Two Gifts, One Cup: “A Shincha Season Mouth-Breather”
In which I savor the umami explosion of being wrong by way of Kansai competition kabusecha.
It’s happened and I’m thrilled. Just when I think I know a thing or two about tea—or rather, a thing or two about my friend’s tea levels—a moment marches toward me, shove sits bows in my stomach, looks me in the eye, and flips my table over.
And so I write to you today lying on the ground covered in shards of porcelain (the fancier the better) and water (the hotter the better) and with laughter spilling out of me like clumps of baby food. That sound you hear? That’s just me kicking my naked little feet against the floor like a toddler at mealtime.
But why? How? What happened?
Follow me up the mossy staircase and I will try to make this easy on all of us.
You see, I recently discovered that I have several ‘me’-s living inside of the container that is ‘me.’ That might sound to you like a case of split personality—or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) as the scientists like to call it. But you didn’t come here for science. In fact, you didn’t come here at all—here came to you—such is the delivery format.
Well, one of the ‘me’s living inside me—better to call him one of several internal family members—often acts in ways some people might call ‘asshole-ish.’ To be more specific: critical to the point of unpleasable. Let’s call this fella “IC,” or “I see” or, in Japanese, なるほど (naruhodo).
Anyhow, なるほど does not give an inch. He has his take and he sticks to it. He is what they might call mentally rigid—as opposed to psychologically flexible. He is not changing his mind, not no way, not no how.
And I’ve come to appreciate that that is alright. In fact, he’s helped me in my past—on a macroscale in my work as a music critic and a football critic. On a micro scale, he’s helped me decide on the restaurant when no one wants to pick where we go.
Except other parts of me have come to light. I won’t overwhelm you by introducing them all today but I feel the term enthusiast—or evangelist, if you must—fits better for how I relate to tea, for example.
So imagine my surprise when なるほど suddenly popped up this month when I received a tea gift from a friend. I wouldn’t call it a full takeover, but he definitely drowned out some other family members for longer than he had license to. His main message was a classically rigid and hilariously adolescent in nature. It might be simplified thusly: “This tea is going to be whack.”
I could apologize for なるほどhere. I could explain that tea gifts in the past from friends haven’t exactly gone well for any of the ‘me’-s—or for the teas, for that matter. Or, I could even try to justify his critical expertise and proclaim, as I have in the past, that life is too short for subpar anything.
But I won’t do that. I’ll simply ask you—as I’ve asked the rest of my inner crew—to accept that this is how なるほど rolls. And that’s ok. It’s really, fully, totally, ok because, look, it already happened. It’s happening on its own and there is nothing to be done. しょうがない—shogunai—if you will.
So now, what happened? What’s so thrilling? Why am I lying here like a child with water and shards of porcelain strewn about, writing this note in the leftover tea leaf swill?
なるほど was proven wrong and—this is the best part—can admit it.
Since なるほど isn’t the whole of me, I didn’t take his word for it from the jump. I brought the tea gift home. It was from a shop I had never even heard of called Tea Dealers, based in New York. なるほど is like ‘no way someone outside the tea game could put me onto something new, this shop probably sucks.'
But, here’s the thing about having multiple ‘me’-s. There was another, less vocal part of me—let’s call him the LP, the “Long Play”—who looks something like this 心 when he’s cold-chilling in my safe space, holding whoever and whatever needs holding. LP doesn’t talk much—kind of like a Silent Bob of the heart—but if I had to translate his stance about the whole tea gift incident, he would have said something like, “Vamos a ver.” Let’s see. LP is pretty much non-judgemental, non-attached, and non-resistant.
I’ve recently been asked by my most dedicated readers to talk less about the specifics of tea and more about the gaping holes inside of me—the voids—but just as that conversation happened, these fools started rushing in to fill those voids. So, it seems, it’s gotten a bit crowded in here, as you can see.
But I digress—and to get back on track, will have the second steep: just to be sure.
Yep. I’m sure—all the parts of me that I am presently aware of, at least.
This is the best kabusecha I’ve ever had. It sits snugly in between the soupy savoriness of gyokuro and the lively vigorously vegetal vibes of sencha. That triple V was not intentional but we’re keeping it.
Shade grown tea is not for everyone. But it is for me. Kabusecha tends to be shaded for half the time of gyokuro. Someone might say, “It drinks like something you should be chewing.”
It’s fitting that I drank this gifted tea out of another gift. Today I drank from the whiter of two cups recently given to me by my friends at Tea at Shiloh in DTLA. They are fellow lover of the shade grown teas—kabusecha, especially—so there could hardly have been a better opportunity to give one of their prototype cups a spin. The shape (curvy and open lipped), texture (not too smooth, not too coarse), color (I’ll call it burnt ivory) and size (almost exactly 100ml) was perfect for tasting shaded tea. I’ll try it with gyokuro next.
Proving that certain rested green teas can be as excellent in their own way as shincha, this tea is a 2021 Kansai region competition-grade single cultivar saemidori kabusecha from Yamazoe, Nara—like Kamakura, a small town that was an ancient capital of Japan. Nara sits in the shadow cast by Kyoto much like Kamakura sits in the shadow cast by Tokyo. I’ve not been to Nara but I’ve wanted to go there for a long time. Maybe one day I’ll have to go and shake the hand of Naoki Okunaka, the gracious soul who produced this tea.
And speaking of handshakes, I owe one to my friend—on behalf of my whole inner fam—for knocking me off my feet with a tea worth writing about.
We love なるほど, he’ll always be a part of us, but it sure is nice when someone takes him down a peg.
Last night I saw lightening bugs glowing a morse code message over a stream near my house. I am no code breaker but the meaning got through all the same—and I won’t cheapen it’s value by trying to write it here.