The Eye of the Beholder (and All That)

I learnt about Gong Fu (or Kung Fu) tea brewing today, a Chinese transliteration that indicates mastery or skill in the practice.

Others have explained more about this, but the gist of it is using more tea leaves than normal to do quick, multiple extractions that separate the tea into sections of flavour, much like drinking a good wine or Scotch in a Glencairn snifter that allow you to 'nose' all the notes. (This is a nice little guide.) I once went to a tea ceremony with a crazy tea guy who said that a robust tea can hold for up to five to eight extractions, or until it starts to lose flavour.

This is different from the Western style of brewing, where you let the leaves steep for a while and then drink the end result as one uniform blend. It is also different because most marketed teas - certainly the ones I grew up with - are blends of teas auctioned from different plantations with varying harvests and seasonalities.

Like a good wine, Scotch, chocolate, or coffee, you also get single-estate teas, which carry their own distinct profiles that change over time. A chip off a brick of rare pu-erh tea from a special year can be valuable enough to be left behind as an inheritance.

I could go on, but what it brings me to is this:

While the Western style of blending tea prizes the skill of blending different teas to get the same flavour profile consistently (thought to be historically the easiest way of transporting and popularising tea), the Eastern style views each tea as a distinct individual, separating it by 'section' to understand the range of its notes, knowing fully that the experience will probably never be replicated over time.

None is right or wrong. Both practice equanimity* in receiving and accepting situations with patience, openness and curiosity, tempered by a mindfulness that helps appreciate the depth of each layer of flavour beneath it all. The Eastern style in approaching each part of the tea tasting as notes to build a profile, the Western in understanding that the blend of different flavours makes the tea experience what it is. Same, but different.

*Equanimity, that value that I am forever trying to bring to my experience of life. The ability to see things with a lightness and understanding that you are not those things, and everything is itinerant really, including the thing and how it makes you feel. Including you, your body, your attitude, your place on this earth.

How's that for some perspective.