a guide to gongfu brewing - feedback please!
So I’d like to ask for various forms of feedback on a thing I’m writing, but some context first:
Once upon a time, I was a semi-professional food writer. Some of my earliest publications were actually on tea (and taco trucks.) I ended up having a hard choice and giving it up to follow an academic career. Now I’m a professor, and one of my main specialties is philosophy of art. I apparently specialize in weird/boundary-case maybe-art – comedy, games, food. More and more, my old fascination with tea is showing up in my lectures. I’ve actually figured out a way to write an actual philosophy of art paper on it (comparing how people review tea and how they review wine), and I’m now set to teach a weird class in the spring where I’m going to take students through various historical views of art and aesthetics, and read old European culinary texts next to Chinese poetry about tea and compare. I might end up doing some lectures at a local contemporary art museum too.
Anyway: every time I talk about tea in lecture or whatever, people want to learn how to brew it. When it was small scale, I could just take them to my house and teach them, but now that things are scaling up, I wanted to have something I could point people to. A friend’s recent discovery that she was allergic to coffee finally spurred me to actually write it.
I’ve used other stuff on the web before, but it was never quite what I wanted. It always seemed to be really all about the physical technique only, and not about… the spirit of the thing. I think I had the luck, kicking around LA and elsewhere, to meet a number of wonderful vendors who let me sit at their tea tables, brewed for me for hours, and showed me how, not just to brew, but how to drink, how to pay attention, what to pay attention to, and that’s the thing I’m trying to capture.
Anyway, here’s the first attempt at it:
Questions:
1. Am I leaving out anything crucial? (My first attempt tried to go through all of green, white, oolong, puerh and it just seemed overwhelming, so I narrowed it.)
2. Is it overwhelming/overloading?
All my old food writing was review-style, and I’ve never written anything instructional before. Especially: if anybody out there hasn’t yet brewed in this style, and wants to try it out using this guide… or if you know beginners who are willing to be test subjects. I would love to have some road-testing/tire-kicking, etc. I’m sure there’s stuff that’s so automatic for me that I’ve forgotten to put it in.
Thanks muchly.
(PS, this isn’t going to be a tea blog or anything like that, it’s just my professional academic site)
Holy crap I loved your description of yanchas and puerhs. Beautifully written. And very helpful for someone like me who is still learning gongfu.
Perhaps some more titles in bold/italics or something, just to break up the blocks of text a bit as it was quite comprehensive, but slightly overwhelming
Really enjoyed it though! Jealous of those who get to take your class
Sweet, that’s very useful.
We’ll see what the students think… Some of my more experimental classes often derail into madness…
I liked it, & im totally with you thinking of food & drink as art. Im always thinking of taste & texture & aroma as colours & shapes & patterns etc.
I actually think of a lot of things in colours anyway, music as well. slight kinaesthesia going on with me.
Stupendous job, but you’re “preaching to the choir” as it were with me. Thus I can’t be certain if your descriptions would all work as well if I didn’t already know what you were trying to convey.
Looking forward to reading Part 2!
I think you have written an excellent post. The only thing I would add is maybe directing them here as well so we can all continue to learn and grow.
Another thing I was thinking, what with all the new people coming here all the time – we could do with a well written sticky about the basics of tea.
‘New to tea? Read this first! – Tea Basics’ or something
Rasseru that is food for thought. Maybe we can email the site founder and see if we get enough people on it.
Who does the moderating? I think they can sticky something. I’m quite happy to write something basic. We need a basic history & geographic,a paragraph on each tea & how to brew, different styles like gongfu etc. & something about purchasing tea. A list of vendors would be handy but maybe unfair?
Maybe another thread in ‘shops & promotions’ as a list of vendors, & vendors can add themselves to it, and then linked from the sticky might be the fairest way. I dont know, but it would be nice to be fair to the smaller shops, they need our support as well rather than just throwing everyone at the usual suspects
OK cool. I’ve had a train journey so started to knock one up to pass the time. If this goes ahead, someone knowledgeable with puerh could maybe write a bit about it. I know the basics but regional differences/more deeper knowledge I’m still learning
TeaDB has some good vendor lists – one for each of the tea types they care about – that might be linked to – one way around the “fairness” worry might be to link out to any number of vendor lists that already exist out there. It’s definitely good to let vendors link themselves, but that’ll probably turn into some sort of mega-huge list that won’t be navigable or useful for beginners. And then instead of giving something like an “official Steepster moderator approval of vendors”, which you probably don’t want to do, you could just aggregate others’ individual tastes.
Any info on regions of any tea and how it changes the taste would be helpful, not just puerh. I’ve typed up a basic one but I’m out, I’ll email Jason a bit later
Perfect! Keep them coming, I don’t mind being the OP of the thread I can keep it informative & concise
Does TeaDB.org know according to Firefox they have an invalid security certificate and Firefox won’t connect to their site because of the possibility of information being stolen. I guess I’ll have to load Internet Explorer if I want to go to TeaDB.org. Edit, Internet Explorer doesn’t want to load the site either.
Very well written. This is the most in-depth article on gong fu brewing I’ve come across. I agree with Rasseru, this should be stickied somewhere for newcomers. It may need to be trimmed for brevity first.
I liked it a lot. I’m looking forward to the puer chapter.
As for editing for length:
Ruthlessly expunge all the mentions of red and green tea. It’s supposed to be about introducing gongfu, with oolong as the medium, right? So you don’t need that. Mention that puer exists and that it is also commonly made this way, but keep it at that.
Ditch the paras on grandpa style and your travel tea canteen. Make them another post.
Maybe go on at a bit less length about the travesty of tea that is the Western mass market. Keep the “particle board” comparison though, that was apt! You can make the related point, on the cost/cup of good tea, in fewer words.
Consider getting rid of everything about Yixing pots, except to mention that they exist and are another, maybe prior, type of gear for this method.
You’ve got at least two points where you tell the reader to smell stuff. Fold those together, adding an injunction to sniff the lid.
Editing for style:
There are at least a couple of paras where you repeatedly use a word: “basically” in the 2nd para, and I think “stuff” in one or more paras later on.
[EDIT] Aaarrrhhhgh You’ve ruined me! I looked at that LAT piece you linked in your blog, and then went to the teahabitat site, and saw she had a 90ml Yixing on sale for $40. Now I’ve gone and bought a clay pot!
Login or sign up to leave a comment.