What Does the Tea Community Mean to You?
Intro
Earlier this year, I spent some time with the brother of an old classmate at our hometown's coffee shop. As we sat out on the front porch, some folks honked and waved at my friend, other patrons walked up chat, one dropped off a flyer, and another came up to share a story. I have been living away from our home island of 10k ppl for most of my adult life, and I was surprised by the degree of offline community that coffee and tea were still facilitating in this semi-rural area. My experience of coffee shops were citadels of urban solitude where one would go to work quietly on your computer or maybe meet to discuss a project.
All this made me remember a photo I had seen online. The graph is based on the American Time Use Survey data. It is saying that people in all age groups our hanging out with their friends less on a daily basis. That means it is indeed becoming less common to loiter with a pal for an hour or two at a cafe, yet where is our time going? Looking at the same database, I found that between 2003 and 2023 Americans supposedly have also come to sleep half an hour more, while leisure time has consistently averaged more than five hours a day. It is not that we are working more, it is that our recreational preferences are changing. I intuitively feel we are scrolling more, posting more, and lurking more. At least, I am. Aren't all of us here?
Whither the Tea Community?
People who are interested in tea do not seem to be going much against the grain in their recreational habits. Over the Summer, I visited Michigan and interviewed five other tea enthusiasts in the Detroit area to get a sense of where and with who they were enjoying tea. The one point everyone could agree on is that there is basically no public offline spaces. Some drank tea with their roommates, others occasionally try to tea-pill house guests, but there was simply no place beyond the front door that they could call an oasis for their tea hobby. They feel it is better on the Coasts, and I remember indeed there were a few spots in Seattle where one could go out to have a pot of Puer or gaiwan some Tieguanyin, yet these spots were few and far between. I am yet to see the hourly bring-your-own-tea tea rooms one can find in Wuhan back home in the States. Maybe there are out there, maybe not.
Tea people are finding their community online. Indeed, I found four interviewees over Discord and one over WeChat. When it comes to online spaces, there does not seem to be a giant top secret dark-web forum that we are missing out on. It is Reddit, Discord, maybe Steepster, and the virtual brewing sessions that these platforms sometimes produce are pretty much all that there is to be had. Community starts and stays online. The new pipeline seems to be: Tiktok/Youtube/Instagram --> Buy a Gaiwan --> Reddit --> Discord. Community discussion online is understandably most focused on 1. where to buy tea 2. which teas to buy 3. how to best brew said teas. Interestingly, there does not seem to be much interest in setting up offline meet-ups. Two interviewees told me they knew of at least one other online tea-lover in the same area, yet have never wanted to share some cha in person. Were the offline weekend anime/cosplay meet-ups that I remember developing out of various online forums simply the sort of thing that only happens when one is young, or is there now less desire to make online friends into offline friends?
Something else that I always cherished about weebs was the creative dimension of a con. Many could draw, about half would cosplay, most could improv something at a fan panel, and almost everyone enjoyed the glomp circle more than they should have. It was not a community purely about consumption. Nor is the tea community, per se. Through a WWoofer I got learn about the League of US Tea Growers, and I met a young farmer growing herbal teas in Western Michigan. There are hobbyists out there that are growing tea. I also came to learn that there are people out there trying to facilitate wet storage in Midwest America, and water nerds who apparently were more awake than I was in chemistry class. Closest to my heart, there are also heroes out there doing Sprite cold brews. There is plenty of creative stuff to be found, yet I have always felt like most of the tea discussion I scroll past is still consumption-oriented discussion, and that is coming from a r/LivingMas subscriber.
Did Our Ancestors Enjoy Tea Better?
No. I don't think so. In the first place, those who came before us had less access to the quantity and variety of tea than your average Lipton enjoyer. Robespierre and his fellow Jacobin Club members were probably not drinking any gyok, nor did the average farmer in China who sipped down tea in the last millennium have to agonize much over which Dancong to add to their cart. As for quality, be assured that there were always a few that wanted everyone to know that they were drinking only the best. Lu Yu is the patron saint of tea and he was the OG gate-keeper. Enjoy the following passage from the sixth section of the Classic of Tea:
"[These plebs] mix tea with scallions (葱), ginger (姜), dates(枣), mandarin peels (桔皮), dogwood (茱萸), mint (薄荷) and other things. They overbrew it (煮之百沸), or let it get weak (或扬令滑), or maybe even brew off the bubbles (或煮去沫). Such abominations are no better than ditch water, (斯沟渠间弃水耳)，yet such are the customs (而习俗不已). Bah! There is fineness in all the ten thousand things brought forth by Heaven, yet in the doings of man one finds a preference for that which is easy and shallow(于戏！天育万物皆有至妙，人之所工，但猎浅易)."
Just as long as there has been a curiosity to enjoy tea better, there have been those who want to sell the correct answer. Lu Yu and his merchant patrons were such sellers; Imperial courts were satisfied customers for more than a thousand years. They alone had the earliest picked tea from the right mountain, and could brew it up in the finest silver or porcelain vessel, accompanied by tasteful incense and rare flowers. Talk about a consumption-oriented hobby. The prestige of doing it right necessitated dabbing on the uninitiated. Centuries after Lu Yu was done complaining, such dabbing was shown in a famous passage of the Dream of the Red Chamber where Granny Liu is shown to be a country bumpkin for not appreciating the delicacte taste of Liu'an Guapian; In another passage of the same book, when Bao-yu goes to visit his dying servent, he cannot recognize the substance called "tea" in her iron kettle. The young master knew only the choicest of bud. Bah! The history of hitherto tea hobbyists is the history of snobs trying to elevate hot leaf water and hype the yum-yums that only their connection has on tap.
How Can We, the Chosen, the Elect, the Daily Sippers, Tea Differently？
In the first place, the easier it becomes to get though the door, to learn more about tea as a plant, a crop, an object of storage, and a nutritional input, the more fun and creative the conversations can be. The internet is already doing that, and I for one will do nothing but kiss the feet of our benevolent corporate overlords that let us meme or effort-post on here for free.
Tea should also always be a vehicle for socializing as much as the subject of conversation. This is really a point more for offline spaces rather than online forums. Nothing has ever made me want to summon the up the ghost of Tan Houlan and turn her loose on my fellow enthusiasts more than the tiresome spectacle of trading poetic descriptions for each infusion of Puer at a Chinese tea house, followed by the host revealing a new detail about why the cake is actually so special and criminally underappreciated by the fools who fail to pass through her doors and cough up 200 RMB for a taste. Here, I cite a rather extreme example. Nonetheless, I think more tea lovers would want to do online or offline brewing sessions together if they do not feel obligated to say too much, or felt worried that they would fail to correctly identify the nuance that is so obviously there. Wouldn't it be more fun to tea and watch, tea and game, tea and gossip, tea and chill?
My tongue-burnt brethren, would it not also be fun to introduce some completely yellowed out longjing to perfectly microwaved tap water, rather than toss the innocent leaves in the trash? Would it not be amusing to plant some Qilan in the Carolinas or some Dabai by the window of your flat overlooking the Danube? Would you not be entertained to try Siberian storage heicha or the finest Alabaman Oolong? It is up to us to make it happen. If we are to devote five hours a day to something other than wage slavery, and make some of that something about tea, then it is at the altar of fun facts and dubious brewing instructions that we must worship.