Love at First Flush

TeaSource
752 Cleveland Ave. S., St. Paul; 690-9822

Though probably some pretty weak tea, if you do the math--what with two tea leaves and a whole pot of water. But it's a good story. So I posited it to Bill Waddington early one morning, as I settled in at his counter at TeaSource for a a morning of tasting teas and spying on his customers.

Waddington immediately offered me a much better story. A Bodhisattva (an enlightened Buddhist who is qualified to enter nirvana, but chooses to remain on Earth to bring enlightenment to others) was trying to meditate, trying to meditate, trying to meditate, but he kept getting sleepy, sleepy, sleepy. Finally, in deepest frustration, he ripped off his eyelids and threw them to the ground. They became the first tea leaves.

Not only does this story have a couple of nice touches--tea leaves are, in fact, vaguely eyelid-shaped; the story references tea's rousing properties; and there's that gruesome bloody-eyelid thing--but it also illustrates Waddington's propensity to upgrade everything in his purview. It was the same drive that 10 years ago led him to renounce the tea aisle at Byerly's and start on a campaign of reading about tea, researching specific teas, and writing to tea importers and tea plantations to request samples.

"I started out being a pest, really," Waddington says. "I'd read about a first-flush [first growth of the season] Darjeeling and I'd write to whoever had it, asking: 'Could you send me a quarter-pound?' And these were people used to dealing with 1,000-kilo orders." Two years ago Waddington founded TeaSource as a Web-based company, www.teasource.net, to test whether there were enough people interested in fine teas to support a full-fledged business. He found there were, and opened his Highland Park tea room this September in a onetime baseball-card shop. In the store, porcelain canisters on maple shelves hold nearly 200 teas and tisanes, all of which you can sample on the premises and buy in bulk. ("Tisane," pronounced "tiz-ahn," is French for "infusion," and means a brew of something other than the 2,000-plus varieties of the evergreen shrub camellia sinensis.)

These 200-odd options are truly dazzling. Merely approaching the 20-some green teas is an exercise in idiosyncrasy; some are as plain as Genmaicha, the toasty green tea blended with roasted rice that so many Japanese restaurants serve. Others are as exquisite as Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearl, hand-rolled snails of jasmine flowers and long green-tea leaves that unfurl in hot water like sea blossoms, releasing a scent like woodland flowers in a shady valley and offering a taste like a drift of smoke on a pond with just a hint of floral sweetness. In fact, Waddington says he has at least half a dozen people a day coming into his shop in pursuit of green tea and its medical benefits.

Speaking of which, just a few weeks ago a press release crossed my desk promising that with green-tea pills I could once and for all eliminate that pesky "taste of sweat socks" while reaping all of green tea's health benefits. I didn't pay it much mind, lumping its authors with the bozos who are trying to get red wine into pill form, eliminating all that irksome taste and tactile pleasure.

Then I went to my local health-food store and saw several varieties of green-tea pills, so I am now forced to take the matter much more seriously. To green-tea-pill poppers I say: You fools! It seems so obvious that the heart-calming and stress-reducing benefits of these beverages are at least partly associated with the simple acts of sitting back and relaxing, breathing deeply, and enjoying stress-free time--and yet the pill-making goes on. (As I write this, someone, somewhere, is probably busy grinding up all life's health benefits for your gel-cap pleasure. Coming soon to a Walgreens near you: Pills full of Adidas, soil, and Pekingese--for all the health effects of running, gardening, and spending time with pets without those annoying sweat, dirt, and dog-hair odors!)

Bill Waddington prides himself on helping people understand that "drinking green tea shouldn't be a medicinal pursuit, it should be a pursuit of the tea," says Waddington. Anyway, the only way your green tea should ever taste like sweat-socks would be if you treated it the way you would black tea--drenching it in boiling water and steeping it for five minutes. Green tea should be heated with water at around 180 degrees and steeped, depending on the specific tea, for between one and four minutes. The leaves can be--and this was news to me--re-steeped as many as six times. According to Waddington, many tea connoisseurs don't even consider that first brew worth drinking because of its raw, unrefined edges.