So Black It’s Gold (or Red Tea as Home Tea)

In which eyebrows are hoisted in the general (hospital) direction of scooped trophies and all (my) buds.

Just past noon here and even though the temps have dipped, we’re all aglow when the light hits. Solar powered. A friend is filming a flower arranging video in what we call the ‘down room’ right now. I got a few pains scattered across the blood bag but this Jin Jun Mei (an all bud black/red/gold tea) in my cup mollifies my concerns.

After, this Cup is has become a Cup Final.

Before Tea W/Dweez was a newsletter dear readers, it was a podcast segment. Then, briefly, it was a Patreon Perk for the aforementioned podcast. To drink Jin Jun Mei is to climb back into the stands and got lost in all the smoke.

Back then, your fearless author actually packed tea tins and sent mailers out featuring madness like this:

Tea Time w/ Dweez 第二 Jin Jun Mei金骏眉 (2019, Tea Habitat)

Name: Jin Jun Mei/ 金骏眉 (beautiful golden eyebrows)

Type: Black Tea (红茶)

Region: Tong Mu Guan, Fujian Province, China

Details: Wild grown, made from young buds

Welcome to the second edition of the tea time mailer. I want to give a shout out to XXXXXXX. He was the first Patreon supporter who took a chance on this weird idea for me to curate loose leaf teas and music for people who listen to a podcast about football and Los Angeles culture. Whoever rides with the concept, finds something enjoyable in the teas or the sounds (or just the novelty and wackiness) from here on out, has him to thank (or blame as the case may be if people aren’t fucking with it at all). It’s been said that we don’t ‘make’ tea we ‘serve’it. I’m honored to serve it to Good People because of that early spark of support from XXXXXX. Thank you brother. I needed someone to kick this off.

I decided to follow the first tea time with another Chinese black tea from Fujian & Tea Habitat. This tea is actually produced in the exact same village as the Lapsang Souchong (Tea Time #1) but has a very different story behind it. As opposed to the West, when you see tea in China, you rarely see black tea. You see construction workers walking with their bottles with green tea. You see Chajin (tea people) in tea rooms serving the more connoisseur-approved Oolong and Pu’er teas. It’s odd, considering how in other countries with tea heads (England, Ireland, India, Kenya) it’s really only black tea you see in the streets. You know from the last TT that black tea was what sparked the leaf’s spread worldwide. But in China? They were like, ‘those idiots didn’t even get the good stuff.’ The result was almost like China forgot how dope black tea could be. Until Jin Jun Mei came along. It’s a much ‘newer’ black tea (2006) where farmers in the classic black tea villages tried a crazy idea: take the year’s best crop ‘young, fresh buds’ and see how they worked with black tea processing. The boom that followed breathed new life into black tea appreciation in China. I hope, for those exploring tea from coffee or maybe lesser quality, mass-produced black tea bags, will have new life breathed into them from this gem. Oh yeah, it’s black & gold. Duh.

I created this short playlist inspired by appearance, fragrance, taste, and feeling. I think you can scan it with your phone and it will take you to Spotify:

For more on this tea or to restock your own supply, check out Tea Habitat, our local supplier here in Los Angeles:

https://teahabitat.com/collections/black-tea13/products/wild-grown-jin-jun-mei-tong-mu-guan-3-oz-2001

Fire up the four song playlist with me. There are 5 others that pair teas and tunes if dig it. Maybe in the future, more will appear.

Anyhow, I now drink before you, halfway around the world a separate Jin Jun Mei, that lacks the gold threads of Tea Habitat’s, but carries its own power, courtesy of a purveyor of Wu Yi teas based here in Japan called Salon De Cha Yuan (aka Vortex Life Design, which are a trio of words I can get behind).

As someone who was first exposed to tea through Mom’s yellow Lipton tea bags and Brisk Ice Tea at the gas station, tastes of this black red gold brew taste like home. It tastes like a house. A fireplace. Coziness. Morning. Work. This is the tea the West was swooned by. Having just finished the 8^th video in the excellent 7 Genres of Tea Course offered by the Good People at Global Tea Hut, I also have added context to consider regarding the language we use (in China, Japan and Taiwan this style of tea is called 红 tea, which is red tea and the color 黑, which is black, refers to an entirely different tea) and how it came to be, was consumed, and then has come to be again.

I touched on some of that when I wrote about Jin Jun Mei several years ago but it’s been the great joy of the course to forget, relearn, forget, relearn. This is the elusive beginners mind way of being in the world. To continue to tell yourself the truth: that this is the only time this moment has happened and will ever happen, rather than recognizing life only in its patterns and sleepwalking through it like it’s a re-run. There are no re-runs. I always haven’t seen this. It’s always new to me.

In this installment of beginning all over again with Dweez, I decided to celebrate LAFC’s quest to repeat as champions, Arsenal atop the Premier League and its Champions League group, and combat some recent nerve pain with a good night of football out on the sacred pitch of my local club: Kamakura International FC. And it felt great. Up until the last few steps. I pretended to be a beginner a little too hard, slipped in the late Autumn dew that I’d probably gush about during a tea session, and crack my head rather powerfully against the less-than-soft playing surface.

I blacked out (in this case I mean Black and not Red or Gold) for a few seconds. Got up wobbly and, most frighteningly, couldn’t remember exactly what happened before I fell. It was my second slip of the night and I could write 3,000 words about the mechanics of that first fall, so the fact that I had absolutely no words to describe my second made it a bit scary. I, smartly, stopped playing and collected myself the rest of the evening and phoned my better half to inform her of the incident.

I slept ok but woke up with some head pain, chest pain, and a mark above my left eye. Now. In this situation in the USA, I would suck it up, let my theories compete against each other for the truth, google ‘mild concussion’ and leave it at that. There is almost no chance I’d go to the doctor. And I had health insurance. It’s just the hassle and stress and expense of hospitals in my country of origin are too tall of an order to take care of oneself with modern, centralized medicine. Somehow, healthcare in America both discourages and necessitates taking care of our health in the worst sense of both.

It's different here. I read somewhere recently that Japanese visit hospitals more than any other developed country. There’s a problem with people actually hanging out there. And since I affixed my ‘beginner’s mind’ hat atop my rattled noodle bowl and went to the hospital for both a CT Scan and an X-Ray, I can attest to the genuinely incredible facilities. I get why people wanna kick it there.

If the question is, “Hey Hoss, Wanna Hang At The ‘Spital?”

Then my answer is yes, if that ‘spital in questions is Shonan Kamakura General Hospital. It’s hell yes, in fact.

For that CT scan, X-Ray, and full peace of mind that I have nothing wrong with me as the result of said football slip, I received a bill of a whopping $52.51.

And best of all, there was absolutely zero intensity involved. In fact, just the opposite—and I was in the emergency/no-appointment zone. They were too kind. I just sort of sat there and watched my fellow LAFC supporters’ light flares and smoke Houston Dynamo right out of our stadium on my cell phone. As the clock wound down, ensuring our passage into another MLS Cup Final, I even was so negligently joyful that I dropped my wallet in the parking lot. Of course they called 5 minutes later when someone had found and returned it.

Here it is guys: Japan. The country where you can hurt your head, drop your wallet, go to the emergency room, and somehow feel better than you did before.

I digress. This was supposed to be about tea. But it’s never just about tea, is it? Even tea. Someday when I can sit through all the pains that remain, maybe I’ll have some opinion about whether we should call it black or red tea, but for now, all I will say is it’s looking awfully gold. Like a trophy. Like a star. Like how I bright I smile when I think of you reading these words.

Onwards. It’s Dale Black & Gold Forever & Ever, Wherever I am, and however deep into the tea and zen tunnels I tumble. As they say. If you’re just a crazy football fan, enter zen from there. The zen of crazy football fandom.

I toast this Jin Jun Mei, and raise my golden eyebrows, to you, my beloved.