tea leaves waiting to be brewed. Source: Supplied

Tong points out that "green teas in general are the only ones that do tend to lose flavour over time as they are originally non-oxidised", so they shouldn't be kept for too long. An exception would be hojicha, which is roast-finished, and so has a longer shelf life. But that doesn't mean you should throw away ancient sencha or gyokuro. 

"Old greens would be great as an iced-tea base, soda concentrate or even to cook with," Tong says. 

So, if you have ageing boxes of loose leaf at home, don't overlook them. You don't have to try a new one every day, but you can revive those long-forgotten brews in a cup, warm pot or even a meal. Just add water.

 

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