Talking with Alex and Bruce about Russian tea, other themes

 

We had the first online meetup of the year recently, meeting with Alex Phanganovich, who I've mentioned before here, and Bruce Carroll, an American friend living in Chiang Mai.  Alex and I first met at a Monsoon hosted talk about tea and sustainability presented by a Russian ecological researcher, Alexey Reshchikov.

Alex is looking at Kenneth Rimdahl in the back, there at Monsoon

he met the kids that day, visiting while I was at swim class with them

I wanted to write this partly to cover discussing Alex selling a bit of tea he's ran across along the way from living in Chiang Rai, and also to mention Huyen's brother mentioning a new online sales outlet.  Huyen's whole family has an amazing vibe, and they are all tea experts, so it has been nice when they can join the meetups.

it's nice seeing Huyen's nephew join; soon he'll be talking about tea too

We were supposed to talk about tea tourism in Chiang Rai; that was the initial point.  We just didn't get to it.  I think there are only a half dozen main producers that Google search would mention there (like this does), and more unconventional and interesting smaller producers would be something else, maybe further out of the Mae Salong area.  Alex mentioned that learning about local tea culture was interesting while staying there, which we didn't get to far into.

We didn't talk about tea all that much, as those meetups usually go, delving pretty far into introductions, and how covid went for people, even into how tobacco storage and consumption parallels tea themes, which led to talking about weed.  Legalized marijuana is being developed in Thailand, and another friend here uses it for a rare problem with facial muscle pain treatment.  All that is what it is, already familiar or not.  

The point about tobacco comes up in discussing humidors quite a bit.  The main difference between tobacco storage and tea is that aromatic woods used for tobacco storage can add positive flavors, and for tea you don't want anything but the other tea contributing to the changes.  Then apparently for tobacco you use different pipes for different kinds of tobacco, as with clay teapots.  Who knew?

It has been snowing in Sochi, where Alex is living now, and a main place where tea is grown in Russia.  And also in Krasnodar, I guess?  In the US tea plants used in Sochi are known for being among the most cold tolerant types that exist, which applies fairly directly for a lot of the US too.  We talked a little about Russian tea preferences, and produced styles, about changes in gaba development and shu and such, but no developed sub-themes that really need to be filled in here came up.

hopefully they're cold tolerant

A question came up about Russian blends really being smoked or not, which didn't get far in discussion.  It's my impression that this is either something made up, or a reference to Russians importing and then mixing smoked Lapsang Souchong with other teas, or to tea transported from China by horseback picking up a smoke flavor from campfires as it was transported.  My guess is the first, that it was made up.  I'd expect most of the tea that made a trip by horse, earlier, was pu'er or hei cha instead, which would make it easier to transport, and matches the theme of Yunnan producing tea for Western and Northern Chinese areas that are too cold to make their own.  Not that I'm well informed about any of that; I asked someone by message before posting this but it didn't work to get more input.

Huyen covered a bit about range of Vietnamese teas, but I've been through a lot about that here in the past.  There are two really good articles on all that by Geoff Hopkins, the owner of Hatvala, on history and evolution of tea there and on origin areas, geography, and types.  Some interesting backstory on the article source:  per my understanding when the old World of Tea blog (by Tony Gebely) transferred content to become the Tea Epicure blog some of the material went to a partner's site instead, which is what that killgreen.io site is.  So unless I'm completely wrong that had been a World of Tea guest article, which is cool.

So I'll mention a little more on those two tea sales updates and let this go.

Huyen's family has long since founded a cafe in HCMC (Saigon) and a chain of gift shops with different outlets, Tra Viet.  I might have reviewed at least one tea from them but I never kept track of origins of what Huyen shared.  Her brother is now expanding to selling tea through Amazon.  It's nothing too novel, but if better tea really is starting to creep into outlets like that it would be good.  I don't think they'll kill off small tea vendors or foreign outlets any time soon, although minding that concern makes sense.

Alex specifically mentioned that he's not necessarily trying to become a mainstream vendor (he can be reached through Facebook though, or Instagram), and that he mostly sells a bit of what he picked up in a year or so of living in the north of Thailand.  Or in general gaba tea, gushu versions, or aged shu, per asking him for this write-up, and maybe later on more Russian teas.  Maybe that's especially relevant to someone living in the Sochi area, since meeting up with someone and trying some teas helps a lot for getting a sense about such things.

This has barely touched on tea issues in Russia so far, right?  That's partly because the general background about what teas Russians like and perspective on the subject repeats what is in other posts (like this one on Russian tea culture).  An interesting sub-theme came up about perspectives on Moychay, a Russian outlet I mention a lot here, for reviewing a lot of their teas.  Some Russian tea enthusiasts love Moychay and some don't--normal enough.  They share teas for review in this blog, to be clear, so my potential bias should be noted, which isn't going to come up here since I'll set aside going further with that discussion for another post.  Alex offered some thoughts on what objections might be, or how different biases could factor in, and how it relates to perspectives on other vendors, and that really got me thinking.

Short discussion came up of a book on tea by Sergey Shevelev, the Moychay owner, Geography of Chinese Tea.  He posted a nice intro of that as a Youtube video recently.  It pretty much matches the review I wrote, talking about what's in it, about Chinese tea types, geography, history, some old stories, tourism sites, processing steps for teas, and so on.  

For covering all that, and for including a lot of photo content, it's a bit general, but that seems fine for what it is supposed to be.  It's not a manual for how to process tea, but it does contain a lot more of the typical processing steps than other books I've read.  It's not a tourism guide, but it could work to cover ideas for what to see related to tea while visiting China.  It's not a comprehensive guide to tea types in China, although it is pretty close to covering all of the main types in limited detail, and many less known versions as well.  Someone just mentioned what they took to be a rare steamed Chinese green tea type in the Gong Fu Cha group, a tea from Hubei, and there was a short section on processing steps in that book on it.

So it was the usual, nice keeping in touch with people and making new contacts, and talking a bit about tea.  It takes the pressure off to do justice to a subject not talking to a tea producer or sub-theme expert, freeing up space for covering tangents.