There is magic in the tea...
Tea is a puzzle box containing a magnificent prize. Within the tea leaf lies a collection of marvelous substances that, when properly nurtured and handled, has the ability to give us comfort, strength, and happiness. Tea embodies both gentleness and fortitude, celebration and recovery, sedation and stimulation. Tea is a shape-shifter, with a multitude of sipping experiences brought forth from a single plant. Tea is both very inexpensive and very dear, very common and very rare, very familiar and completely extraordinary. The diversity we see in tea is a result of differences in the growing and processing of tea.
All tea begins with the freshly-picked young leaves of camellia sinensis, the plant from which all tea is made. (Camellia assamica is another matter. Perhaps I will discuss it, perhaps not.) You might think the tea you get from the shop is just the plucked leaves set out to dry, and they come from one plant if they are green and another if they are black, and you just pour water over the dry leaves and all that magical flavor is released. This is far, far from the story of tea.
The tea leaf has magic inside, but getting that magic from inside the leaf and into your cup requires a great deal of care, attention, and finesse, beginning from when the tea is growing in your garden. Water is everything. Get the water wrong and you won't have good tea. Of all the things you can screw up making tea, water is the most critical. In the dry growing season of western Cascadia. water management requires careful attention. The magic of the tea is locked away in the cells of the leaf. You have to break those cells to get the magic out. But if your leaves are too wet, the magic can be lost. If the leaves are too dry, the magic will stay locked away. If you break the cells too quickly, the magic will evaporate. If you break the cells too slowly, the magic won't come out. If the rate at which you are breaking the leaves doesn't match the rate at which the moisture is being lost, you will not get the magic.
Make no mistake. As inexpensive as that box of imported tea is at the corner shop, even the crudest cup requires a complicated series of steps to accomplish. Going through the experience of growing and processing my own tea leaves me in awe of the most brackish cup from the all-night diner. Join me and I will share with you what I know about tea.