Pairing tea with books. Yes, books.
I know I could have (or maybe should have) posted this in the Tea and Books thread but I wanted a larger general crowd response to this.
I am running a tea book club. We focus mainly on Fantasy/Horror/Sci-Fi with some general literature mixed in. We do one or two featured teas per meeting. My question is what are your thoughts on trying to match certain types or flavors of tea to certain style/mood/genre of books?
For instance, the book I’m looking to pair this month is called The Eaton. It is a horror on par with 80s style horror movies and the author/book has often been compared with a young Stephen King. I have my thoughts on what would pair well but I wanted to get all of your general thoughts on methods to pair a tea with a book. Overall, I just want to have fun with it!
A medium aged sheng puerh from Xiaguan. Tasty but dark and mysterious.
Thank you for this suggestion. Because of it, I am about 99% sure I will be purchasing the Crimson Lotus offering of the 2006 Xiaguan Sheng Tuo. Any advice with how to handle/brew it, especially for people who probably won’t have had a puerh before?
I myself was leaning towards a puerh! The only reason I hesitate on that is that I have a fairly inexperienced tea crowd thus far and this is our first meeting. Nothing like pouncing the complexity of Pu on them right from the get go!
Maybe I can find a complex black as an alternative for people who aren’t quite ready to handle the Pu!
Hm. I am doing a tea & book club at the moment as well, but our books feature tea growing regions so I’m pairing with teas from the region. Monday is our first meeting and the book is set in Assam, India so we are having chai and… assam. :)
A nice dark Assam might go well with horror. Something comforting to balance the tension. Or something with hibiscus to tint things reddish… :)
Funny you should mention the reddish tea. I was already considering how in China, black tea is called red tea and maybe I could use that play on it to educate those in the club to that fact and to also tie it into the horror theme (red=blood). The hibiscus thing could work as well.
It’s funny you should mention this, because that was one of the main motivations for why I started www.booksandtea.ca – to review both of them together, and possibly to draw links between them.
I personally find it easier to drink a tea and link it to a story I’ve already read rather than to read something and find a tea that matches.
However, for something like horror, I would really recommend drinking something discordant, that has a lot of different notes going on that kind of work together, but there’s an edge. You should not be drinking a smooth tea for this. Perhaps a really young sheng to get the sourness and smokiness going on?
Your book club has got to read the Imperial Radch books (Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy). Not only is it a fantastic trilogy but it’s absolutely full of tea.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suanna Clarke. A fantasy novel written in an old-fashioned Charles Dickens-y style. With Assam, Darjeeling, anything imported in large quantities to England.
I don’t know anything about the Stephen King book. Just an idea for the future.
Oh, and similar styles of tea for Kazuo Ishiguro’s literary sci-fi book Never Let Me Go. It’s a 1950s period story set in England (I think the 1950s, possibly another contemporary-ish decade). His new fantasy book The Buried Giant is supposed to be good too, but I haven’t read it yet. In any case, I’d read anything he writes.
Ishiguro is great, though I haven’t read the newest yet either.
As for Jonathan Strange, I SWEAR I used to own it and am 93% sure I donated it to a book sale, thinking I would never get to it. And all I’ve heard since then is how much I would like it. Argh.
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