The Art of Drinking Tea for a Comfortable Body

This is the thirty-second article in my "Tea on Paper" series. Click to read more articles from "Tea on Paper".

This article is full of experience, my personal feelings and perceptions, no data. "Scientific tea drinkers" please exit reading promptly!

Tea that makes the body comfortable should have a comfortable taste, smooth body sensation, and a lingering aftertaste.

Many times, I don't pay much attention to the taste when drinking tea; I focus on the overall feeling of the tea. Often, when I taste tea with friends and find it good, they ask about the taste, and only then do I carefully notice sweetness, astringency, aftertaste, and other specific flavors. This overall feeling is a sense of imagery. The first time I mentioned imagery was in an article I wrote in 2016, "Tea on Paper XIV: Ten Indicators of Ancient Tree Ripe Pu-erh". Today, I will expand on it here.

Moss on tea tree

One: Imagery.

Imagery is the overall feeling this tea gives us. It's like a young man seeing a girl and falling in love at first sight. He might not even know her name, having only seen her once on the road, but he has already imagined dating, marrying her, and even thought of names for their children. If you ask him what she looks like, he says beautiful; ask for specifics, he can't say clearly, just beautiful; ask about her habits, where she's from, her hobbies, he doesn't know, but he likes her anyway. Love at first sight that lasts a lifetime is the ultimate beauty in the world.

Tea is the same.

When I drink tea, I mainly drink for imagery. Tea with good imagery usually has good taste; tea with poor imagery, even if the taste is good, the body sensation is lacking, and some are poor in both taste and body sensation. I have always believed that tea with good imagery is worth drinking, and for those of us who make mid-to-high-end tea, such tea deserves attention.

When I try tea, I often pour it out after one infusion. Some think I'm being pretentious, saying the first infusion hasn't even released its flavor. Actually, I'm drinking for imagery; one infusion is enough. The taste might change, but if the initial imagery is poor, further infusions are not worth expecting.

This overall feeling requires a calm body; tea can speak, but only if you can understand it. For a calm body, please refer to my 2022 video "How to Understand Tea? Advanced Level." Besides a calm body, you need to empty yourself, not deliberately focus on the taste, forget the tea knowledge you've learned, forget those damn technical terms, and with an ethereal mindset, feel the tea. Have you noticed that children are especially accurate when tasting tea? Because their bodies are calm, they don't know about tea, and they only care whether it's tasty or not. Tasty or not is the most common imagery.

At this point, the argumentative ones will have questions. Then haven't those professional tea makers and those graceful tea artists wasted all their tea knowledge? No! Learning tea is itself a process from one to many, and then from many to one. If you can't return from many to one, I think you still need to learn more; there is huge room for improvement. I've seen people who have been making tea for decades but still can't understand tea. Perseverance is useless; why not empty yourself, go out more, stop researching tea for a while, sleep well, eat simple meals, and maybe one day you'll have an epiphany. That's how I understood it!

Actually, many people have imagery. For example, drinking tea with a smoky flavor feels like eating cured meat; some tea is unclean and tastes like pig feed; often people say drinking this tea makes them unhappy, or that tea has the taste of first love. These are the most primitive imagery. Forget professional knowledge, let's use our bodies to perceive tea, to seek the beauty (or ugliness) at the moment the tea soup enters the mouth.

Let me talk about my imagery. First, the good feelings: like a spring breeze; like walking in a primeval forest, having eaten ginseng fruit, with pores opening up; cool, like a summer noon with sudden rain and mist; sweet and refreshing, like when I was a child going to the mountains to chop wood, thirsty and hot, finding a clear spring, cupping water to drink, that penetrating coolness with a hint of sweetness; this tea relieves stress; this tea soothes the heart; this tea is like mellow wine; this tea has the taste of mother's cooking, etc. The bad feelings are probably similar for all of us: pig feed, entering a garbage dump, dust, cheap perfume, etc.

Two: Quenching Thirst.

Tea is first a beverage, a substitute for water. Seasoned tea enthusiasts, please remember the following sentence.

Tea is water, but it cannot completely replace water.

Besides tea, we should still drink plenty of water, whether boiled, mineral, or purified.

Since it's a substitute for water, quenching thirst becomes a necessary condition. Unfortunately, many teas don't quench thirst; some even make you thirstier. If you encounter tea that is hard to drink or makes you thirsty, stay away from it.

We don't need others to teach us how to drink tea; tea that quenches thirst is basically enough.

Only after quenching thirst is it necessary to pay attention to other aspects of tea.

Three: Taste.

Regarding taste, I have made many videos, so I won't expand here; I'll simply record to maintain the completeness of the article.

1. Aroma.

There are three types of aroma: aroma in the air is worthless, and so is aroma on the cup; only aroma in the soup is valuable. Some teas smell fragrant when brewed, but once in the mouth, they are garbage. Teas of slightly acceptable quality have good cup aroma, so cup aroma has no reference value. Aroma in the soup, where the fragrance enters the water, when you hold the tea soup in your mouth, bursts of subtle fragrance fill the mouth and penetrate the heart; only aroma in the soup is the true way. Air and cup aromas are fleeting; soup aroma lasts forever.

Refinement of aroma. A subtle, lingering aroma is best; a pungent one is inferior. Fine aroma is light, faint, as if present yet absent, like being entwined in a passionate love; poor aroma is intense and direct, like cheap perfume, making your nose itch and sneeze; a woman at the east end of the village uses such perfume, and it still stings at the west end. Fine aroma is like floral and fruit scents; coarse aroma is like artificial flavoring. Good tea should have all three aromas excellent; I have never seen tea with good soup aroma but poor air and cup aromas.

2. Sweetness.

Clear sweetness is entry-level; from clear sweetness to sweet and refreshing is the highest realm of sweetness. Why are Yiwu tea and Bingdao tea so popular? One of the main reasons is that they start with clear sweetness and peak at sweet and refreshing. Clear sweetness becomes more appealing as you drink; cloying sweetness is hard to swallow. Good tea should be clear and sweet, and sweet and refreshing.

Sweetness is easy to understand: most natural fruit sweetness is clear sweetness, while maltose and birthday cake sweetness are often not. As for sweetness reaching sweet and refreshing, buy a few bottles of natural mineral water, taste carefully, and find the subtle, almost absent sweet and refreshing sensation.

3. Flavor.

Clean flavor is the most important; only through control in processing and selection of raw materials can clean tea be made. Unclean tea will only have poor imagery.

Good tea should have a complete flavor, a complete mouthfeel, and throat resonance. Tea with incomplete mouthfeel or emptiness tends to make you thirstier as you drink.

Good tea soup should be like a gentleman, warm and smooth like jade. Smoothness is not just thickness; it's the fullness and firmness of the tea soup. Loose, watery tea soup is not appealing.

Tea soup should be soft; the soft power of tea refers to this. To cut the hardest thing, you don't use diamond; you use water. Soft and smooth tea soup aligns with the way of health, so such tea can be drunk more.

When entering the mouth, there is a subtle fragrance and clear sweetness; when held in the mouth, the tea soup is full, with good salivation and aftertaste; when swallowed, the aftertaste is endless. Only when these three aspects are combined can it be considered good tea.

4. Charm (Yun).

Rock tea emphasizes "cong" flavor, Pu-erh emphasizes wild mountain charm; they all refer to the same thing: charm.

Good tea must be full of charm, with a taste of the wild that you can actually taste, a taste of nature. That's what it means.

Free-range chicken is especially fragrant; compared to supermarket broilers, the main difference is charm.

Tea with strong charm must come from a good ecosystem. Of course, ecology is not just about free-range; reasonable organic fertilizer and pesticides can also produce tea full of charm.

5. Liveliness.

Sweet, fragrant, charming, and lively are my five indicators for evaluating tea. See: /lcpf.html.

Liveliness, I will write another article, which is the next one, "The Art of Tea for a Comfortable Body: Body Sensation."

Four: Summary.

Good tea often has no obvious shortcomings; sweetness, fragrance, charm, and liveliness should all be very good. It should taste good regardless of whether brewed by a professional tea master, whether the water temperature is lowered, or whether the infusion time is fast or slow.

Learn to drink tea with your mouth. Don't think a tea is good just because it's expensive, made by a famous person, or from a famous mountain; that's drinking with your eyes and ears, not with your mouth.

Everyone has the ability to discern tea; trust yourself. Of course, appropriate learning, discussion, and exchange are necessary, but no matter what others say, if you feel uncomfortable with a tea, you should firmly trust your feelings and stay away from that tea, or even that person (company).