Golden Buds of Joy - Pt. 2
A Birthday Mugging on the Slopes of Nagano
There are ways of making tea that take some doing. I brewed Golden Buds of Joy in the first post using several tools. A tumbler for hot water, a bag of tea, a gaiwan, a glass pitcher, and a tea cup. I would still call this a sort of easy, or casual gongfu style brewing. But let’s be real. I also had to shuttle these items up over three trips to the roof deck. Not the most complex tea ceremony you’ll ever have but yes, indeed, it took some doing.
There are other ways of making tea—even phenomenal, delicious, damn near life-changing tea—that require almost no doing at all.
To interpolate an oft-used phrase by Brian Phillips in his excellent podcast about the World Cup, this is not a newsletter, this is a celebration of mugging.
I’m on a train right now. We just passed our third lake. The middle and smallest one was completely frozen. There is a blizzard in Japan right now. I am in a town called Omachi—that’s 大町—in the northwest of Nagano Prefecture. This is the last of our five days here. We intended to stay fewer days but the blizzard interrupted inspired our plans.
It’s been a dream of mine since I was 12-years-old to ski in Nagano. The 1998 Winter Games are my oldest memory of watching winter sports on TV. Right beside my TV, dominating more than half of my living room window at the time, was a ski slope. I would watch athletes tackle mountains halfway around the world in a country called Japan that I knew next to nothing about. Then, I would walk across the street, ride the chairlift to the top and fly down the mountain at reckless speeds pretending I was going for the Gold. My non-traditional childhood on the slopes promoted, or maybe necessitated, existing in fantasy worlds.
In that sense, I dreamed of Nagano long before I even knew about Japan. Even before I came to this country for the first time in 2015, Nagano was a destination from that purest part of myself: the part that lived in a snow-globe fantasyland where anything is possible. There were few better places to choose for a January 2023 birthday trip. We picked Hakuba Valley—with a series of world class resorts—and Happo-One Resort specifically for the occasion. Happo-One hosted most of the alpine skiing events, including the Downhill, which as a 12-year-old and a grown adult is still the most insane non-mechanized voluntary feat of humankind.
As I recount all of this on the train, I’m mugging. In fact, I’ve been mugged for three straight days. One day I foresee myself writing a more detailed dispatch with instructions on how to mug with the best of ‘em, but until then, here is a basic summary:
You have a glass (or a tumbler, in my case in Nagano)
You have tea leaves (or a bag, I suppose)
You put the tea inside the vessel of your choice
You fill with boiling water
You drink about half or 2/3rds of the way
You refill with more boiling water
You repeat until the tea stops “giving”
Congratulations, you mugger.
Mugging in China is often called Dabeicha (大杯茶) or big glass tea. It’s how most people in the spiritual home of tea consume their tea on a daily basis. Why? Well, because it’s easy. It’s easier than just about any kind of beverage consumption apart from water. You don’t have to squeeze any fruit. You don’t have to grind any beans. You don’t have to do anything but add leaves and hot water.
English speakers, at some point started calling this style by another name* which is problematic for various reasons. I am here to play a small part to help put that name on the back-burner. Mugging is better. Mugging pays homage to the beautiful crime, the sleight of hand, that one commits when upending what great tea is supposed to mean. To be a mugger, is to be the smoothest of tea criminals.
For three straight days, the tea I’ve been mugging in Nagano is Golden Buds of Joy. That’s right, it’s the same tea from episode one of Tea w/ Dweez. This is a great tea. One might scoff at using a great tea in this more informal drinking manner. I am no scoffer but I judge not if scoffing occurs. I would argue that one key component for a good mugging session is using high-quality but hearty tea. Not all great teas mug well (Japanese and Indian teas, for example, don’t always lend themselves to a good mugging) but all great muggings require great tea.
I have a confession. I already knew Golden Buds of Joy would mug well. I mugged it on my first-ever visit to Huntington Gardens this past October. It provided an equivalent cerebral enhancement one might receive from micro-dosing psilocybin for the same occasion. That is to say, it was incredible.
Perhaps if there were a rule book for mugging, rule #1 of mugging might read: Never mug a tea for an all-day outdoor adventure that you’ve not mugged before.
I’ve mugged Golden Buds of Joy (GBJ) in Nagano for three straight days because it’s an outstanding tea to mug. It’s high-quality. It’s hearty. It gives and gives and gives a beautiful dark brown sludge that’s like a sledgehammer to the indivisible crust trapping your tired eyes and weary bones. It’s a blowtorch to the anxious monkey on your back. It’s a cozy blanket for your icy toes and a grandmother’s kiss for your chilly nose.
My first day of mugging it on the slopes of Happo-one was the birthday mugging. I threw in five tiny bricklets, filled my mug of choice (a 12-ounce stainless-steel Thermos tumbler that cost around $25) with boiling water, and slid it into my ski jacket at 7:30 AM. I slurped from the tumbler on the lifts, in the gondolas and on the tippity tops. It was my tea companion for my first foray into the Japanese Alps. The Aussies around me cheered their Asahi lagers over soba noodle lunches halfway up the mountain as I sipped a few more mouthfuls of GBJ. When my liquid was low, I asked a couple of Japanese gentlemen at a kiosk near the gondola for a refill. They asked, curiously, if I had tea inside. I nodded and felt their jealousy as they stood, hotboxing in the stench of standard-issue coffee beans. If sharing mugging was more covid friendly, I’d have offered to pour them an espresso glass full of the good stuff. This mugging lasted until the lifts closed at 4 PM. A full workday of mugging. I thanked the leaves when I disposed of them, their brick-like shapes now looking like scattered sticks and clumps of seaweed when I fished them out of the bottom of my tumbler.
The second GBJ Nagano mugging began at noon after an altogether delightful stay at a hot spring resort called KAI in nearby Omachi Town. The snow was falling in heavy sheets by then. The news had called it a once-in-a-decade storm. Trains had been cancelled. A friend had taken what was supposed to be a 12 hour bus ride from Osaka to Hakuba that turned into 21 hours. Through it all, I just kept sipping from my mug of GBJ. The pending deadlines and project calls and moving tasks all melted away as the snow fell. I enjoyed the second mugging so much, I sipped it through the day, the night and into this morning.
Is it abhorrent to keep drinking the same mugged tea the next day? I’m not sure. All I know is that I was too tired, too lazy and too cold to make a fresh batch to go with breakfast. When I added some hot water this morning, I was astonished that the second GBJ mugging batch still had some give after marinating all night in the partially full tumbler. I shared it with my traveling mates over some sweet and savory bread morsels then it was time to hit the slopes again for our final day.
Today was set to be a powder day. A third mugging of GBJ was required so I obliged. I plopped the current batch in around 7:30 AM as we left the hotel. It sloshed around my jacket pocket as I squeezed into my boots and later smacked the snow off those boots and slammed them into my bindings. We swung from one lift to another until we made it to Riesen Grat. This is the highest lift in Happo-One. We arrived just as it was opening so we were probably the 6th and 7th skiers of the day.
I got to the top. We were enveloped in a cloud. Curtains of snow were falling in the still air. I opened my icicle laced beardbox and filled it with a healthy pour of GBJ. Then I hugged the skiers left hand side of the course where the Men’s Downhill start began in 1998. I thought of myself as a 12-year-old. So hopeful, so silly, and still so in love with life—a kid completely unaware of what would happen to him and those he loved. What he would see, what he would miss. The snow came up to my knees in the deepest places. I got to the steep part of the course. I could see just far enough to recognize the shape of the gift in front of me. I leaned forward, bent my knees and proceeded to fully bask in my favorite three minutes of powder I’ve had in a lifetime on the slopes.
Later, when a barista at an Aussie-owned sandwich shop called Café Cubano poured out half of my mugged GBJ tea leaves by mistake when filling it up with hot water, I didn’t mind. I still had half and that was enough for the train ride.
So now I’m rocking a half-mug of GBJ as I type this. It’s still piping hot even though it was filled three hours ago during lunch. Shout out to this extraordinarily basic Thermos tumbler that I was suspicious of when I received it as a gift before a trip to Alaska five years ago. Like the tea, it keeps giving.
Golden Buds of Joy, after three days of mugging, after eight hours of this batch and half lost to a coffee sink, still bangs. It burns like a soothing balm down my throat. Then it spreads, thawing my frozen extremities. It’s the dark brown of wet tree bark now. It’s almost black when mugged for so long. The effect is somewhere between a traditional medicine and a bowl of bone broth. It sinks into my chest and spikes me into place in this moment.
We are in car #12, the last car. A bird of prey—maybe a hawk?—just flew by out the window to my right. Too fast to snap a pic and try to identify it. There are only two other people in this train car, making that 4 seats filled out of a total of 30. It’s quiet part from the occasional surging click and whoosh of the train. It’ll be dark when we get to Shinjuku station in Tokyo where we will transfer once and take our train home to Kamakura. Until then, I’ll watch the frozen nature show and treasure every muggy sip I’ve got left of this batch.
In China mugging is so popular that there are hot water dispensers on the trains, and other public places like schools. If I see an opening in Tokyo, I’ll ask for a refill of hot water at a coffee stand. I always offer to pay but they always give the hot water for free, peering into the mug with more than a little curiosity about what’s inside.
I want to tell them what I want to tell you, that mugging takes no doing at all. But I don’t know how to say that in Japanese. Not yet.
*The alternative name for mugging you will find online is “grandpa style” and I will try to avoid using it again.