According to Okakura Kakuzo in his celebrated classic, The Book of Tea, there are 3 kinds of tea: cake-tea, powdered-tea, and leaf-tea (referring to the tea preparations of the Tang, Sung, and Ming dynasties, respectively). In a fictional vignette “Lu Yu Explains Tea” included in Teatime in the Northwest, 3rd edition), the author of the earliest known treatise on tea, The Classic of Tea, says there are 3 kinds of tea: black, green and oolong.
So which is it? My experience has been mostly Anglophile (formal afternoon teas like those held in the Rose Lounge or ) and Japanophile (either matcha at a tea ceremony, the ubiquitous Itoen green tea, or assam-based “tea+cake” pairings at kissaten).
I know very, very little about the tea, tea culture or tea customs of China.
Yesterday was the Lunar New Year, and I went to an event hosted by the Mercer Island Chinese Association where TeaFairy Culture & Art Center had a table. I got to try yellow tea, definitely not on any of those aforementioned lists. According to the representative, there are 6 kinds of tea: green, yellow, white, oolong, black, and pu-ehr.
Unfortunately, not speaking Chinese and only being able to recognize a few of the characters I learned while studying Japanese, TeaFairy looks like a great resource, but it’s pretty inaccessible to me. An alternative is Floating Leaves Tea, with a shop in Ballard and a studio near Woodland Park Zoo, where they hold tea classes focusing on the fundamentals of tea appreciation or scent structure, and others devoted to specific teas.
Oh, and about that yellow tea: I expected it to be like Cascadia barley tea by Tao of Tea — at least in terms of color and lightness — but it tasted like a lighter version of green tea without something… Wikipedia tells me that the something I was missing is the grassy flavor. So, in taste it’s the exact opposite of that barley tea.
cascadia teahouse 