Drinking Forests and Walking Through Tea: The Importance of Drinking Real Tea and the Quest to Find It

There is a moment in Les Blank’s film documentary, All in This Tea, when German filmmaker Werner Herzog sips some tea and says that the experience is not unlike walking through a forest. He imagines a lush and verdant landscape where the tea takes him, and he says approvingly, “It's all in this tea.” This experience, of walking through a forest, is precisely what I try to replicate every time I drink quality tea, and there are certain teas that have helped me attain this calm, serene state, not unlike wandering through a damp forest after a rain and kicking up pungent leaves.  

Herzog’s poetic, tea-fueled description comes as a retort to the subject of the documentary, David Lee Hoffman, who says that we don’t have the vocabulary to describe tea, which is also deeply true. 

The documentary follows Hoffman, a tea importer from California by trade, in his quest for finding “real” tea to bring back to America. More than a tea importer, Hoffman is really a tea adventurer, a happy traveler that lived a nomadic existence in Asia during the 60s and 70s, just drinking tea all day with the people he came across, people like the Dalai Lama and nomadic shepherds of the Himalayas. 

Hoffman is also a visionary, an idealist, and a man on a mission to change the way we approach tea and food. Years ahead of the goofy “local,” “organic” foodie movement, which is really just a pretentious way of saying that you eat “real” food rather than food created in a sterile laboratory with ingredients barely recognizable by the average human being or harvested at such an extraordinarily large scale that the flavor has been bred out of them, Hoffman is passionate about the importance of earthworms in agriculture. 

It’s sad that most Americans don’t know what real tea is. Tea is pleasure. Tea is ritual. Tea is for welcoming guests. Tea is for sitting around and chatting. Tea is for relaxing. Most of tea is water, which is why you need good, clean water with which to make tea.

There is nothing wrong with Lipton tea bags, and I’m the first to order some iced tea at a restaurant, but tea is so much more than that. 

My tea obsession started when I grew tired of coffee. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) coffee since I was probably 13 years old, and I like a wide range of coffee—dark roasted Colombian coffee, Turkish coffee, Vietnamese coffee, the light, delicate Kona coffee, or even mass-produced diner coffee—but there is a point when I realized that the energy coffee gives me is mainly jitters. I still like the jolt of a coffee every once in a while, but I appreciate the deeper, calmer energy of tea. I then started getting into green and oolong teas. My wife and are obsessed with a tea called Waterfall, a high mountain oolong tea that we get at Silk Road, a tea store in Victoria, BC, and the experience it approximates is not unlike coming across a hidden waterfall in a forest. I then went to China for a friend’s wedding and knew that I wanted to discover new teas. With my limited Chinese and still budding tea knowledge, I tried a tea called pu’erh, and it blew my mind. Fortunately, I had enough experience with tea that I wasn’t taken aback. Pu’erh isn’t for everybody. It is strong, complex, and isn’t easy to get a hold of at first. I bought a cake of pu’erh and brought it home, and I still had no idea how to properly prepare it, but my wife and I savored it every morning that we drank it, a special treat that was deeply important for us. 

Pu’erh is a fermented and oxidized tea that has been around since 700-900 AD or maybe even before, and comes in bricks, balls, and cakes. And pu’erh is perfect for aging. Like a cabernet, a pu’erh can be overwhelmingly strong when it is young, and then mellows with age, releasing a wonderful array of complexities, and can be great at 40-50 years old if stored properly.

Once I saw the beauty of pu’erh, I was hooked. We couldn’t find a tea store where we live that sold “real” pu’erh. Too many of the tea stores we went to sold these fruity, flavored teas, and most of the people we talked to didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked them about pu’erh. In a desperate quest to find good pu’erh, I found an herb store in Vancouver’s Chinatown and bought a pu’erh cake. I wasn’t sure of the quality. We walked around in Chinatown for the afternoon and just about made it back to our car when I spotted The Chinese Tea Shop. This is what we were looking for! 

There, Daniel Lui prepared gong fu cha pu’erh for us, and this was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Gong fu cha means good skills tea making. Not a ceremony, like the Japanese tea ceremony, gong fu cha just means using the right skills to infuse a perfect cup of tea. What is important to remember is that every infusion, every cup of tea is different, and there are many variables to making a good cups of tea. When prepared correctly, you can get 15 or more infusions from a good pu’erh tea, and it changes, releasing new flavors and essences, so you can literally spend all afternoon drinking tea, feeling Zen-like, and having profound revelations while reading or writing, each infusion giving a slightly different flavor and layer of complexity.

Daniel waiting for the gongfu cha pu'erh tea to infuse at The Chinese Tea Shop

We try to visit Daniel Lui in his Chinese Tea Shop every few months to learn more and every time I sip down new teas that take me to other places. Daniel is generous with his knowledge and his enthusiasm for tea is contagious. He had a likely and willing counterpart in myself, as I had already loved tea when I met him, but he made me realize just how much more there is to discover about tea. And what a beautiful world it is. If you want to know more about tea, you need to see his website, which is an excellent source of tea knowledge.

There is a tremendous variety to teas that I have only begun to explore, as the world of tea is not unlike the world of wines, another world that you could easily spend entire lifetimes walking through. Like wine, what you taste, as Herzog poetically observed, is a terroir. When you taste a good tea, you taste the 10-day lifespan of the tea leaf and all of the weather it experienced. You can taste the fragrance of orchids that grew around an oolong. You can also taste the altitude of where the tea plant was located. For example, I really like a high mountain oolong. Like the winemaker’s art, one is observing the whole experience when drinking tea, which means taking in fragrance and color of the leaves. You are literally tasting the earth where the tea or wine grapes were raised. Like great wine or food experiences, drinking tea is also about creating and re-creating memory. You are drinking an essence of a time or a place.  

Lately, my favorite tea is a shou pu’erh. Shou pu’erh is the less common black version of pu’erh tea (most are green and known as sheng pu’erh). Low in caffeine, shou gives a calm, tranquil and transcendent energy that is perfect for rainy afternoons. My penchant for shou and obsession with it is not unlike my obsession for leather goods (like my belts and boots) and mushrooms. A fine shou tastes somewhat like how a very high quality leather smells or a freshly picked boletus, morel or chanterelle mushroom tastes after delicately sauteing it in a pan with nice olive oil or a creamy sauce. This is a flavor that I attempt to replicate at any moment that I can because, like walking through the forest, it is one of the pinnacle experiences of being on this planet and truly living. 

When I drink tea, it is like I am mushroom hunting or adventuring. I’m searching for a flavor, really an experience, that is almost unattainable.When you bring a wild mushroom into your kitchen, you’re bringing in the forest and you have to respect it. I do my best to always respect the tea as well. Which makes me worry because so many of the places in China where it is grown are threatened by environmental calamities. The soils are depleted. Nevertheless, the optimist in me hopes that tea is resilient. Some of the tea I drink comes from 800-year-old trees. 

In Russia, where mushroom hunting is an age old sacred pastime, parents tie bells on their children to keep them from getting lost. They say that when you walk through the forests during the mushroom season, you hear tinkling, as if the forest is full of fairies. There is something special and unique about tea that when you drink it, a forest comes alive, and it’s full of fairies searching for the pleasurable essences of forest, be it in mushrooms, kicked up leaves, or the taste of a 700-year-old tree that has seen the test of time to give great experiences. 

I imagine things like walking through a forest, 

leaves on the ground

And it just had rained but the rain has stopped.

It’s damp and you walk

And somehow

It’s All in This Tea.

Werner Herzog (upon sipping good tea)