When I saw this book, I thought the author’s names looked familiar. As it turns out, I actually read another book by them – The Story of Tea – last year. I’ve definitely learnt a lot since then, so I decided to read this and see if my opinions on their opinions of tea would have changed.

Unlike The Story of Tea, which is an overview to the world of tea, The Tea Enthusiast’s handbook is focused more on the practice of buying, brewing, drinking, and storing tea. To that end, the book is divided into four chapters:

1. Purchasing Tea: An overview of what to look out for. Given that each tea is going to have a different standard for what’s great in a dry leaf, the overview is very, very general. There is a pretty interesting discussion of single estate vs blended teas, which I thought was interesting.
2. Steeping the Perfect Cup: This chapter looks at the two main ways we make tea – the ‘Western’ method and the Chinese method. Again, the best way to steep a tea depends on the individual tea, so the chapter leans more towards general tips and best practices on how to steep tea rather than exact timings (approximate timings are given, but they are too general to be used)
3. The Six Classes of Tea: This is the longest chapter, where the authors introduce each type of tea and a few famous examples of each type. The examples of each tea come with the region, flavour, steeping instructions, and even pictures of the dry leaf and the tea. I appreciated the fact that they talk about the differences in tea types for each country – terroir really affects the taste of tea so I’m glad they talked about it.
4. Tea Storage and Freshness: This last chapter talks about the best ways to store tea and how to age tea, should you want to try it.

Overall, I thought the book gave helpful information about how different types of tea and how to store it. I do, however, have a few quibbles. They are:

• Under the purchase of tea, there is advice to shop at a place where (among other recommendations) there is “[a] good cross-section of green, white, oolong, and black teas are available.” Honestly, I don’t agree. Tea is an incredibly broad topic and if you’re shopping from a small shop, it doesn’t really make sense for them to try to carry every tea. I’ve seen smaller shops that focus on one type of tea – Taiwanese Oolongs or Wuyi Yancha. They do have other teas, but the selection for these tend to be smaller because the owner doesn’t have the capacity to go too deep into other types of teas. But this lack of diversity doesn’t mean it’s a bad shop – on the contrary, these shops will be able to provide in-depth knowledge about their area of speciality.
• In chapter two, there is a mention that tea-producing countries “[develop] unique teapots and methods of steeping their teas that extracted the best flavour from the tea leaves and suited their taste preferences”, which implies that the larger Western teapot was developed in the West. While the West did eventually have their own teaware industries, we must ask the question: what reference did they use when making their teapots? The answer is: China. Tea (and teaware) first arrived in the West during the Ming dynasty, when the teapot sizes were larger, hence the larger teapot sizes that have persisted in the West. Whether they brew good tea is another argument, but I wanted to point out that there is a reason why these larger teapots exist and that the West didn’t come up with large teapots just to ‘ruin’ the flavour of tea (although if I misread the line, my apologies!)
• In the Gallery of Green teas in Chapter two, the picture of the matcha seems a bit off. It doesn’t have any foam and is a bit cloudy so it actually reminds me a lot of funmatsucha. I’m not sure if it’s my tablet but the colour of the matcha was a bit dull too.
• In the last chapter on storing tea, they mention never to store tea in the fridge or freezer. While I definitely agree that you shouldn’t store tea in a freezer, I was actually taught by a Taiwanese oolong specialist that you can store green, yellow, and white teas in the fridge. Of course, you should make sure they are properly sealed and away from foodstuff that have strong smells, but other than that it should be fine. I’m not too sure who is right but I wanted to put it out there that there are experts who are saying something else.
• The book only talks about oolongs, black, and pu-erh teas when it comes to aging, but you can also age white teas as well! You can actually find white tea cakes and age them the same way you’d age a sheng pu. And on the other hand, I’m not too sure how much aging will change a black tea because it’s already highly oxidised.
• In the glossary, the phrase “ten famous teas” is defined as “teas formerly held in reserve for the Chinese emperors, these teas today represent premium growth and productions in their style”. This definition about the teas for emperors is actually more accurate when describing tribute teas. While China has always had famous teas, the earliest top ten list that I could find is the 1915 one for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. From what I understand of the matter, I would argue that the top ten teas are teas that have a great rep and may also be tribute teas, but the two terms are not synonyms.

The disagreement list looks pretty long now that I’ve written it out, but that’s only because I didn’t bother writing about what I agreed with – that’s most of the book. These are just a few things that made me pause while reading, and that I would not have known if I haven’t been learning about tea outside of books.

Overall, I thought this was a pretty helpful book! Chapter three, in particular, is my favourite because it goes into detail on each type of tea, including recommended brewing temperatures and instructions. While I disagree with the book on a few points, I think that if you’re navigating the world of tea by yourself, this would be quite handy as a reference.

Featured Image: Photo by Me