Liebster Award Nominee

Liebster Award, new blogger recognition

I was recently nominated for a Liebster Award, an award to recognize a new blogger.

It seems a device for new bloggers to help spread the word about other interesting new bloggers, like the other chain / tagging question sets you see.  Ordinarily I wouldn't put the time in to write all that out--answers, more questions, links--but why not.

Some background:

Vee Carthens Honey Lemon Tea (the nomination link) is a lifestyle blog where we share our journey towards achieving a comfortable and rewarding lifestyle. Books. Recipes. Green Beauty. Healthy Decisions. Inspiration. Cups of Tea.

My own blog is just a tea blog, and only a beginner's tea blog at that.

The Rules:

1. Acknowledge the blogger who nominated you and display the award.
2. Answer eleven questions the blogger gives you.
3. Give eleven random facts about yourself.
4. Nominate eleven blogs you think are worthy of the award (but they must have less than 200 followers.) **This rule is a little misleading since twitter followers may be included as well. So, you might not be able to tell the true number of “blog followers”. Make a guess and choose who you love.
5. Let the bloggers know you nominated them.
6. Give them eleven questions to answer.

(plus display this logo):

Answers to questions from Honey Lemon Tea:

1. Why did you start blogging?    to talk about tea more, or at least bother people other places less

2. What was your favorite television show as a child?    old Godzilla shows (I'd still watch that actually)

3. Are you allergic to any foods?    no

4. What is one of your guilty pleasures?  I live a pretty spartan life these days; I wish I had just one

5. What is your favorite sport?    to do, snowboarding, to watch, MMA

6. What is your favorite season of the year?    summer (but getting a little old here in Thailand)

7. If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?    home to see my family 

8. Tea or coffee?    TEA!  If tea or food still tea.

9. What is the last book you read?    Damien by Herman Hesse

10. What is your favorite comfort food?    nachos

11. If you won the lottery, what would be the first thing you would buy?   TEA!  except probably toys for my son instead, and then whatever madness my wife had in mind

Questions for nominated bloggers:

1.  What is it about your blog subject that is so compelling?
2.  Favorite tea?
3.  What's the furthest from "home" you've ever traveled?
4.  What is one thing Thailand is famous for, other than food?
5.  Guess your bench press (or skip that if that doesn't make sense to you)
6.  Do you believe in ghosts?
7.  Are people still evolving now?
8.  Why can't astrologers detect dark matter?
9.  What historical person would you visit if you could (language issues aside, come on)?
10.  What is one thing you can do that almost no one else can do?
11.  What did the Buddha teach?  (short version)

Nominated bloggers:

These are supposed to have less than 200 followers, but some seem a bit more developed than that.  It's hard to check follower count and I wanted to include favorites.


the tea sisters  the opposite of stuffy review-only blogs

complexitea by patty  she's been doing some other things lately, but a nice basic tea blog with a background information theme

toad's tea blog  one person's take on teas, some blogs with research references

guerillaction  edgy Asian travel blog

temple mountain tea  substantial resource in the making

daramuscat   (a blog for inspiration), note the translation function button since it's in Russian

listening to leaves  pu'er inclined well-developed tea blog, not really a newbie blogger

tea-stains  also a bit too developed, but it's done from Bangkok

renegade travels  surely way too established, but a cool travel blog, not overly developed or commercial

tea de zhang  a tea blog in Thai, associated with a can't miss Bangkok shop (again too developed, but come on, a real Thai tea-expert blog)

foongpc  an actual new-to-blogging Asian travel theme blog, with lots of pictures


bonus mentions:

tale of genji  technically not a blog, a Japanese historical fiction site, but pretty cool, but like a theme photo blog

herbal teas  herbs as supplements and such, developed as a reference site (not really a conventional blog format--off topic--but somehow it seemed worth mentioning)


Congratulations!  And if any of you decide to run through this, it takes a bit longer than it would seem.

Lapsang Souchong in a trendy Bangkok cafe

Lunch with tea

Normally a trendy cafe in Bangkok (read:  expensive) is not high on my list of lunch stops, but based on a friend's suggestion I just tried out the Rocket Cafe near where I work.  It was nice; modern, trendy, like a Starbucks but less like a library.  

I was looking forward to trying a tea and they did have decent looking pu'er, oolong, and lapsang souchong.  Ok, the descriptions were a little general, and I forget most of the write-up related to the oolong, but nice they even had those types of teas.  There wasn't much on the food menu but an egg salad sandwich sounded nice.

I was wondering how they would present the tea related to the demands of brewing a loose tea--it had been loose, right?--but after a bit of a wait they brought it already finished, a good bit of tea in a glass pot.

And the tea tasting verdict:  a bit weak.  The smoke made for a nice front end but the brew was too weak to let any other flavors stand out much.  It tasted like it was decent tea, no astringency to speak of, "clean" flavors typical of Chinese black teas, and probably some earthy flavor elements if you could taste them better, but brewed too weak to really do much with beyond noticing smoke.  Maybe there was a hint of clove going on.  I've not tried a lot of lapsang souchong but I've had better, I think.  

All the same it paired nicely with the sandwich, and with some strange pickled peppers they served it with.

Work-day lunch options in Bangkok

I suffered a little sticker shock at first because everything in Bangkok more or less comes in two types; traditional and inexpensive--my normal lunch--or modern and closer to the Western pricing scale. 

Ordinarily a lunch in a food-court type restaurant costs 40 baht for an entree and rice or a soup, equivalent to about $1.30, as much as $2 with a beverage, or maybe over $3 with a snack as well.  This lunch cost 350 baht, about $10, or what I might spend in a week on local lunches, which is actually normal for higher end places.

Some co-workers I had eaten with in the past would seek out options for 35 baht instead of pricier 45 baht lunch pricing; relatively a lot less, but almost the same in a sense.    McDonald's and such seems to equate relatively directly to pricing in the West, maybe just a little less, so in the middle.  It's even crazier to buy Starbucks here with the cost of living difference but people still do.

Since I could buy 100 grams of decent Thai tea for that lunch cost here  (jin xuan oolong, usually) as far as trying tea goes it wasn't a great value.  It was nice to get a break from the normal routine though, so worthwhile.  

I felt a little like a tourist, all the while still a short walk from my office building.  On the walk back it seemed like I'd went somewhere, and I still had a sense of that smoke.  I picked up two rotis with sweetened condensed milk added from a street vendor for a desert and went back to work.

A tea drinking slump

In one earlier post I did the unthinkable and reviewed a low-grade tea bag.  No offense intended to the maker; it wasn’t that bad, but was likely an inferior product to Lipton or PG Tips.  Based on urging from my wife I’ve been drinking through a back-log of tea inventory at home—getting there now—and I’ve sank to even drinking tea from tea bags, routinely.  I have other decent tea at the house, a little longjing, some Darjeeling and silver needle, but not much, and the better types keep running out.

In an earlier post I mentioned tea bags don’t necessarily need to be low-grade tea, but in the case of what I’ve been drinking the teas seem a bit common.   

In the past when I’ve read such reviews it seemed odd a reviewer would go there.  In a pinch why not drink whatever is available, but to review it—why?  Who is shopping around for better tea-bag tea through blog research?  But since it is part of the tea landscape and since I am in a tea slump I’ll do just that.  As a second experiment I think I'll try not announcing the post so it'll be like it never happened anyway.

My tea bag history:

In the past I drank a lot of tisanes, what people called “herb teas” back then.  My favorite brand was Alvita, a provider of a large range of quite decent herbal products in simple bags.  My favorite was sage, followed by berry and floral teas, but I tried all sorts of roots and herbs, and mixes of types. 

Now that I think of it if I could just source good fresh sage--a good quality dried version--I’d love that as a regular supplement to my tea habit.  I tried making it from the herb in a spice cabinet once before and that does work, it just might not be fresh enough in everyone’s spice cabinet to work well, especially if they live in the tropics, worst-case storage conditions.  It would seem possible to find even better product than usually comes in those little jars, too, I’m just not sure how.

Chrysanthemum tea:

(still not onto tea bag reviews yet):  I tried some chrysanthemum tea my wife picked up when I was real-tea shopping.  I had a great fresh version of this in a nice Beijing restaurant last year but the “tea” at home is suffering a little from a half-year of aging under poor storage conditions (Bangkok weather).  Fresh versions of the tea taste floral (of course), with an interesting freshness, a light, bright flavor that is hard to describe.  In tea-tasting terminology the taste element I’m looking for is “chrysanthemum” but it seems possible to apply the same reasoning with other herbs as with tea, and break the flavors down a bit more to what they seem to compare to.  This less fresh tea started towards a hay flavor a bit, not really bad, just not an improvement.

Twinnings Darjeeling tea-bags:

Twinnings teas needn’t be so bad, and I’ve been working on my wife’s stock of loose Earl Grey from them that’s decent.  The Darjeeling tea-bag version really doesn’t compare to real fresh loose tea, of course.  It’s nice that the muted flavor profile also eliminates most of the astringency that can go along with Darjeelings but there isn’t much for interesting muscatel, orange, raisin flavors and such.  If someone didn’t already drink loose leaf tea the flavor would probably seem a lot better.  I tried to get more taste out of it one time by using two tea bags and lengthening the steep time but the astringency kicked back in without the conventional positive tastes ramping up.

Twinnings mango / orange flavored tea:

Not as bad as it sounds.  If you don’t think of it as tasting like tea it’s actually ok.  I checked the package to get some indication what the “flavor” is but it doesn’t say, only that it’s something like 16% of something else they call flavor, which I’m thinking is some sort of extract.  I’m pretty sure it would taste worse if that were just a mix of chemicals but who knows.  Mixing the Darjeeling and flavored tea is slightly better than both but still not much like tea.  One limited benefit of drinking such teas is there is no concern about defiling a better tea through blending so one can basically treat them as a mixer.

What gets lost:

Real loose-leaf tea has unique character, a range of flavors that makes each tea its own experience.  Beyond the tastes subtle elements like body and finish add layers of depth to that experience, and experimenting with slight changes in brewing techniques or just noticing them across individual infusions even more so. 

Pretty much all of that drops out when you drink normal grade tea-bag tea.  It’s like comparing instant coffee to coffee.  The teas are drinkable, and you don’t need to worry about brewing technique or even time very much, but it’s back to just something to drink, not really an “experience.”  Of course most of the expense drops out too, and all of the effort to research and find better tea.  You can buy the tea along with your food in a grocery store, something that’s virtually impossible where I live related to decent tea (Bangkok). 

Sourcing decent tea:

One can stumble across mid-grade but drinkable loose tea here lots of places, in small shops in malls and grocery store complexes, at relatively modest cost.  But to find your way to decent tea in this city you’d either need to be unusually lucky or obsessed enough to put the research time in, or maybe just spend long days of getting lost in the maze that is Chinatown.  Or there is buying tea on-line.  There are even a few on-line tea shops in China in English so there’s no need to buy tea that’s made the round trip from Asia to America and back. 

I keep hearing about the holy grail of tea shops here in Bangkok, the one place that sells really good tea at decent prices, but that’s an entry for another day when I get around to visiting.  I think when I do this tea slump will finally be over.