Further Reading & Practice

Everything here assumes you are starting from an ordinary position: some interest, a limited budget, and no access to a teacher.

The classical Chinese texts

Lu Yu's Classic of Tea of the eighth century is the foundational work and is short. It covers the plant, the tools, processing, water, boiling, drinking and the regional sources. It describes a method nobody uses any more, which is part of its value: reading it makes the historical distance obvious.

From the Song, Cai Xiang's record of tea and the emperor Huizong's treatise describe the whisked powder method in detail, including the criteria for judging foam. From the Ming, after the change to loose leaf, Xu Cishu's work on tea is the most useful and is much closer to modern practice in its concerns with water, vessels and steeping.

English translations exist for the major texts, generally within scholarly editions with commentary, and the commentary is usually more useful than the text alone.

Books in English

For history, James Benn's Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History is the most reliable scholarly account and is particularly good on the Buddhist material. Victor Mair and Erling Hoh's The True History of Tea is broader, more readable, and strong on the global trade.

For understanding tea as a product, Kevin Gascoyne and colleagues' Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties is unusually good on processing and chemistry and is well illustrated. For pu'er specifically, Jinghong Zhang's Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic is an anthropological study of how the modern market was constructed, and it explains more about tea culture than most books about tea.

Okakura Kakuzō's The Book of Tea, from 1906, is frequently recommended and should be read with a clear head. It is elegant and influential, but it is about Japanese practice, it was written to present an idealised East to a Western audience, and it is a work of advocacy rather than description.

Buying tea

The single most useful habit is to buy samples rather than quantities. Most reputable sellers offer small amounts of many teas, and twenty grams is enough to brew a tea several times and decide.

Judging a seller is easier than judging a tea. A good one will tell you the harvest year, the region, the cultivar where relevant, and the processing, and will describe a tea's limitations as well as its strengths. A poor one talks about grades, awards, ancient trees, imperial tribute and health benefits. Prices at the entry level are low; the jump to genuinely fine tea is significant but not extreme, and prices beyond that are driven by scarcity and status rather than by proportional increases in quality.

Be sceptical of dramatic origin stories, of very cheap tea with famous names, and of anything sold primarily on health claims. Famous-name teas are extensively counterfeited, and a Longjing at a fifth of the usual price is not a bargain.

Storing tea

Most tea wants to be kept away from air, light, heat, moisture and other smells. An opaque airtight container in a cupboard away from the cooker is sufficient for almost everything.

Green tea is the exception that benefits from cold storage, and it can be kept sealed in a refrigerator or freezer, though it must be brought fully to room temperature before opening or condensation will ruin it. Most other teas should not be refrigerated.

Dark teas, particularly raw pu'er, are the opposite case: they need some air circulation to continue developing, and should be kept loosely wrapped in a stable environment rather than sealed. Very dry conditions stall their development and very humid ones risk mould. Do not store them next to anything aromatic, since they absorb smells readily.

Building a practice that lasts

Most people begin with enthusiasm, buy too much equipment and too many teas, and stop within a few months. The pattern is avoidable.

Keep the equipment minimal and the tea selection small. Three or four teas you know well teach you more than twenty you have tasted once. Fix a regular time rather than waiting for the right occasion, since the right occasion arrives less often than you expect. Twenty minutes on a weekday morning is a more durable practice than an elaborate weekend session.

Drink the same tea repeatedly over weeks. The differences between one brewing and the next, using the same leaf and the same water, are where you learn what your own technique is doing.

Keeping notes

Written notes are worth more than they seem, because taste memory is poor and unreliable. Record the tea, the amount of leaf, the water temperature, the infusion times, and what each infusion was like in plain descriptive language.

The value appears after a few months, when you can look back and see that a tea you now find ordinary once seemed remarkable, or that you have been consistently over-brewing one category. Both are common discoveries and neither is available without a record.

Visiting tea regions and markets

Tea markets in Chinese cities are large, and vendors will almost always brew tea for you at no cost and with no obligation, which is the normal way business is done. Sit down, taste several, and do not feel pressured to buy; the tasting is genuinely part of the trade rather than a favour.

In producing areas during harvest season it is often possible to see processing directly, and watching pan-firing or the shaking and resting of oolong leaves explains more in an hour than any written description. If you visit, go in spring for green tea areas and late spring to early summer for most oolong regions.

A practical caution: prices at famous production sites are frequently higher than in city markets, not lower, because the buyers are tourists.

A suggested first year

If you want a concrete plan rather than general advice, this one works. Spend the first three months on a single category, most usefully oolong, because it has the widest range and rewards the small-pot method most clearly. Buy four teas within that category that differ obviously — a light floral one, a heavily roasted one, a Wuyi rock tea and a Phoenix Dancong — and brew each many times.

In the second three months, add green tea and learn to brew at lower temperatures, which is a genuinely different skill. In the third, add a red tea and a raw pu'er, both of which behave differently again. Leave aged pu'er and expensive tea until last, because you cannot evaluate what you have no reference for and the market in that area punishes inexperience.

Throughout, keep the same vessel, the same water source and the same cups. Changing everything at once means you learn nothing from any of it.

Learning without a teacher

Tea is one of the few traditional practices you can genuinely learn alone, because the feedback is immediate and unambiguous. If the tea is bitter, you know. This makes it different from calligraphy or internal martial arts, where you can practise a fault for years without noticing.

What is harder alone is calibration: knowing whether a tea is good or you simply like it, and whether your palate is developing. The remedy is drinking with other people, which is also how the practice was always conducted. Online communities are useful for this, and group tastings, where several people brew the same tea and compare, are the most efficient learning format available.

Tea and health, revisited practically

Since this page is the practical one, a few concrete points are worth setting down. Tea inhibits the absorption of non-heme iron, the form found in plant foods, so drinking strong tea with meals is unhelpful for anyone managing low iron, and leaving an hour either side of a meal resolves it.

Caffeine sensitivity varies by a factor of several between individuals and is partly genetic, so advice about how late you can drink tea is not transferable. Find your own cut-off by observation. Strong tea on an empty stomach makes some people nauseated, and this is not a sign of quality or of energy despite occasionally being described as one.

Very hot drinks of any kind are associated with increased oesophageal risk in epidemiological studies, which is an argument for letting tea cool a little rather than for drinking less of it. And fluoride accumulates in older tea leaves, so brick teas made from mature material contain considerably more than fine-leaf teas, which matters only for people drinking large daily quantities of that specific type.

Traps worth avoiding

Several patterns recur and are easy to fall into. Collecting rather than drinking is the most common; tea kept unopened for years is generally deteriorating rather than improving unless it is a category that ages. Chasing rarity is the second; scarce tea is not reliably better tea. Assembling a vocabulary before assembling a palate is the third, and it produces confident descriptions that correspond to nothing.

The last and most damaging is treating the practice as a performance. If you find yourself more concerned with how the sequence looks than with how the tea tastes, the thing has inverted, and the correction is simply to brew alone, badly, for a while.

Key points

• Lu Yu's eighth-century classic describes a method nobody uses today, which is precisely what makes it worth reading.
• Okakura's Book of Tea is about Japanese practice and is advocacy rather than description, so it should be read with that in mind.
• Buy samples rather than quantities, and judge the seller by whether they give checkable specifics rather than grades and health claims.
• Most tea needs airtight storage away from light and smells, green tea benefits from cold, and raw pu'er needs air circulation.
• A small number of teas drunk repeatedly at a fixed regular time produces a practice that lasts, while accumulation does not.
• Tea can genuinely be learned alone because feedback is immediate, but calibration requires drinking with other people.