“Tea making is easy”, that was the culture I walked into more than a decade ago in Taiwan. This was an encouraging idea. It seemed simple. I didn’t yet know what all the tools were — all the why’s and wherefore’s.
Learning a skill in a foreign language is an interesting game. It requires close observation and lots of trial and error. Fortunately youtube wasn’t too active on Pu Erh tea at the time and so there was no chance of short cutting the process. My teacher didn’t teach brewing technique but if you spent enough hours watching him make tea you could prick up some of the basics. This provided a great scaffold upon which to place my own experience and realizations. Anyone can be taught to make tea, but in order to make great tea, the elements of tea brewing have to be internalized and transmuted into individual technique.
My teacher would not advise specific techniques in tea brewing. “There is, after all, no right way to make tea, there is just what works for you” he would say. Until the point at which you are satisfied with the result, the experimenting and tweaking goes on. This process, continues on for me. The endless pursuit of the perfect cup of tea has sustained my inquiries into the art/Way of tea. It is perhaps a trivial to spend one’s life, but in some ways that is exactly the point.
In China we say that the way you do the small things in life reflect how you do everything else. Following this strain. The way you make each cup of tea is a reflection of all that you are, all that you have been and all that you will become. It is also good for the throat and the belly.