Sip this one in silence

Royally good oolong + the art of a silent tea ceremony.

When good tea meets a great roast

The tea: Royal oolong, sold by T Shop. $65 for 2oz.

10 years ago I joined my friend and tea teacher Theresa Wong on a sourcing trip to Taiwan. For a few days we visited farms in Lugu, a small town in the country’s central mountain range that crests up and down the island like the plates on a stegosaurus’s back. Farmers in the area have shops in town where visitors can sample their teas. We knocked on door after door in search of dong ding (“frozen summit”), a local oolong named after the nearby mountain. Dong ding is quintessential Taiwanese tea, but Theresa had yet to find a batch that spoke to her—until she met this one.

This tea comes from a biodynamic farm, though Theresa’s point of contact is a roaster who buys the finished tea, then applies his own roast. I asked Theresa what made his roasting stand out:

I have a lot of respect for his dedication to quality tea. Roasting is not easy work, and his even more so. Even in his newly roasted teas, it’s not harsh, not edgy…it’s round and dense. You can taste his skill through his tea. His roasting is really one of a kind, and his understanding of what quality tea is like is very important. You can test it by oversteeping the tea. Quality shouldn’t focus only on aroma. It should be about the nuance in taste and how it changes. It should make your body feel good.

I can only agree with her. My notes from a recent session include, “it just builds and builds until it washes over you.”

The source: You couldn’t ask for a better guide than Theresa Wong, who has been working in tea for a long time, first as a seller at Fang Gourmet in Flushing, then since 2014 as the owner of T Shop, a tiny getaway down a long hallway behind a Soho shopping street, right next to a psychic’s studio. She has an excellent eye for quality, and if a tea of hers is expensive, like this one, it still feels like a good value. T Shop specializes in Taiwanese and Chinese teas, but also has a small selection of Korean brews well worth your time. Visit the shop to drink with Theresa if you can, or meet her business partner Hyun Lee, who has a keen sense for great tea as well.

To brew: Take your time with this one. It’s potent, yet subtle; gong fu brewing is a must to taste it at its best. I’m using 6 grams in an 80 milliliter gaiwan (~1g/13ml) with boiling water and short steeps at first, then up to a minute after the third brew. The careful roast comes through with a sauna-like radiant warmth. I get a slight mineral presence in the first few steeps that transitions to caramelized tarte tatin, then hints of butter, rose, and peach juice. Each brew reveals more of these flavors while delivering that classic dong ding character: savory meets sweet; a kind of rocky, sesame seedy robustness that dances around fruits and flowers. True to Theresa’s words, this tea makes my body feel good. Give it space to do its work.

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Deanna Cristobale pouring tea at a silent tea ceremony. This and the following photos are courtesy of Deanna.

Inside a silent tea ceremony

I didn’t know what to expect when I sat down for a silent tea ceremony with Deanna Costabile. Turns out that’s part of the point. Inside the serene Manhattan sound healing studio Official Ritual, five guests and I sat on beanbag cushions in a half-moon around Deanna. She explained she’d be brewing a dong ding oolong for us in the gong fu method over a series of steeps. We’d sit together in silence to let the tea speak for itself. This sounded suspiciously like meditation, which I’ve never been good at, but sure, I can sit and drink tea and shut up about it.

Deanna heated ceramic bowls with water and began rinsing the tea in a rustic side-handle pot. Her movements were slow and practiced. I settled into the rhythm of bowls filling with water, then tea, then more tea as we sipped one steep after another. A few steeps in, I started to relax. I felt like I do halfway through a massage, when I’m used to the pressure of hands on my body and I’m just there, sinking into myself.

I lost track of the number of steeps. After the final brew, Deanna collected and rinsed our bowls, gracefully giving us time to come back to Earth. Guests briefly shared what they thought and how they felt, and then we were done—reunited with our shoes, cell phones, and the stinging winter air.