Level 2: Advanced Tea Craft For Gentlemen

this episode of the modern rogue brought to you by nordvpn head on over to nordvpn.com rogue sign up for a huge discount on two years plus get a bonus gift and if you don't like it you can say baxi's 30-day free trial in your face you're gonna love it dude sohan you did a fantastic job of teaching us i think it's all in our brains now we remember everything jason this is called a what uh the shenzhou oh yeah yeah this this knife is called the g-knife okay uh the this scrapey doodle scrapy daddle old grandpa's tin pot yep that's called the the the the pot the pot the pond potter potter i think we're ready for the advanced lesson let's do it all right everyone we're back here at the west china tea house with sohan so hunt thank you so much for coming back last time we learned all of the basics about tea and how to drink it what to look for all the tools and everything so i think we're ready to go to the next level and by the next level what we mean is we want to look like awesome badasses of tea knowledge because between you and me i suspect we may have low tea you said we get one right that's your one for today okay can i throw the frog at you do i get one of those i bet that would wreck him i want to learn all of the cool back story i want to be able to sit here and and and just know more what do you got first thing that you need to know to really drink tea is ingesting liquids most people can do this babies learn how to do this very very basic skill but make sure if you're showing up to tea house that you can actually drink liquids with your mouth that's super super important yeah yeah beyond that yep relax people think tea tea ceremony wait a minute so so i i've been i've been sitting here on my knees this whole time yeah you can chill you can wean back i'm gonna see i figured this was more like a hookah lounge kind of vibe but this wouldn't be rude if you're serving tea to your chinese mother-in-law on your wedding night don't do that okay but at a tea house when people are chilling at this tea house for sure and at a like a casualty house you can sit however is comfortable if he takes his pants off use the tina okay there you go that's when you can throw the frog yeah but you know people see this and they're like oh you know formal like ceremony formal that's japan this is chinese tea culture japanese t-ceremony is very very formal you do sit on your knees you even have a section at the end where you roll onto your butt so that you don't stand up and then fall over because there's no blood new eggs chinese tea service we want to be comfortable we want to enjoy the tea each other's company so that's the main thing that said there are some badass little tricks first of all in chinese tea culture do you serve your own tea or or exclusively if you're at a tea house it's so that you are being served tea you can do both sometimes you know i'll come back i know what he's doing he's doing the thing where he's waking up the uh the the pottery exactly yeah see good job you weren't paying me yeah you were paying great attention so uh it depends where you are uh china is huge sometimes i'll come back from china and people be like so how's the weather in china in america you know what i mean so there's different oh you're from texas do you know edgar i actually do know edgar though but yeah but there's there's all kinds of different expressions of tea culture all throughout china and you know where i lived in chengdu for three years people will drink their own tea this a tea house is outside you're sitting at bamboo chairs and tables you're playing mahjong you're smoking cigarettes you're getting your ears cleaned by a dude uh you know in the public square and you're just you're sitting there and you've got your guy walking one of those things stood out in my mind i'm gonna put the brakes there you just have guys roaming around cleaning your ears it's a thing they've got their little clapper thing so you know they're an ear cleaner and they come around and they've got their little like it's like you know a chef unrolls their little chef knife thing they've got a little bit of room to confess right now it's really cool if y'all ever want to do a china episode let me know i'll take you to chengdu and we can see yeah you can get your ears cleaned while you drink i mean we're all here let's just go yeah it's really really soothing but yeah you know that's chengdu sichuanese tea culture very chill chilling out drinking tea drinking straight from your gaiwan like that you know where people would do this is in the southeast of china is where this practice of serving tea from these little vessels into these little cups gongfucha as we know it became really popular and it spread all over china and it did exist in imperial china but it kind of got you know pushed to the side in the cultural revolution they're getting rid of a lot of chinese culture but it persisted in southeast china and that's where this practice comes from and they don't really do that at a ts they do it at their homes and they would do it at a tea shop if you go to a tea shop you can sample stuff and there's someone there but also i once went into a hardware store in chaozhou where this practice kind of originates and uh they were drinking tea at the hardware store and i went into pipe fitting and i walked in they were like hey you want to drink tea with us i sat down drank tea with them for an hour and a half left didn't get my pipe fitting they didn't say anything i forgot that's just the it's the fabric of life in the parts of china and the southeast of china where they do this it is the fabric of life they do it everywhere is there any stated or implied status uh based on who's serving or any of that no okay so just in this situation you could have just like hey give me that here we go it's really about equality and friendship and uh just uh bringing the community together it sounds like there's chai tea arts which is much more formal but it emerges from the folk practice that we're doing here that's where it really comes from is people hanging out and people will do that in child joe you've got a bunch of people sitting around usually at grandma grandpa they've got the charcoal stove they're shouting at each other drinking tea one person's got their bag of tea and they're making tea and then they switch and then someone else is making tea for everybody else and so the server you know their job is to serve but they're not like a waiter they're also the expert they're the master of the what's going on they're providing the service to people so there's kind of this dual role but they're definitely not above anybody and no one's above anybody else when i'm serving i'm going to serve in this direction because that's a welcoming gesture so there's your first little tip if someone starts serving backwards they want you to leave really this this is bringing people in a very subtle way of saying all right tea service is ending serving the other way so that's got it got it good one and i'm gonna go ahead and start our tea and i've got a little treat for y'all i'm gonna crack this guy here this is a tong of dragon bro the tea we're gonna make today is called dragon bro i wanna show you what it looks like it sounded like you said a tongue of dragon bro our name for it you got to unlock that at level 16. yeah it's finally opened with two fists coming together exactly so you were saying that we have little discs of t in here called that's right exactly bing so t was used as currency and still is along an ancient trade route called the chama gu dao the ancient tea horse road and it comes like this they'll pack cakes of tea that are pressed into exactly 357 modern grams each into these bamboo tongs is what it's called it's a stack of seven you'll get to see what it looks like in a second and we actually needed to open a new one so you all came on the right day and it's all sealed with bamboo and they've been doing it this way for hundreds of how many servings are in here there are seven cakes times uh you know about 13 ounces and say 72 servings good question thanks brian for the watermelon watermelon just put a bunch of this on so like more than 500. wow more than look at that fast math fast arithmetic and like you said this has been done like this for hundreds of years and hundreds probably up in the thousands the plus years that they've been doing this and this was the chinese government produced tea it would press them in these cakes trade them as currency for horses along this ancient trade route on the road the tea would age and start to ferment and get earthy and funky think of it like like the way a cigar ferments like composting you know not like alcohol or yogurt or something but dry fermentation so it's like breaking down plant matter and that's where it gets the earthy taste that we associate with ht and so people would trade this for horses one being 357 grams seven beings is a tongue 12 tongs is the gen that's where the horse one of the things with whiskey even though you're only getting like a bit of a smoke from the pete from the island of wherever it was in scotland or whatever you're actually experiencing a geographical location tea comes in from a certain place and you knew it made the journey and it picked up certain aromas and everything the whole way it went there well it's fascinating to me how one of the things about whiskey for instance is the consistency and trying to keep the same flavor profile in a barrel but with tea yeah you do want consistency of the blend but it's very dynamic in that as it ages it changes because you're not actually making the drink unlike whiskey it's set i guess uh whereas with this it's uh you can oxidize further there's a lot of different variations even among the infinite variations exactly you actually hit on something really key there whiskey wine they're liquid when you get them all the flavors that are going to be in that bottle are already there and it doesn't matter who pours it out it's going to be there you let them let it aerate and you let it breathe and then that's there for the most part tea is solid and you have to make it liquid and how you do that is going to have a profound effect on the finished product imagine if in wine culture there was a step where you had to turn the wine into wine how elaborate it would be how many different little tools you would have and how much training someone would have in that art that's what this is for tea and we're talking about everything from timing to i assume there is something to the technique of how you use the knife too i noticed that you carved out fairly large chunks of of this tea and it looked uh from what we learned last time that i'm assuming this is a black tea that's been heavily oxidized this is a puerte it's its own category it's a hey cha so it's been oxidized but it's been fermented which is the important step got it yeah so in addition to being oxidized it's a chemical process it's been fermented microbial process this is what it looks like when we've been chewing on it i like to open it with my knife like so that was very astute of you you can see there's a divot here the way that they press these is with a stone they wrap it in a sack they take a 15 kilogram stone they put it on top of the t in the sack they stand up on it rock around let it sit there and it gets this called stone pressed poir this is a stone pressed cake so i like to come in from the side like this and break it like that and i'm going to use my hands so i don't stab myself and break it and then lift up a flake like that that way i leave the leaves intact in that case you don't have the weaves themselves getting broken a lot of care has been put into making sure these leaves stay full why do you want the leaves stay whole it's like the pepper in the pepper grinder and the pepper and the pepper shaker when the leaves break you get little fragments it oxidizes faster it's just lower quality tea the grating of tea is the more hole the leaf the higher the gravy yeah there is a reason they call it fresh cracked pepper no yeah it's like totally you yeah so when you're drinking tea in a tea house or in someone's home here is a fun trick for you to do beyond just being able to drink liquids if we're hanging out here for hours and hours like you do in you know normal life we weren't filming a show we'd be here for hours and hours drinking dozens of little cups of tea if you were to say thank you every time and i would just say you're welcome every time that's all we'd be saying and so they have a little a fancy little trick here i'm going to rinse y'all's cups first and then show you this fancy little trick when you're at a tea house in someone's home even at a chinese restaurant if you do this trick you will look like you know a lot about chinese culture whether you look like a badass or not that's subjective but you will look like you know what you're doing and that is when i serve the tea right next to your cup you're gonna tap your fingers like that here i'll get it ready for you i'll set you up for it okay number of fingers just one two two two fingers is fine i mean no no difference right or left hand or no difference right or left hand depending on who you ask some people say one finger is for someone younger than you two fingers is someone your age three fingers someone older than you knuckles is for your teacher you know or someone you know that you're showing respect to they don't do that in mainland china as much anymore because of communism so they're not into the confusion that's right that's right because that would be disrespectful and it would it would imply one entity has authority over the other yeah if you do it wrong though does someone get murdered or something like that depends who you're having tea with you know like i said you're not gonna offend anyone's ancestors here we're just trying to have fun and like show out so the tap is kind of a way of helping us do that because then i don't have to have this thank you you're welcome thank you you're welcome it's very subtle and so i'll be serving your tea you don't even have to stop talking i'm going to serve you and you can tap right by your cup and the where this originates there's a story there's a cute story for this a lot of cute stories and tea there you go ready ready yep ready ready ready as soon as you yeah bam you can do it while i'm doing it too oh really style choice style choice boom nailed it great job guys so the story for this is that during the ming dynasty an emperor wanted to go and be among his subjects but not know that them not know he was emperor so that he would be treated like a normal person undercover boss exactly so he was walking around and he had his body guards with him because obviously he's got to have his body guards he was walking around doing you know stuff they went to a tea house and he was dressed as the manservant of his bodyguards and so in character as the manservant of his bodyguards he served tea to one of his bodyguards and it's such a great honor to be served tea by the emperor if they were at court that bodyguard would have to kowtow which means you get down in your hands and knees and you touch your forehead to the ground twice but obviously he would blow the emperor's cover if he did that so right next to his cuff where only the emperor would be looking he tapped his fingers to simulate the kowtow because when you're pouring tea for someone you have to look at their cup if you don't you spill their tea oh that's awesome it's really classy this typifies what the chinese think is classy and like elegant it's like subtle and restrained so from our previous episode i got the impression that that one-handed two-handed however you want to hold it seems to be fine if you want to be really fancy three fingers two on the this body slash mouth of the cup and then one little finger underneath and if you want to be extra fancy you can put these two here so it's bad form to do it like brian does jaeger where you just put it on the table yeah yeah and then shoot it back like that correct yeah that would people would be so entertained he's good at that i mean it's hot if you're down to do it it's gonna be huge in china man yeah oh this is a very different flavor than that green tea this is a 2010 and it's the same dude who makes this tea this is by lee shulin same guy who made the last two that you had same style of tea but the same different sub category we the both times we've had to rt yeah first was shang pua the unfermented style this is shupur the fermented style and this is age this from 2010 the older it gets the more valuable it is people buy these cakes they put them away they're special humidors just for them they're called pumador who are humidors and people will that's their whole job they'll just buy tea speculate in it save it age it 15 20 years and then make a killing selling it all off what's phenomenal is since we've already gone through one journey with the green tea i know we're just now ramping up and it's already very potent and not bitter but just very rich earthy flavor yes yeah absolutely there are people whose entire interest in tea centers around different vintages and different mountains of poor and that's all they care about they don't drink gouang and they don't drink white tea so specific oh yeah oh yeah it's a lot like beer nerds or or again whiskeys yep you know because you can tell if you're an aficionado you can say oh this one's from the highlands this one is spay side could you get that uh a druit at uh determining what type of tea it was that you could say oh this is from this mountain oh yeah are there somalias that can just just sip a tea and tell you what region it's from oh yeah i mean there are people who get formally trained in that there's an art they don't obviously not call them somalia's in china but it's uh there's an art called ping cha we actually taught that we did a certification course for the formal style tea service chai with yao yao who is from hangzhou she actually studied this in a school in beijing she studied the formal style king cha is a formal art dedicated and it's almost like a science it's what tea tasters tea buyers will do just the way a coffee taster will go and buy coffee for a company they'll go and they identify all the notes and the flavors and there's a formal way of tasting it with a little spoon and everything and yes absolutely we even play a game at this tea house where if someone who works here comes in and there's a tea being served you don't get to be told what it is you have to guess that's awesome so i am certain that traditionally the water was boiled by fire and so on but now we live in a different age the pot that you're using to heat this you probably choose a specific number for the temperature is there is there an established right temperature that tea should be like with barbecue yeah exactly i actually don't choose the temperature the temperature is always 100 degrees celsius i don't use temperature control kettles myself uh because if you buy a bag of tea here it will have a temperature on it that is a guideline what i'm really doing is adjusting the temperature for each steeping depending on whether i want the tea stronger or softer so those numerical temperatures are good for if you're trying to follow a recipe and not mess it up if you want to be really good at serving tea you develop an organic sense refilling the water smelling the leaves and deciding how to steep the tea based on that this is the performative aspect that we were talking about you are you are performing based on your timing of of when it's time to deliver yeah there is an element of precision to all of this because you only steep the leaves for a very short amount of time i know there's no ritual to it but it all still is very precise absolutely and you know looking at the word what is gong fucha well cha means tea and gongfu we actually do say that word in english all the time but we pronounce it kung fu and that word was introduced to the english language by bruce lee and it refers in english to the chinese martial arts but it doesn't really mean that martial arts are called wushu martial arts in chinese gongfu which is how it's really pronounced means skill acquired through mindful practice in anything like knife skills you see someone with their knives that's their gongfu or like hammering a nail have you ever seen like a carpenter just drive a nail with one stroke yep it's cool it's amazing and then i'm there i'm not a professional carpenter i'm like tap tap tap tap tap it's going sideways i'm bending it whatever there's nothing that the master carpenter can say to the apprentice carpenter that will give them the skill of driving a nail with one stroke they can tell them how to hold the hammer how to aim how to breathe but that student is going to have to just drive thousands of nails mindfully and eventually they will cultivate the skill the gongfu of that's what this practice is all about so at this point you did the initial wash and then we are now on our third step it is getting intense is it going to get more intense after this or are we about to ride the the down down wave it could get more intense yeah we have not we have not reached the zenith here for it it's gotten noticeably darker yeah yeah yeah yeah when jason came in i was i was like so you guys did a show about whiskey and i was like people who like whiskey tend to like this tea we think of tea as you know that's the western perspective on tea and there's all kinds of politics behind that but in china there's all kinds of different ways of expressing tea culture and you've got you know really classic tea culture in china it's like grandpa smoking and shouting and drinking tea right that's like classic chinese grandpa playing paizo yeah playing mahjong or go or whatever and just hanging out and drinking strong strong teeth especially in child joe they'll take like these phoenix oolongs they use these tiny little teapots and they'll jam it in with their thumb and just get as many leaves as they can in there and they're just getting you know high off of this tea because they're making it so so so strong so with whiskey oftentimes it's it's culturally easy and socially nice to just have something in your hand and i will oftentimes just just nose a whiskey for the entire evening maybe not even drink the entire thing is there sort of an upper limit of no nosing where it's like are you gonna drink that or not no you are allowed to drink tea at whatever pace you want when i am doing this style of tea service that's acceptable because i have this my gong dal bae remember in the last episode we had that glass pitcher i'm exchanging my glass picture for this handmade long handle gong dabe which is a by made by liangtu studio in jing hong i just like it it's mine it's my personal one and because i'm using this i'm doing a kind of a modified taiwanese style of gongfucha right now if i was doing chaozhou style gongfucha i wouldn't be able to serve the next round of tea until everyone had finished got it right now we're simulating the more relaxed you know maybe where like you talked about playing mahjong or arguing uh probably not politics uh nobody argues politics in china that's the exact same never comes up so this one should be pretty intense oh yeah you know i can decide how strong it is if y'all were getting like a little red in the face and i was like i should dial it back for these guys this is so dark it looks like like steak sauce i mean it looks like uh folger's crystals uh coffee at this point i'm excited oh and that dark rich earthy taste when people come in and they're like i want to quit drinking coffee i can't drink coffee anymore what do we want me to drink i'd say buy a cake of this tea put it on your kitchen table get a little gaiwan and every morning just crack a chunk off throw it in there pour some boiling water on it you can drink it all day and this is what i recommend to people who don't want to drink coffee ooh that's another good question let's say we come to a tea house like this when i go to a restaurant i would never say hey can i have some of whatever your food is that you sell and to take home so i can have it whenever i want but at a tea house is it expected that i might really enjoy this uh and and ask you know hey could i buy some of this to take home oh that's like the whole deal okay got it at least here at this tea house in china you go to you know most of the time in china when you go to a business and you're drinking tea in the business traditionally it would be a tea shop where actually the tea service is free they're just hanging out drinking tea and you're just getting to try stuff and then you buy stuff and bring it home and that's kind of like our bread and butter here is mostly people going on the website buying tea and then people coming in how do they know what they like they come and they drink it here they hang out they get into tea so what we're all about doing is helping people become connoisseurs of tea helping people to explore tea culture explore this very like broad and sometimes intimidating world of tea bringing it down to earth democratizing it so people can really appreciate and people come in here they'll be 19 year old you know ut student but they've gotten into tea and they're like i want a shang power and i want it to be from the highest patch on the mountain and i want it to have you know this age range and they're very sophisticated they develop a very sophisticated taste of tea it happens over time over many senses now that that invites a new question like uh 22 year old uh student at ut down the road comes in starts using your free wi-fi keeps ordering tea and pays no it treats this like a starbucks in other words uh good move or jerk move no that's fine yeah that's cool i mean they're they're here they're patronizing the business and people use tea in all kinds of different ways most of the time people come in and they don't know what we do here there's a lot of explaining and we would you have people sit at that front of house table that big round table and it's five dollars per person per pot and it's a very low barrier to entry you can sit down and someone will serve you tea and everyone around you drinking the same tea and you're gonna meet all these people that you didn't know because they're all doing the same thing you are if someone is renting a tea set and serving themselves tea and they want to co-work we have a members section you know we have members at this tf it's a membership model tea house and so our members can come here and co-work and so it's totally fine when someone's serving ut it's polite to not be on a device but when if you're just showing and serving yourself to you can do whatever you want okay so right now uh i think i'm ahead of jason i would like more tea is it rude for me to you know [Music] how do you signal that you want more tea you have an empty cup if you have an empty cup that means that you want more tea if you don't want more tea you can leave your cup full you can cover it when i come by to serve it or you can turn it upside down something that i would i would think would be so rude you know like get out of here yeah but i guess no no modern chinese culture is very down to earth people like i said people think it's like super polite that's japan china is really really down to earth and chill like instead of saying thank you we reduce it to this very simple gesture so that it's you know even less obsequious if someone wanted to start getting into tea oh what's a good starter set yeah okay yeah so uh on our website we've got a starter set that's made out of this kind of clay this mutton fat jade porcelain that we're using here as long as it has a vessel where you can have the leaves and the water together and then you can separate them and that can either be like a teapot where you're pouring the water out and the leaves stay in there it could be a strainer basket something like that it could be a gaiwan like i was using in the last episode but you can check out our website we've got them there's all kinds of little starter sets out there if you really want to do gongfucha then you're going to want either a teapot or a gai one you want it to be small you don't want it to be huge because then you're going to use a ton of tea and you know you want to make small concentrated brews and you want to have if you want to serve the tea and not just drink it by yourself then you're going to want a vessel to decant it into like a gong da bay and pour it out of if that's a gravy boat that's fine you can use a gravy i've used a gravy boat to serve tea sometimes i'm at grandma's house and you know that's what just now occurred to me that's why we're able to steep the tea for such a short amount of time is because it's so concentrated and there's so little of it at a time we're not doing the southern belle thing of a big jar sitting on the windowsill right and that's why we can sit and do it all day long and drink these little cups well i suddenly know what gifts i'm gonna buy people with a link to the episode yeah yeah yeah we need a promo code now uh uh oh my god uh this has been amazing i i would ask for more but we have to wait for the water [Laughter] you're not gonna make a t-pun you got one when the pressure's on come on dude you're mister i'm done jason teasing our hosts jason murphy you know how sometimes people do responsible stuff like no shave november where they raise awareness for a campaign or whatever i'm familiar i want to raise awareness of irresponsibility on the internet by being wildly inappropriate in just don't worry about it july i'm afraid of where this is going guess how many wi-fi's i signed up on how many all of them everywhere i go i just sign up on any wi-fi i go to all my institutions so that way anybody knows exactly where i bank or where my loans are from what my spending habits are oh my god why you should see the targeted ads i'm getting now oh that's a bad thing i've stopped closing the door when i poop i just want the whole just forget about it july you know what i barely put on clothes today you need to use nord you don't understand man i'm seeing the real world it's like that moment when rowdy roddy piper puts on the glasses and he sees that the world is all ads i get to see all of the ends you're not supposed to embrace that that's all there's so many ads and that's targeted it's like they know everywhere i've been that's bad you don't want them they knowing all of your secrets and business seeing you poop with the door open you don't do that don't poop with the door open we've talked about this nordvpn virtual private network set up for it super complicated sounds difficult sounds expensive sounds like trouble it's not it's just cheap don't worry about it july man hey you want my ip i'll write it down i don't no no no no no no no no no you need you need like a give me my social security number as well you need to put up nord yep between you and literally everything else they don't keep track of your logs yeah they're a military-grade encryption it's really easy to use you can use it on multiple devices i bet they would turn it over to anybody who asked name one country with no extradition papers that they're located in they're in panama oh dear wow that would be hard to get that information that's right you know what you've convinced me i no longer am going to irresponsibly give out all of my information to everyone instead i'm going to enjoy the privacy the security the simplicity at a huge discount two years of nordvpn plus a bonus gift and 30 days of backseas by going to nordvpn.com rogue but i'm going to spell it right r-o-g-u-e so that we get credit for the sale and i am protected nord vpn is here to chew bubblegum and protect your information how much bubblegum do they have they're all out offer and link in the description below that's my dog quinn she just showed up apparently throw me off my game focusing on t what do i say next dog and i was just looking i was like by the way

Channel: The Modern Rogue

Views: 137,817

Keywords: modern rogue, brian brushwood, jason murphy

Id: ixlOebAxhbI

Length: 30min 2sec (1802 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021