It took a bit of work, but I have identified this tea as third flush Jakseol. When I bought it several weeks ago I was limited in the amount of information at hand, since I am not able to read Korean, but I could tell that it was good quality Korean green tea, grown and produced by the O’Sulloc Company on Jeju (Che-ju) Island, which was enough information to tell me it was what I was looking for. I was quite surprised and pleased to find any respectable Korean tea in a local store, even a large Korean grocery like Paldo World.

As attractive as the bright green tin is, even the company name was a challenge to puzzle out since it only appears in English in the highly stylized logo. But after I identified where the tea came, from I knew I could trust its quality.

The only English on the package says “not fermented green tea,” which didn’t tell me anything useful. Much later, after some comparisons with other tea packages, and some guessing what English to enter into the translator to identify the characters, I was able to translate enough of the package information to tell when in the season it was picked and what kind it was, which was harder than it sounds. I was using Google Translate, which is useful, but I couldn’t type in the Korean characters, and while the translations from English show the Romanizations it wouldn’t translate them the other direction.

The two large characters in the middle left of the package front, under the Sulloc-Cha logo and company name, are Jak-seol (Jakseol), which is a type of Korean green tea, often referred to as “Sparrow’s Tongue” due to its appearance. 중제 means third picking, or third flush, sometimes written Jung-jak (중작), and in the case of this package, the Romanization is “Jeung Je.” (The second character is “third;” the first is jung, or jeung, which translates as “during,” which shows how ineffective literal translation is, in this case.) The third pick of Jakseol is in the later part of June, so this is last year’s tea.

That was a lot of wrangling with language to come up with little actual information, but what is more important is that this is very delicious tea. I’ve made it at home, prepared in a Korean black stoneware tea set. I have also been drinking it fairly often in a Korean celadon cup/infuser set at work, which is quite pleasant.

I need to find the proper Korean name for those sets. They’re not at all like a Chinese gaiwan, although I’ve seen people call them that, and they’re not just a cup or mug. They’re very efficient devices for brewing and drinking Korean green teas. for the first infusion I pour boiling water into the empty mug part and then insert the infuser with the tea in it after the water is around 160-170 degrees (fahrenheit).

Averaging about 3″ in diameter and 10″ long, the individual logs of charcoal are way too large to fit into the tea stove, but charcoal is quite brittle and easy to break into smaller, usable pieces. I might also add a cautionary note that this type of charcoal can also be quite sharp. After bleeding a little onto the shards I more sensibly used an ax for the rest of the task, rather than my bare hands.

I can’t imagine trying to light little pieces of charcoal within the very small burning chamber inside of the tea stove. The charcoal would be almost impossible to reach with a flame. A propane torch might work for this, but I wouldn’t want to apply that sort of heat that close to the sides of the clay stove. Plus that type of tool, commonly used for soldering copper water pipes, just doesn’t have the right aesthetic for use in preparing tea. In any case, it’s considerably easier and more efficient to light the charcoal over a flame and then transfer the coals into the stove once they’ve established a stable level of burning. I used a butane-fueled, single-burner hob for this purpose, with a barbecue grate placed over the flame to contain the charcoal pieces. The one thing I found a little disconcerting during the lighting process was that the charcoal spewed quite a lot of sparks as it caught. I lit the charcoal outside so that I didn’t distribute sparks and ash all over my living room. Once I had placed the burning coals into the tea stove with a pair of brass charcoal chopsticks, I brought the stove into the house to use and the fuel burned completely cleanly, without sparks or ash, and I let them catch sufficiently so that there was no danger of them threatening to go out while I was using the stove to heat the kettle of water.

Alternately, a gas stove would work for the lighting stage, although even if my stove were gas intead of electric I think I’d still rather have this phase take place outside of the house. I also suspect that different charcoal types vary considerably in respect to sparks, smoke and ash. I’ll get some additional types and test them at some point.

I would hope that everyone already understands that unlike this type of charcoal, briquets are toxic and dangerous. Using them in any form to heat water for tea, or inside of a building is foolhardy and potentially deadly. This is due to the non-charcoal stuff they’re treated with to make them catch more easily in a barbecue (not that they do this without tons of lighting fluid anyway). But pure, plant-based charcoal is not poisonous. If it were, you would certainly never hear of anyone using it to purify water for tea or to neutralize amonia in fish tanks. It’s evidently not even repellent to curious cat noses. Pure charcoal is actually kind of a nice substance, clean burning and pleasant. I did not have the least bit of trouble with smoke, ash or a bad scent after I brought the burning coals inside.

Last weekend the Northwest Tea Festival was a little sparse, but in its inaugural year it was about the size I expected it to be. Festival attendance looked pretty good on Saturday while I was there and most of the booths were getting a fair amount of attention. We paid the $5 donation to the festival and were given the festival bags, containing a nice white ceramic tasting cup, a few samples of the sponsor’s products and some promotional leaflets. The two films and all of the event programming were centered around tea and worldwide traditional tea cultures, so I was a little surprised to see so many flavored blends and tisanes offered as tasting samples in the booths and in the donor bags. I prefer learning about and drinking pure teas from specific cultural traditions, thus a lot of what was offered held little interest for me.

It was notable that the retailer serving the most samples and selling the most product was SA Japanese Green Teas. I would like to think that this was because theirs were the more traditional and clearly identified teas, although it may just be that Japan and green teas are especially popular right now. I was very impressed by a taste of their award-winning genmaicha, a more wonderfully aromatic and rich brew than any other genmaicha I have tasted. I purchased the last of the loose leaf cans they had available and also bought some of their loose leaf hojicha.

The tasting room – essentially a row of tables with stools behind a curtain – ran explanatory and useful classroom-styled tastings throughout the day. The tasting that I sat in on was hosted by Barnes & Watson Fine Teas and consisted of three different oolongs: a Taiwanese Baojhong, a “Formosa” Oolong (also from Taiwan) and a Rou Gui (Cinnamon) Oolong from Wu Yi Mountain, Fujian Province in China.

The most outstanding experience of the festival was the opportunity to observe a Korean Tea Ceremony demonstration by Tea Master Yoon Hee Kim. Preceding the ceremony itself she gave an incredibly informative talk about the history of tea culture in Korea and its recent re-emergence after periods of suppression under Japanese occupation and near decimation of the tea fields during the Korean War. The ceremony itself, called Panyaro in Korean, is notably different from Chanoyu, the much more well known Japanese tea ceremony. In one of those odd and frequent synchronicities I had been reading about Korean tea culture over the past few weeks so I was particularly fascinated with the lecture and demonstration. Yoon Hee Kim is also a wonderful photographer. Some of her work was on display in one section of the festival’s wall space. A more extensive look at her work can be found on her website.

I hope that the festival organizers were pleased with the turnout and the feedback. I would say that overall they did a pretty good job of assembling and presenting the event. I expect even greater things out of the second annual festival next year.

In addition to their own specific form of the tea ceremony, the Koreans have a centuries-old tradition of drinking tisanes prepared with fruits, spices and leaves. One of these, which I discovered in a Korean grocery store, is sujeonggwa (수정과, 水正果), sometimes spelled “soojunggwa” and other ways. It is made from ginger, cinnamon, sugar, dried persimmon and pine nuts. The dried form that I purchased comes in small packets of powdered mixture which dissolve into boiling water, producing a lovely, sweet flavored and refreshing beverage. The chewy, sweet whole pine nuts float on the surface of the yellow-orange liquor. The English post-export ingredients sticker on the box does not list persimmon, but since this particular tea is a standard in Korean cuisine, and since persimmons are pictured prominently on the box, I am pretty certain of its inclusion. More information is available from the manufacturer (primarily in Korean).

Here is a one recipe for making it from scratch, and here is another.

The quote that follows, from an article on the importance of the seasons in Korean tea drinking, in the Japanese magazine Kateigaho, is an explanation of the socio-political factors that affected the history of tea traditions in Korea:

Why haven’t green and black teas steeped with leaves of Camellia sinensis taken hold in Korea as they have in neighboring China and Japan? Their absence stems from Confucianism’s infiltration in the 14th century. According to Korea’s oldest history book, Samguk Sagi (Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms), the custom of drinking tea spread to Korea from China together with Buddhism.

During the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910), however, Confucianism became Korea’s national religion and tea production, which had been intimately linked to Buddhist temples, disappeared as Buddhism fell into decline. From then on, Koreans applied their health knowledge to developing teas using medicinal ingredients. Along with Confucianist principles such as respecting one’s elders, the concept “food is medicine” became firmly ensconced in the minds of the Korean people, and medicinal teas became a staple.

The wikipedia article on Korean tea is also a good source for additional information.