Brewing 信阳毛尖茶 (Xinyang Maojian Tea)

No math updates, no school updates, but I thought it was time to write a useful post, so here's how I make Xinyang Maojian tea at home. I try to visit the nice people at my favorite store in 北茶城 (North Tea City) every week to practice my Chinese (tea merchants make for great conversation), drink awesome tea and, most importantly, learn step by step the art of making a delicious cup of Maojian. Every time I go I pick up a new tool or technique that improves my home batches just that much.

Maojian is a refreshing, bitter green tea. The best analog I can think of for the flavor is "like drinking the smell of fresh-cut summer grass." It comes from the city of Xinyang in southern Henan. I drink maybe fifteen cups a day, depending how much time I spend at home. At work I

stuff my bottle with various types of Pu'er because all you need to make a decent cup of Pu'er is hot water and hotter water. Maojian's a little more delicate; if the water's too hot it'll burn out all the flavor in the first cup, but if it's too cool you're left with warm, clean tasting water. Not disgusting, but not the desired effect. What you want in the cup is cloudy, pale green goodness with the tea leaves resting comfortably at the bottom of the glass. It should last for five or six pourings, depending on how much tea you use. I drink a lot of the stuff, so I tend to use less; it has a milder flavor I guess, but you can really use as much as you like. Experimentation is important.

So here's my ramshackle tea setup. The cutoff bottle is for excess water or first brews of non-Maojian tea. The big clear pot is for cooling hot water. I use the little brown pot with white varnish for filtering and the pilsner glasses for drinking. The tongs are for

picking up hot glasses and getting floating leaves off the top. Everything else I use for Pu'er, so forget it's there.

To make the Maojian, I first put a few big pinches of tea in the bottom of a pilsner glass while I boiling a big pot of tea on the stove. Once my water's hot, I pour it into the big clear tea pot to cool off. It's cool enough when you can stick your finger in for a few seconds without burning it; it's a dangerous rule of thumb, but I lack a thermometer. The lady at the tea house says the water should be between 70 and 80 degrees celsius.

When it's cool enough, I fill the glass about halfway. Some of the tea leaves will float to the top so pour the tea into the smaller brown tea pot through the funnel filter and then back into the pilsner glass. The tea leaves should settle to the bottom of the glass, but sometimes you might have to filter it once or twice more to get rid of excess floating crap. Finish by filling the pilsner glass up with water from the big clear pot, let it settle for a minute and enjoy. Refill with hot water when the tea is level with the top of the settled tea leaves. It should look something like this:

加油 Tibet!

In August, after summer classes are over, is a two week lull where students are visiting their hometowns and squeezing in last-minute vacations before the start of school (I'm sure many of them will go to the Expo). That and the few weeks around the Dragon Boat Festival in late April/ early May are the best opportunities I have to travel in China, and I have no class and they don't coincide with national holidays like October 1st and Spring Festival.

Last year I spent a couple of eventful days in Beijing, and after guiding my parents around the city a few months later I'm pretty content to avoid it. Beijing is like the Orlando of China; it's very clean and orderly and there are lots of impressive cultural things to see (the Great Wall, Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace), all swathed with a veneer of fresh, post-Cultural Revolution paint. It's brimming with foreigners, fancy restaurants, good shopping and lots of English speakers for tourists. I'm not really interested in any of that, and it doesn't have any of the nitty-gritty or wacky things that make China such a cool place to travel. I was thinking this year I'd make a trip to Qingdao to drink beer on the beach, but last night my friends invited me to go with them to Tibet.

It's two days each way by train on a hard sleeper, with seven days of a closely-guided tour. I believe there's a police escort. We found out that for only 300 kuai extra we could buy a package with only two sales stops instead of eight (the worst part about tours in China are the sales pitches they make you sit through, especially when it's at the expense of sleeping in a little or enjoying the sights you're seeing). I know very about the itinerary so far (it's all in Chinese), but I'm getting really excited. I want to drink some yak butter tea and pass out from altitude sickness. I'll supposedly leave in two weeks.

Basi Guangnian is Chinese for Buzz Lightyear

I've cut back severely on my drinking during the past month, which has left me with a lot more time, energy and money for useful, productive things. I have lots more energy, especially in the morning, and the massive amounts of tea I've been drinking have helped my creativity. That being said, it was a pretty bad idea to mix four different liquors (beer "啤酒," red wine "红酒," baijiu "白酒" and the previously uncharted jinjiu "金酒," which tastes kind of like brandy) on the one night I set aside for going out. I paid for it today. No amount of forty-kuai tea could help me get through the still unsolved math problems and I haven't looked up any new graduate programs. Nor could it find the location of the hidden rebel base.

I'm not even going to mention my lack of progress on working out because this week has been hot and humid, and I want to forget that it even happened.

I have spent a lot of time practicing my Chinese, which actually isn't that hard to do. I'm pretty introverted, but all I have to do is A) leave my house and B) start talking to someone I don't know. Chances are they speak Chinese. The people working in North Tea City are the best for this as they aren't servers (I'm pretty ace in a restaurant) and spend most of their days sitting around drinking tea and talking about tea. Renato told me that they like hearing funny stories about our foreigner friends, so we went in and made fun of people we knew for an hour or so. I can tell some mostly coherent stories about foreigners saying or doing funny things. It's a good way check how intelligible I am because Chinese people will laugh at almost anything remotely funny that foreigners do or say. Chinese people practice their English by watching Friends, I practice my Chinese by talking about the time Joe and I went to a massage place and they stole our socks. The bastards.

Here's a list of things that have diverted my attention this week:

-Toy Story 3, in Chinese and 3D. Watching American movies with Chinese dubbing is great; since there's a lot of cultural disconnect between English and Chinese, the language is toned down to the point where I can catch maybe 80% of what's being said (except, strangely, for understanding the motivation of the villains; I had the same problem with Avatar and Up). Also, I lost my shit when Buzz started speaking Spanish and everyone in the theater was staring at me. Same for the awesome Star Wars reference. I got a lot more out of the visual gags as the jokes in the dialogue went right over my head.

-Make a cheap DIY smoker out of ceramic pots. Almost all of my cooking in China is limited by space and lack or expense of common cooking appliances from back home. Every time I see something like this, I add it to my imaginary culinary thunderdome, which I will erect on an ancient Indian garbage pit upon my return.

-Why Chinese is so damn hard by David Moser. Great read. Spoken Chinese is actually kind of easy to pick up once you can understand the phonetics. There are very few English cognates, but the grammar is very logical, especially for constructing tenses and asking questions. But you have to learn characters at some point and the only way to do it is through rote memorization. There are few useful tricks for untangling the phonetics or meanings. Take one of the ways to write "police." It's "治安" or "zhian." The second character is a "女" or "nu," meaning woman, with a roof over her head. So sort of like protection for vulnerable people, I guess. It's pronounced "an," which is close enough to "nan," but nothing in the character suggests how the pronunciation should change with the addition of the radicals. And someone told me that in this case, it's actually read right to left, so "anzhi." The first character is a something with a water radical (the three lines to the left), although now that I'm looking at it it's two lines with a person radical underneath them. 不知道. People have been pushing for years for the adoption of a writing system that makes logical and phonetic sense, but that will never happen. First of all, national pride or something. Second, characters are essential for conveying meaning in a language as linguistically diverse as Chinese. They not only help differentiate between the thousands of words in Mandarin that have similar pronunciations with vastly different meanings, they also make communication possible for people speaking the hundreds of dialects of Chinese.

And in case you're wondering, I suck at reading and writing characters. I get almost all of my characters from Google translate. I'm going to install a pinyin input one of these days, but most of you could do this at home.

-Random quote from Linda, our marketing manager, of the day: "Joe, he can't be a gay. He showed me his dance moves and they were excellent. Also, he dresses very well."