FAQ (also on website)

So what makes Tea Tavern's teas special?
We care about the tea, our community, and helping our community grow. As a result, we attempt to find tea that has the fewest growth intervention techniques used on it. This includes use of pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, and tipping for growth encouragement, or anything else that we find might adjust the strength and health of the tea plant and its flavors.
As a result, Tea Tavern teas are are chosen with this in mind, such as teas grown through low intervention farming with just enough pruning to keep the plant healthy, or even are picked from wild plants!
Why gongfu tea instead of a big tea pot?
Gongfu brewing uses a much larger amount of leaves for the amount of water that is used at a time. As a result, brewing is significantly faster, the flavor (not the bitterness) of the leaves is stronger, one has more control over the particular flavor desired to be brewed, and gongfu allows rebrewing many more times.
Want a brewing kit for gongfu? See our Adventurer's Brewing Kit!
Want to learn more about gongfu brewing first? Read our brewing guide or come ask one of the traveling brewmasters at a Traveling Tea Tavern event!
What is the simplest way to do gongfu brewing, with the least effort?
Basic gongfu uses the following tools as a basis: Gawian (brewing vessel), a serving cup, and tea cups for drinking. If the serving cup is missing, however, it is common to pour directly into the tea cups, attempting to share as equally as possible.
With this in mind, if you aren't serving people, one could skip the serving cup and tea cups, and just release the tea into a drinking mug.
What are ways to describe the flavors of tea, so I know what to ask for? (How to know which teas are for you)
People who are new to tea can usually relate the practice of describing "tea tasting notes" to that of fancy alcoholic beverages or chocolates. Tea has a wide variety of flavors and varying strength in those flavors. The Tea Tavern tends to use the following descriptors, but note that more descriptions are used by other places, as well.
- Nutty
- Flowery
- Grassy
- Smokey
- Earthy
- Fruity
Do you make your own tea blends?
For the Tea Tavern's home, the term "blend" tends to be used because people expect a mixture of herbs to produce fun flavors, such as is common in places such as English tea rooms. Rather than mixing the herbs ourselves, however, we work with vendors to bring mindfully grown herbal blends such as The Mosscap Hearth and Rain of a Mosscap.
As referenced in other places such as China, however, the creation of "tea blends" is primarily an outcome of the industrialisation of tea production to reduce costs, flavors, and qualities. Teas from different regions or various parts of the tea plant, such as leaves and stems, are "blended" together. This process ensures a consistent product but often overlooks the unique characteristics that individual teas can offer. As a result, the Tea Tavern is no "opposed" to selling a blend, but they are not the focus, as they are usually not the same quality as single origin sourced teas.
How do you tell the quality of a tea?
The easiest option is to smell and taste the tea yourself.
- Does the tea smell like chemicals? It likely won't be a good tea.
- Does it just taste unpleasant or feel weird? It is possible that the particular tea is not to your preference, but it is also possible that you are tasting/feeling pesticides or chemical fertilizers that were used in the growth process. So if you don't like the particular tea, just don't drink that one, and look for one you do like, instead.

For more delicate teas like whites and greens, one can use the resilience of the leaves a metric for quality. Can they be brewed in boiling water and not become bitter?
For example, Tea Tavern's brewmasters always brew Master's Green with boiling water and it won't become bitter.

Contrarily, Tea Tavern's brewmasters do not recommend brewing Phidim White Prakash with boiling water, as the strength becomes too strong too quickly, and the flavor become what most people call "bitter". As a result, if tea becomes unpleasant because of how strong the flavor is, can you make the brew taste pleasant again by adding water?
The Tea Tavern's keeper (and this FAQ's writer) regularly over-brews Phidim White Prakash, for example. (^^;)7
As a result, the keeper often adds water to Phidim White Prakash brews, fixing all the bitterness that is otherwise found!

This brings us to the last easy quality-checking method. Tea farmers will sometimes take a small amount of leaf and brew it in a bowl of hot water. The tea will be left to brew for multiple hours, and when they finally come back to it, the tea may be weak, but is it pleasant?
Maybe they were good leaves and prepared wrong, thus doesn't taste good.
Maybe they used chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and since it was brewing for so long, they actually released into the brew.
Whatever the case, a long steeping time is sure to extract as much from the leaves as is going to happen, for the most holistic leaf flavor.
I see you have more than just "green tea" and "black tea".. so what kind of tea is there and what do those mean? What are the differences?
Due to classifications of tea crossing different cultures and languages, there are debates and confusion from meanings and translations. As a result, these are the terms and classifications that are influenced by Tony Gebely's book "Tea, a User's Guide" and used at the Tea Tavern.
White: White tea is made by withering fresh leaves for several days and then drying them.
Green: Tea made from leaves that have been withered, fixed (AKA: Kill Green), and dried
Yellow: Yellow tea is defined by a unique processing step where small batches of tea leaves are wrapped in cloth bundles after fixing, allowing them to yellow.
Oolong: During the oolong production process, oxidation is initiated, controlled, and halted before the leaves are considered fully oxidized.
Black/Red: A mostly oxidized tea from fresh tea leaves that are withered, rolled, oxidized, and dried.
Hei Cha (Dark): Teas that have been fermented or made to be fermented.
Pu-erh: Tea leaves grown in Yunnan Province and are descendants of Camellia sinensis var. assamica.
Shu (cooked) Pu-erh: A quickly fermented tea that undergoes the "wet piling" process, the process in which tea leaves are put into piles and moisture is added and controlled over a period of several hours to several weeks depending on the type.
Sheng (raw) Pu-erh: Is made the same as shu, but without the wet piling process. Rather these are made and often left to age.
~~Purple:~~Purple: A tea with genetics that make the leaf on the plant purple rather than green in color.
Do you have a recommendation for teas to try? Teas to gift?
One of the first recommendations for people is always a wild picked tea. This is because they are much more difficult to brew bitter and avoids the possible toxins in other teas that result in jitters, sickness, and sometimes difficulty sleeping after drinking. If you wanted to know what a variety taste like, see the Wild Tea Sampler.
What is the importance of water used to brew the tea?
Water dissolves/dissociates the solids in tea leaves, which is what gives the brew its flavor. This can be either supported or hindered by the materials already in the water.
The easiest way to see how this can happen is if there is already a lot in the water. Water that has been saturated with salt (of any kind) will extract fewer materials from the tea than purified water with nothing in it. The color change will be less noticeable.
Another factor is if the materials in the water will react with the tea. One basic science experiment that teaches "how to see evidence of chemical change" is by adding an acid to tea; this is to see the color change. So if the materials in the water are particularly basic or acidic, then they will have an effect on the tea's flavor.
Lastly, if one is drinking particularly hard or metallic tasting water, then it will be very likely to just mix the flavor of the tea with the unpleasant metallic and hard water flavors. Not necessarily remove them.
With all these factors in mind, the Tea Tavern sells brewing components that help people prepare tea water as well as tea! One would obtain purified water (reverse osmosis or distilled), which can often be found in many markets and add 1ml of each in the mineral pair.
*fill, spritz, spritz, boil*, and the water is ready to brew tea!
Why re-mineralize purified water (reverse osmosis or distilled)?
While one can use a good local tap water, filtered, bottled, or just a purified water without re-mineralizing, the brewers of the Tea Tavern find that the minerals in the water help exemplify or mellow the particular flavors of a tea. Thus, they not only help extract some materials in tea, but they sometimes react with the tea in a minor and possibly favorable way.
If someone doesn't like grassiness in tea, perhaps they will use the minerals for Autumn water.
If they want to influence the floweriness of the tea, perhaps they will prefer minerals for Springtide water.
Or maybe one just want the true flavor of the tea and wil use minerals for Original water to extract as much of the tea's true flavor as they can.
Do the teas of Tea Tavern have caffeine?
How much caffeine is in the tea that has caffeine?
What are the medicinal properties of Tea?
How do you store the tea?
How do you age the tea?
How long does the tea last?
I'm struggling to brew good tea... :(
What should I do?