This is my last year-in-review post, and it’s going to be one of the hardest to write because there’s no list that I can refer to; I keep track of my favourite books + all my podcasts are in one app so those were relatively easy to organise. But, I’m very excited about writing this post because I learnt so much about tea this year. This is partly due to the fact that I’m working at a company that focuses on tea, but also because I’m now back in Singapore and can borrow more books, which is one of my main methods of learning.

Apart from learning more about the different types of tea, its history, and how they were processed, one of the key things that I learnt was how deeply tea was woven into society. Whether it be Chinese or Western civilisation, tea has played a huge role. For example:

• As tea became a part of Western society, it became an important part of the temperance movement. Because tea was seen as a drink that promoted sobriety, temperance advocates would hold huge tea parties to convince people about the benefits of temperance. You can even argue that these temperance tea parties were the precursor to afternoon tea.
• Tea was one of the foods that were often faked and/or adulterated, and were one of the foods that Harvey Wiley campaigned for as part of the Pure Foods Act (although admittedly, the focus was on meat and milk. But tea was mentioned in the book!)
• In China, tea culture first developed as a way for the elites to show wealth, then as society changed, as a way for the elites to proved that they belonged and that they were superior to the masses.
• Also, I was surprised to hear that the myth of Shen Nong discovering tea was first mentioned in Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea, most likely as a way to boost the status of tea by appealing to its supposed antiquity.

Also, even though each culture ends up claiming tea as uniquely theirs (or just somehow superior to other forms of tea culture), I don’t think there’s any one tea culture superior to each other. Each of them have their own history, their own culture, and their own way of appreciating tea – I think the differences should be celebrated, not used to put down one or the other.

I also managed to attend two workshops, namely the Tea Tasting Course and the Theanine! Tea Pairing with Chocolate and Cheese workshop. The Tea Tasting Course gave me the opportunity to try the six different teas at one time and compare the different tasting notes. It also convinced me that I needed to develop my taste palate because while I can tell that the teas clearly taste different, I haven’t really developed the vocabulary used to describe the teas in detail. From the Tea Pairing course, I learned about the ways tea and food can enhance each other’s good attributes and/or mask each other’s deficiencies.

As for teas, I liked most of the teas that I tried this year but a few that stood out were:

• Hida Black Tea (Second Flush): The way the taste of this tea varied widely with just different steeping times was quite surprising – if I had more of this, I would have liked to experiment with temperature as well. Done just right, this tea was sweet, robust, and the bitterness present added to the depth of flavour.
• Pandan Green: This green tea was infused with pandan. What I liked about this was that the sweetness and the taste of the pandan was very natural – nothing like flavoured teas (although I enjoy those too).
• Red Jade Black Tea: This tea stood out as being an excellent example of a highly astringent tea that wasn’t bitter. It really dries out the mouth and I think would be fantastic with rich and creamy foods.
• Cache Cache: This red tea was part of Lupicia’s winter set and the reason this black tea stood out was because it had so many different tastes hidden in it. I thought it was a straight black tea, but I found something new each time I tried it.

I also drank quite a few flavoured teas, but I tend to like different things about different teas, so it’s hard to rank them. A few that I enjoyed recently were Kittea’s Christmas Teas, especially Peace, which was a peach and melon green tea. Peace has such a lovely fruity smell and taste which was flavourful without being overpowering.

Overall, I think this has been a pretty ‘productive’ year for tea. If I didn’t have gastric so often, I’m sure I could have sampled a lot more types of tea. That said, learning how to slow down was useful too – becoming a bit more choosy about tea meant that I enjoyed the teas I had a lot more.