Cha Xi Collective

Tea Tables and Trays

When brewing tea for yourself or others, protecting your teaware by providing a stable brewing service is an absolute must. Many people have a nice small table they brew on but some people prefer to use tables specifically designed for brewing tea. They also serve as a place to catch excess water/tea from spill/spray or even just a rinse. 

Similar to Yixing or Porcelain, these tables are functional art. Many hours/weeks/months can go into creating a single table. Sometimes they are humble with a simple shape and few, if any carvings, just a solid piece of wood with a nice finish, Some are fantasically detailed carvings with birds, dragons, buddha’s, fish etc. One of my favorites, from a teashop in Dali Old Town, has a built-in strainer holder that filters through the base into a bucket for draining!

Most novice to mid-livel tea enthusiasts and most western teashops that carry Chinese teaware will have the kind of tray or brewstation with a removable plastic tray for when it gets full. These are nice for small volume home brewing. Are you really going to fill up a tray with more liquid than you are likely to drink in a single tea session? When making tea in a teahouse or any other situation where you are serving lots of people, this can create a problem. This style is really not meant for bulk brewing, you will have to empty the tray too often. 

In Chinese teashops, the most common type of table was a root carving table. They cut a tree in half to make a flat surface and use the roots and branches as the legs. They dip them in a finish, usually polyurethane, to protect the surface from the obvious water damage that would otherwise deteriorate their work. This type always has a small drain closest to the brewer that has a metal strainer, often with the tea character on it, to filter the leaves and prevent clogging in the tube. Using a tea brush, you push excess water from the brewstation into the drain which leads to a bucket on the floor near the brewer.

In addition to providing a safe and beautiful place to brew tea, it also serves as a display for your favorite teapots, gaiwans and teapets! most of the shops we went in had all their active teaware on the brewstation and reserved the rest of the shelf and display space for tea and wares for sale. 

I have a few pieces of wood I am trying to convert into my own tea table. I am no woodworker so they maybe be functional but certainly no works of art like these professionally made tables. 

Working with Tea

As an employee of a teahouse, I have an interesting perspective on tea that other bloggers and tea enthusiasts may not: I prepare and taste teas that I don’t often drink outside of work. These aren’t necessarily bad teas, just ones I don’t enjoy or don’t keep in stock at home. 

I am humbled by the amount of tea experts available to us on the internet, I have my expertise in puer, oolong and yixing at my job but I am still a jack of all trades in tea knowledge, I lack the depth that Stephane Erler would be able to provide about a particular oolong. On Tea chat there are some people who only post in the Japanese green boards  and others who just stick to the puer. 

Even though I may not drink Sencha as often as I drink Long Jing, I know how to brew it well, how to recognize it amongst Gyokuro or Tamaryokucha, I know what it should smell and look like. Working with these teas daily provides a glimpse into a system for knowing a tea will taste good or if it was overbrewed. This is especially handy when aren’t tasting the tea yourself before serving it to a customer. 

Sometimes I will bring a tea to a table, start pouring and the aroma fills the air, I know this tea will taste fantastic. My suspicions are confirmed, The Ali Shan I made is a perfect vibrant blue/green color in the cup. I am jealous of the customer at this moment. Other times I pour the tea out and I can see the liquor is too dark :( hopefully the tea will be saved in subsequent infusions. 

I wonder if someone with an untrained palate can enjoy these subtleties or if an overbrewed tea would taste “normal” to them. While I was thinking about a comparison in the food world I thought about pizza. There’s good pizza and bad pizza and there’s a lot of middle ground. Tea is very much the same way, The vast majority of consumers in this country gravitate towards this middle ground. Think about this though, what if the only pizza you ever tasted was burnt. Would you accept the burnt flavor as normal? I think some people drink tea that’s too strong and bitter because they’ve only ever had it that way. They might add milk or honey to cut down on the bite and this leads to a habit of always adding these things to the tea even before tasting it. For Pizza this would be like going to a restaurant that has a bunch of specialty pies and adding hot sauce too it. If such a pie needed hot sauce don’t you think the chef would’ve added it? I’m not sure if these people like Tea (pizza) or they actually just really like honey (hot sauce). 

As I work with tea I learn more and more everyday about each tea and how it changes daily. I see trends of orders based on the weather or season and I see regulars who either stick to one or two teas and others who let us chose. The customers who meet us with the respect of the tea and the traditional serving methods we strive for are enough to keep any teamaster happy!