Having People Over for Tea Tasting
I had a few friends over recently. They had never “experienced” tea. So I decided to give them a bit of a tasting, but I also wanted to have several courses of food to pair with the tea. After much deliberation, this is how it went down…
We started with Silver Needle white tea and shortbread. We then moved up to several oolongs Gonfu-style paired with sliced pork tenderloin which I prepared with only sea salt and black pepper. As we moved on to darker teas (blacks and Puerhs) we moved onto the third course… pears poached in white wine, vanilla beans, cloves, cinnamon, and of course sugar. We finished the night off with some Masala tea that I blended along-side bits of coffeecake.
Brian Pfeifer from the Tea Traveler [http://www.sabletower.com/tea/] also added:
“The more brisk or bitter the tea, the sweeter the food should be. The sweeter the tea, the saltier the food should be. Also don’t let the food overpower the tea.”
Overall, the night was a complete success; we sampled around 15 teas and I was happy to have shown my friends a new experience. Feel free to share with me your tea-tasting experiences. I’d love to hear them!
This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 10:02 am and is filed under Tea Preparation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tony Gebely
Tony is co-owner of Chicago Tea Garden and tweets as @WorldofTea. He has been a tea drinker for nearly ten years and has traveled to tea producing regions throughout Asia.
Thanks! We gotta small tea boutique In Goa,India,where we retail our esp.Darjeeling Tea collection and hold tea tasting session with customers almost every week after Christmas.My clients are all travelers and people who enjoy India and Goa.I am a puritan and have never tried food pairing with Darjeeling.After this read i think i should try Brains suggestions!
This sounds like a wonderful time..interestingly, I just published an article about how it’s important to taste teas in a different manner / context from this. I.e. not too many new teas at once, and taste the same tea several times over a period of several days. I love tea tastings like this though–they can be a great way to introduce people to tea or to new types of tea.
Let me know if you’d be interested in reading about my other ideas though…it’s a bit of an odd and new perspective…I don’t want to be spammy and post a link here because I’m not a well-established visitor!
A fun and more subtle series to do in the summer: a delicate bilochun, a mild but sweet bao zhong, a slightly grassy dragon well, a jade tie guan yin, and an aromatic green high-mountain oolong for a finale. It’s a shorter arc of flavor, but if you are serving to people not totally new to traditional teas then it demonstrates the wide range of possible flavors in the small range from green to green-oolong. If you want to go outside of Chinese teas you can throw in a jungley-vegetal sencha or matcha to throw them.
Other favorites: a nice sharp Quimen (Keemun) alongside a rich brownie, and sweet golden-tip Yunnan with a peppery chai biscotti. Jasmine pearl with smoked chicken breast is a lovely treat too.
A nice bit of food-tea pairing. It sounds like you served the food with the tea. When I do home tea tastings I typically do small servings of food in between teas, as a palate cleanser in the earlier courses and as a complement in later ones.
I found a local bakery that makes mild almond biscotti that does the trick to clean the palate when transitioning between whites and green oolongs. And raw Thai-style spring rolls (with a sweet peanut sauce) are great after dark oolongs but before the reds or pu-erhs.
I also enjoy introducing pu-erh to newbies after a heavy and meat-rich dinner — it never fails to impress them how much it settles the stomach and improves digestion. I save the good aged stuff for a stand-alone sipping though.
All said, the most teas I’ve managed to serve to one group in one “sitting” is only eight or nine, although I insist on at least three steepings of each to show the arc of flavors. I’m impressed by your 15 teas in one evening!