"Moar Tea For Me" Rediscovered

I just remembered that my blog existed thanks to somebody I know who also remembered that her blog existed. I will surely be whoring out about tea occasionally from now on. Time to catch up...

So I used to consume and own a LOT of tea. That was about 3+ years ago. Even then my college roommates got used to me taking up an entire freaking cupboard in our apartment for my loose leaf and teabags. Now I consume so much tea that I could flood my bathtub on a daily basis. However, my tea collection and teaware is expanding all the time. I don't think you can ever fully master tea... not even the Grand Tea Masters can. I will be learning new things about tea for the rest of my life.

Hello, tea. I am going to learn about you forever and ever.

Anyway, this is who I am. I am a film composer who graduated from California State University of Northridge and was then admitted into the USC SMPTV (Scoring For Motion Picture & Television) graduate certificate program, which I politely declined to continue my career. Only 20 people are admitted into this program every year, so you can see that my main passion in life is composing music. However, my second biggest passion is tea.

Tea and music go wonderfully well together. Tea and work go well together. Since I am a musician that means music is my work. I just shotgunned three clay pigeons all at once.

You could see my current tea making set up in the above picture. There will be another one below this paragraph. I LOVE using a Gaiwan because it allows for multiple quick infusions and, thus, very precise tea steeping chemistry. I heat up my filtered water using this over priced kettle from Adagio Teas that I would not recommend purchasing because there are cheaper ones and the temperature control is absolutely a lie. I then pour my water into my ancient looking tea pot (I checked the inside and there isn't a single crack) and measure it with a digital thermometer. By the way, if you are using a thermometer don't let it touch the bottom of the teapot or glass that you are using because it can change the temperature by about 10°F. Once the tea reaches the desired temperature I then pour it into the Gaiwan and do my thing. I usually steep my green teas rather strong. I never steep my teas for 20 seconds in a Gaiwan. That seems crazy to me. The minimum I ever do is 30-40 seconds for my first steep.

Green Kukicha purchased from Tao Of Tea.

This is all I want to cover for my first post in a long time. I'll finish by promoting some good tea websites below:

Tao Of Tea (I order a lot of tea from here. Highly recommended!)

Adagio Teas (PERFECT for beginners)

Verdant Tea

Camellia Sinensis

Tea on Reddit (you can learn so much about tea by discussing it with the reddit /r/tea community. I post here and 14,000 other tea drinkers do as well)