It occurred to me that I never got around to writing about this! So yeah, I know I said next part in the Chinese tea reviews but let me talk about this for a bit.

Over the last two or three months (my memory is hazy), I had the good fortune of being asked to conduct two workshops on Japanese tea for two different Churches. It’s basically an introductory lecture on what Japanese tea is and how to brew it, but I thought it was interesting that I ended up focusing or changing my lecture each time.

The first time I was preparing for this, I got to talk with some of the participants a week or so before and realised many of them were concerned about caffeine levels in tea. So a lot of my focus was on the chemistry of tea and how water temperature affects the taste of tea.

On the other hand, before my second workshop, a lot of people asked me if this was about the tea ceremony. So I focused a bit less on chemistry and touched a bit more on matcha and its history. I also added matcha into the hands-on segment after the lecture. The overall structure was the same, but the focus was quite different.

Another thing I realised was that… the hands-on section should be more of a tasting session rather than a tea-making session. Because a big goal of mine was to teach people how to make Japanese tea, I tried to make things a little more practical in the second workshop. That generally backfired because people wanted to taste the tea, not practice how to make it.

On the topic of making tea, I was surprised when a lot of people told me that they didn’t know you weren’t supposed to use boiling water to make tea. I also heard from a lot of people that they didn’t realise you could cold brew tea. These are fairly basic tea rules so I’m glad I remembered to include them – I have to remember what is obvious to me may not be obvious to others!

Overall, I was pretty glad that I had this opportunity! My whole post is a bit disjointed but basically, I learnt to:

• Talk to the participants ahead of time – you’ll learn what to focus on from this
• Focus on the practical fundamentals of brewing tea (even though I personally love tea history)
• Figure out the logistics so that participants can just enjoy drinking tea in the second half of the workshop because brewing tea is less popular (at least for my second group of workshop participants).