Editorial Conversation: AMA #5

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our Fourth AMA with the editorial team! You can listen to the episode here, on YouTube, or on Spotify. Listen to the team discuss their 2024 tea trip to Wuyi. Learn about the 'Crush and Pack' technique, explore the cultural differences in tea preparation between Chaozhou and Wuyi, and get a sneak peek reveal on Jason’s next book! Discover what inspires the team in their tea journey and listen to light-hearted discussions on recent books, films, and urban exploration.

A full transcript is included on the episode page and below:

[00:00:00] Jason Cohen: As people start coming in, I think I have some special,

[00:00:10] Pat Penny: Oh god no, are we in for another theme song? It's better than Pokemon last time.

I don't know, Pokemon was a little cringe last time.

[00:00:36] Pat Penny: Nope, it's gonna be just as cringy. When are we done? When are we done?

[00:01:34] Jason Cohen: When are we done?

[00:01:35] Pat Penny: How long was that track going to be?

[00:01:37] Zongjun Li: Ladies and gentlemen, that was the national anthem of China.

[00:01:39] Pat Penny: Jason, as we have guests coming in, do you want to let them know what, what the hell they just walked into?

[00:01:45] Jason Cohen: Oh yeah, now we do special songs for each of these AMAs.

Something about tea, I think.

[00:01:52] Pat Penny: I don't think the song made it into the recording for the last one. Did it?

[00:01:56] Jason Cohen: Oh, it did.

[00:01:57] Pat Penny: Oh, it did. Okay.

[00:01:58] Jason Cohen: It's like a two minute pre start laugh track.

[00:02:01] Pat Penny: Did we take a good look at how many people on the stream skipped, just skipped right over it.

[00:02:08] Jason Cohen: I think they did.

[00:02:08] Pat Penny: Yeah.

10 seconds in and then they're just clicking 15, 15, 15, 15.

[00:02:12] Jason Cohen: Can we zoom past this please?

[00:02:14] Pat Penny: Yeah. All right. Welcome to our guests. For those of you who experienced this really special music, I hope you enjoyed it. I'm sure there'll be a track again next time. Maybe Jason, you can upload the full track as a bonus.

So they can hear it, uninterrupted.

[00:02:28] Jason Cohen: Yeah, I can put that right onto the Tea Technique podcast.

[00:02:31] Pat Penny: Perfect. We're gonna kick off the way we kick off every time, which is first by asking everyone, what's in your cup?

Jason, you can go first as you're taking a shot.

[00:02:40] Jason Cohen: I guess you want me to go first, sure.

[00:02:42] Pat Penny: We're staring at you.

[00:02:43] Jason Cohen: Yeah, just a 29 year Bunnahabhain.

[00:02:45] Pat Penny: Cas. Casual. For people who don't know what that is, you want to break it down a little bit more?

[00:02:51] Jason Cohen: It is one of the smaller distilleries on Islay. Highly renowned for their very lightly peated malt scotch, the smoky flavor.

29 years on the relatively older side, and this is a independent bottling that I quite like.

[00:03:06] Pat Penny: All right, starting it off super relatable. I might just jump to Emily, who might have something that's more familiar to other listeners. Emily, what's in your cup today?

[00:03:14] Jason Cohen: 9 a.m. Kaoliang.

[00:03:16] Pat Penny: Yeah, you're at 9 a.m. where you are.

[00:03:18] Emily Huang: It is 9 a.m. where I am, and it's also a national holiday today. And so in my cup, I have some coffee to just wake me up.

[00:03:29] Jason Cohen: Coffee and Kaoliang.

[00:03:32] Pat Penny: Jason is assuming you've poured a shot of Kaoliang into that.

[00:03:36] Emily Huang: Yeah, no.

[00:03:37] Pat Penny: No, I didn't think so.

[00:03:39] Emily Huang: Like a 9 p.m. thing, yeah.

[00:03:42] Pat Penny: Okay.

[00:03:43] Zongjun Li: I gotta get my Tsingtao ready, guys.

[00:03:47] Pat Penny: Zongjun, that's 9 p.m. What's in your cup at 9 a.m.?

[00:03:51] Zongjun Li: It's just hot water and a little bit of a dancong.

[00:03:54] Pat Penny: Very nice.

And Zongjun, where are you joining us from? I know you were a little bit on the move.

[00:04:01] Zongjun Li: I'm from Changsha right now.

[00:04:04] Pat Penny: Very nice. Okay.

Alright. My turn, last.

I've got a little bowl tea right here. I figured, Zongjun, you and I hold down the fort with a little bit of tea. But this is just an osmanthus oolong from a friend of ours who mostly supplies our dancing (单丛), actually. But I just wanted something light and floral. It's still nice and that in between period of summer and fall here in Seattle.

So this really felt like it was resonating for me. So hopefully our guests are all drinking something nice too, depending on where you are in the world. I'm gonna kick it to Jason, for some life updates.

I know it's been a little while since we had an AMA, it's been a little while since we updated things in general. We were all traveling and then had various things going on in our lives. Jason, what have you been up to in the relative silence of the past, let's call it four months?

[00:04:48] Jason Cohen: Oh, the last four months, I was in Taiwan for a month, I was in China for a month. And then I was in Italy for a week with my mother, that was a vacation. And then we published the 30 page chapter, and then we published the more recent 20 page chapter. Two megachapters followed by two months of pretty hard, constant travel certainly set us back, and I think I've mentioned this on Tea Technique before, but I started a company almost exactly one year ago, a new company, which is a foolish thing to do.

I don't recommend it. Don't start a company.

[00:05:22] Pat Penny: Second time doing it, but

[00:05:23] Jason Cohen: Yeah, some people are just prone to making the same mistakes over and over again. Third time's a charm, I'm sure. I'll get the lesson but of course, that, that takes up a incredible amount of time.

So I try very hard every day to wake up and first thing I do before looking at my phone, before looking at email, is to write at least a couple of pages of the book. I've done that somewhat successfully enough that the book's 700 pages now. And yeah that's my major life update.

[00:05:52] Pat Penny: Nice. Mine is that I had my appendix removed about three weeks ago, so editing was a little slow in that time. I'm on the mend. I'm healing. I'm gonna be back to my usual activities, which mostly involves drinking tea, editing and reading about tea, but then also deadlifting. So, excited to get back into the gym in another couple weeks once I'm fully healed, but otherwise, this past summer was really just traveling with you, Jason: China and Taiwan. But I did spend some time in Japan and Korea and got to do some fun activities there as well.

Now, the reason we were all in Taiwan, Emily, you want to share what you've been up to?

[00:06:25] Emily Huang: Yeah, this is actually my first AMA, yay!

[00:06:27] Pat Penny: Welcome. You missed the last one.

[00:06:30] Emily Huang: Yes, I missed the last one. And the reason they were all in Taiwan is because I'm here. Of course. And so I got married and they were here for my wedding in June, yes.

[00:06:44] Pat Penny: You were a little busy traveling with a honeymoon or that kind of thing?

[00:06:47] Emily Huang: No, honeymoon is scheduled for early next year. But I was busy with the planning. Because we have relatives in different places, we actually had two weddings.

[00:06:57] Pat Penny: So you just recovered. You're just recovering.

[00:07:01] Emily Huang: I've recovered. My life is back on track now. And I did do some traveling. Yeah. But it was more for like short trips, not honeymoon, which my husband still owes me.

[00:07:12] Pat Penny: It's going to happen. Zongyi, where have you been, my, my guy?

[00:07:18] Zongjun Li: Ah, a lot of places. I had to do a little bit of a here and there between China and U.S. And our most recent Wuyi trip. After that I also started a company working on grinding matcha fresh. So I had to go to Japan for a while and interestingly see how the tea industry in Japan works.

So, see a lot of interesting similarities and difference between the two countries.

[00:07:43] Pat Penny: Nice, yeah, we heard a little story from you, I think before we recorded our last episode about some of your experiences in Japan, maybe they'll come up a little bit today, there were some funny stories in there.

But, for our listeners, it was really just all of our excuses for why we haven't been getting things out timely in the last few weeks. But Jason, I think you're promising to keep us on a pretty tight schedule as we move forward.

[00:08:04] Jason Cohen: I'm trying. I'm trying.

[00:08:06] Pat Penny: Yeah, we'll see. I think we're going to get a little better.

I know some of the upcoming chapters are exciting, but also relatively long.

[00:08:13] Jason Cohen: Yeah, I would say that I don't write the book in exact order that the chapters are published. I get inspired about certain things, or research takes me down a rabbit hole. So actually, quite a number of the upcoming chapters are actually fully already written, which means that it's less of a rushed schedule. A lot of the firing work was not because we did the Yixing trip last year and learned more about the kilns then we actually went back this year in the 2024 trip. Zongjun and I went back to take a revisit and follow up on some notes and understandings.

A lot of the information was like, literally was written as we were there, as we were doing it and came back and published it. That's nice when the timing works out.

[00:08:50] Pat Penny: Yeah, hopefully everyone's excited to see what comes next. But I know I'm excited to keep reading and learning more and revisiting some of the stuff I experienced with you guys.

 In the tradition of the last few AMAs, with the trips that we've had recently, I do want to ask everybody, what has been your change in tea habits over the last few months? So last year after we did our Chaozhou trip, I think we all had quite a lot of things that were changing. Obviously we were drinking a lot more dancong, but there was other changes to our practice. This year after being in Wuyi, or Jason and Zongjun, after revisiting Yixing, Jason, for you and I being in Taiwan, what changes have occurred in your tea habit or tea brewing practice?

I'm gonna kick this one to you, Jason, first and then we'll go from there.

[00:09:29] Jason Cohen: I guess a few things. One I restocked up on Taiwanese tea. Our podcast editor, Nancy, was with me for a week or two in Taiwan, and so me, Nancy, and Emily all went to a Taiwanese tea tasting, and it was just mind blowing.

I forgot how much I loved Taiwanese high mountain oolongs, particularly really well traditional charcoal roasted Taiwanese high mountain oolongs, and I fell back in love with Shanlinxi (杉林溪) which is not an area that I normally bought and drank a lot from. And I've just been enjoying it. I've been drinking it lao ren cha (老人茶), I've been drinking it in bowl tea, I've been having it in yixings, it's great all around. That's been a lot of fun.

It's actually funny. Everyone I guess expects, particularly after, I expected after Chaozhou last year, to just be drinking a ton more Wuyi tea, and actually I stocked up on a bunch of Wuyi teas from some trusted suppliers before the trip in order to start tasting and generate this muscle memory and flavor memory so that I would have a better understanding of the cultivars and be able to match things as we were tasting it.

And then we went to Taiwan, Pat, and you and I did that mega tasting of Wuyi. And then we got to Wuyi and we didn't buy any tea and I came back and I just have all the tea that I bought before going to Wuyi. And I haven't really been drinking that much Wuyi tea. I came back from Wuyi and I'm like, I'm gonna put this aside for a little while.

Yeah, I don't know, is that disheartening? Is that, I just went back straight to the dancong. Yeah,

[00:10:52] Pat Penny: I think everyone who has probably listened to the episode we posted on our experience in Wuyi probably heard that we think there's obviously more to learn. We just scratched the surface but at least in the experience that we had, which parts of it were wonderful, we don't feel like we found any teas that were better than what our current vendors or connections are sourcing, which makes sense, you know they spend years or decades in the area. We were just meeting with a couple producers that some friends were willing to hook us up with.

Just to break into my kinds of habits. Much the same. I have not been brewing a ton of Wuyi after our experience there. We did buy a little bit of tea from one farmer who we worked with there, which I do really enjoy and I have been breaking it out every now and then.

As I drink it more and more, I do find that the things I like about it are more dancong than Wuyi yancha like.

[00:11:42] Jason Cohen: I have that tea. I drink it from time to time. I find that tea to be more of an experiment or comparison tea than something I actively reach for. It does some interesting things in some teapots, but yeah, I totally agree. It tends to work better with a lot of the dancong teapots.

[00:11:58] Zongjun Li: To add a little bit of more color on this tea, it's a super light roast. It's so light that you can hardly taste any roastage. The intention of creating this tea is to, it's almost like third wave coffee. The producer wants to highlight the terroir rather than the roastage or the roast flavor that's people typically associate with Wuyi tea. But the producer wants to highlight more about tea itself and hopefully we can taste the terroir too.

[00:12:25] Pat Penny: Yeah, I think what we bought too was quite a unique varietal. It's Que She (雀舌). I don't own any other teas of that varietal, so it is nice to taste very pure expression of that cultivar and of the area that it came from but Emily had asked us in the chat, why we didn't buy very much when we were in Wuyi. I think that everything that we ran into just didn't really beat the teas that we are currently able to source through other friends. There were some teas that were amazing actually that we tasted but the price to quality ratio was not there.

[00:12:55] Jason Cohen: Astronomical prices.

[00:12:57] Pat Penny: Zongjun, do you remember what some of the better teas that we had cost? I remember things close to hundreds of dollars per gram, but

[00:13:04] Zongjun Li: Yeah, entry level, it was like

[00:13:07] Pat Penny: Eight dollars a gram?

Entry level?

[00:13:09] Zongjun Li: Yeah, eight dollars, or ten dollars, sometimes twenty dollars a gram. It was didn't make sense?

[00:13:16] Pat Penny: No. And the best ones were, I feel like pushing, I know we had one that was maybe 60 or 70 per gram that we were all like, Okay it's really amazing tea. And I think the most expensive one we tried was pushing a hundred dollars per gram, and I think we were all impressed with the tea itself, but when you see the price point, none of us could justify it.

[00:13:36] Zongjun Li: I'm just calling this the Maotai effect of Wuyi tea. People just putting a price tag on it for the sake of it, and it doesn't really mean anything.

[00:13:45] Jason Cohen: It's a Veblen good. It's good because it's expensive, or it's desired because it's expensive.

[00:13:50] Zongjun Li: Or, yeah, or the intention of me serving you this tea, and it's so pricey, I'm valuing you as a guest, but this number that I wrote on the price tag, I wrote it yesterday, and

[00:14:02] Jason Cohen: I will accept your expensive things.

[00:14:05] Pat Penny: Yeah, Zongjun, if you want to serve that tea to me at any point, please feel free. Feel free.

[00:14:09] Zongjun Li: Yeah.

[00:14:10] Jason Cohen: But yeah, the prices were just astronomical. And the crazy thing was, is it wasn't the best tea that we had. We had better tea at much more normal high, it's Wuyi high prices, but much more normal prices in Taiwan and at our friend's tea house in Shanghai and elsewhere.

[00:14:25] Pat Penny: So very little tea was bought while we were in Wuyi. But we've still got our sources, we're gonna go back, we're gonna learn more more to uncover there.

[00:14:34] Jason Cohen: Same question to everyone else.

[00:14:36] Pat Penny: I continue to drink a ton of dancong, actually, and brew a ton of dancong. We obtained some nice cups while we were in Taiwan that I've been experimenting with.

But I would actually say that I have been drinking a lot more Japanese tea through work. I took a Japanese tea certification course, and it was a nice foundational course. A lot of the material I think all four of us would already know going into the course, but they supplied us with some good teas, and while I was in Japan this past summer, I also went to a couple places Jason that you recommended, and a few of my favorite tea places, and so I just, I picked up a ton of Japanese tea this summer, and you don't want to sit on that.

So I've just been drinking a lot of it and hoping to get through it before the weather really turns here. At that point I'm sure I'll turn back to roasty teas and pu'er (普洱).

[00:15:24] Zongjun Li: A lot of gyokuro and

[00:15:26] Pat Penny: Yeah, kabusecha, gyokuro, sencha, all that kind of stuff.

[00:15:31] Jason Cohen: I was given a gift of that deep steam and I hadn't really had much Japanese deep steam tea before, but it was quite nice.

I enjoyed that.

[00:15:38] Pat Penny: I'm really actually into the light steaming. The deep steaming is nice for a don't pay attention to it, just a morning cup of tea or whatever. But I do find that the deep steam, much like a really heavy roast, right? While it's enjoyable, it can cover up a lot of the nuances of a certain tea.

So it's that category, the fukamushi sencha, where you'll see the worst of the worst and some of the best.

[00:15:59] Zongjun Li: Yeah, it really magnifies the flaw of the the cultivar and the gardening.

[00:16:05] Pat Penny: Zongjun you wanna, I know you were in Japan quite a bit. Any changes either from Wuyi or your other travels in your tea brewing habits?

[00:16:12] Zongjun Li: Japan didn't really make any impact on my tea drinking habit. I'm all into this Chaozhou game here, if you guys can see it.

[00:16:20] Pat Penny: We see it. We see it.

[00:16:24] Jason Cohen: Zongjun just showing off.

[00:16:24] Zongjun Li: I have my nilu (泥炉), I have my kettles, I have everything set up in Changsha.

This is great.

[00:16:29] Pat Penny: I love that on this audio medium for everyone who's not online, that they're going to hear us just all ooh, ah, but yeah, Zongjun just showed us a really nice setup. We'll post a picture of it. There we go.

[00:16:41] Jason Cohen: Zongjun, its a very nice, very trad Chaozhou setup.

[00:16:45] Pat Penny: And I was just gonna say, Zongjun, when we were visiting you in Changsha, while you had a nice setup, you didn't set up that nice for Jason and I. What's up with that?

[00:16:55] Zongjun Li: Yeah, I know. Recently I finished my furnace in the balcony, so I moved everything downstairs.

[00:17:01] Jason Cohen: Which is great, because that was a sweat lodge, sitting in the attic space.

[00:17:05] Pat Penny: Straight up sauna. We were in Zongjun's attic, it was so hot, we have the nilu going with charcoal, and we are just, semi finished attic, we are just sweating bullets.

[00:17:16] Jason Cohen: No air, no AC, only two windows on either ends of the attic.

Burning charcoal, we were probably asphyxiating ourselves. Tea tasted great, blasting music, that was a fun way to be in Changsha, but it was an experience.

[00:17:31] Zongjun Li: That was a welcome drink, gotta show some hospitality to our laowai friends.

[00:17:36] Pat Penny: Thank you. I really, we did not drink any of the 10 plus dollar a gram yancha (岩茶) that we had tried, unfortunately, but Zongjun took care of us.

[00:17:45] Jason Cohen: Yeah we sweated it out there, then we sweated it out with the Changsha spicy food.

[00:17:51] Pat Penny: It was amazing. Emily, I'm gonna kick it over to you. You weren't on the studying portion of the tea trip with us, but we saw you in Taiwan. Since the last time we saw you, how have things changed?

Did we impact your drinking habits?

[00:18:06] Emily Huang: To be honest, not really, because I think I've always been in Taiwan. I've always been drinking Taiwanese tea, high mountain oolongs. I'd say 90 percent of my tea would be Taiwanese high mountain oolongs and then some light roasted, some dark roasted.

 I usually select my tea based on the weather. So if I feel it's like really hot or if it's really humid. If it's humid and slightly lower temperature, I go for a more dark roasted, a heavier roasted tea. If it's hotter and I would usually go for a lighter roast. But yeah mostly Taiwan tea. My tea habits is actually the inverse. My tea habits changed when you guys were in here. When you guys left it return to its normal pattern.

So while you guys were here, like Jason said, we visited a lot of different tea houses and coffee houses. And it's really then when I had the opportunity to drink more teas that I don't have relatively easy access to, so like the Wuyi yancha. At the tea house, we had a really good old laocha and all that kind of stuff, yeah.

[00:19:23] Pat Penny: I knew there was no way with Jason there for a month and me there for a week that, at least for that week or so, your tea habits weren't going to change, but okay we're going to start kicking into the questions that were submitted for us. Let me just go through here. Jason, I think we've got a question from a reader who was interested, I don't think they live in your area, but interested in how the bi monthly tea gathering is going and potentially it sounds like maybe they're going to want to drive down to check it out at some point, but looking to understand more about that.

[00:19:50] Jason Cohen: Yeah, they're pretty good. Sometimes we have six people here and sometimes it's me and one other person. And we pull out whatever teas people want to drink. If they have something that they want to share, I can brew it for them. They can see what it tastes like if I brew. We could use whatever wares I have.

If they have a teapot that's having issues or they can't figure out what it is, I've done some teapot identification for people. I did some pu'er identification, verification for some people or put it side by side with some of my pu'ers from supposedly the same area. So we've had good fun.

Sometimes, there's not really any active questions. We all just gather and drink tea and sometimes there's tons of questions and people come pre prepared with what they want to talk about. And sometimes they're thematic, right? When we got back from Wuyi, we did all Wuyi teas. But yeah, usually they're just whatever we feel like drinking that day. And they'll go on two three hours, however long people want to stick around.

[00:20:41] Pat Penny: Nice. I'm hoping that, the next time I go out to New York, we'll line up nicely with one of these sessions. But either way, you and I will be drinking tea for two or three or more hours. Okay, so hopefully that answered that reader's question and encouraged them to make the trip out. I got another question on here from Instagram.

When do you expect to finish the Yixing book? And what's next after that? Somebody wants more.

[00:21:07] Jason Cohen: When do I think we're going to finish the Yixing book? I thought we had finished the Yixing book last year.

[00:21:11] Zongjun Li: Are we going to actually finish it, Jason?

[00:21:13] Jason Cohen: It's just going to extend all the way into

I'm gonna extend off into infinity, but I don't know, I'm gonna keep writing this book forever.

No, the book has a clear ending in sight. We are more than halfway. Majority of the book is now written. There's a couple of areas that have some open experimentation. But I think if we stick to a bi monthly cadence, we'll probably published the last bit of this book in February, March of next year, which would be perfect because then we'll be in China for Tea Technique research trip 2025, which leads me to the answer to the next question.

What's the next book we're going to work on? I think we're going to do pu'er. I think we're doing it. I think we're biting the bullet and we're going to write the pu'er book.

[00:21:58] Pat Penny: Okay. Yeah.

[00:22:00] Jason Cohen: You're acting like you didn't know. I feel like you knew that.

[00:22:05] Pat Penny: There's, there is another question, which was, we'll address more of it at another point, but part of the question was, what will next year's trip be?

So we're answering that here. Making news. Yep. But Jason, as you think about writing a book on pu'er, where do you even start, man?

[00:22:20] Jason Cohen: It's only gonna be a short book.

[00:22:21] Pat Penny: As if any of them were gonna be.

[00:22:23] Zongjun Li: Yeah.

[00:22:24] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[00:22:24] Zongjun Li: Spoiler alert. Short book.

[00:22:27] Jason Cohen: Yeah, real, real short, easy to read. No complexities there.

No diversions about the Miao minority groups and the itinerant wanderings and social realism in contemporary Yunnan. I

[00:22:42] Pat Penny: The metaverse, renaissance painters, nothing else. No other rabbit holes will go down.

[00:22:46] Jason Cohen: No, no other rabbit hole. You haven't even gotten to the renaissance painting chapter in the Yixing book.

[00:22:51] Pat Penny: There was one in the previous book.

[00:22:53] Jason Cohen: Oh, there was? Yeah. There's one in this book too. That's great. I think that's one of my favorite chapters.

[00:22:58] Pat Penny: It's a theme. It's a theme.

[00:22:59] Jason Cohen: It's a theme. We're going to have to somehow include the renaissance paintings in the pu'er book. No, I think honestly that's going to be a pretty difficult and long book to write.

It needs to obviously start with the history of pu'er, the history of that area, Yunnan as a hinterlands, Yunnan is outside the core central politically central China, Yunnan as an area of Han influx going all the way back to Yuan dynasty. During the mining ban on interior China, not to upset the farmers, which were considered to be the most important people during the dynastic system, they banned mining throughout politically central China, and so all the Han miners went out to the hinterlands, predominantly Yunnan, in order to mine copper.

The level of mining intensity was so intense that the mines ran out of copper by Qing dynasty which started some of the overseas copper trade, which brought in Chinese into Southeast Asia, particularly Penang and other areas around Malaysia which starts part of the overseas Chinese trade, which influences the shipments of Yixing teapots, starts some of the early proto overseas trading that led to things like liubao (六堡) in Indonesia and overseas pu'er. Anyway, it's gonna be a long book. Just that type of social history alone is probably gonna take up the first two, three hundred pages.

[00:24:18] Pat Penny: Yeah, we've got a comment from Danny here that I think is accurate. If the Yixing book is 700 pages already unfinished, I'm sure the pu'er book is going to be long.

[00:24:28] Jason Cohen: Yeah, it's going to be long.

[00:24:29] Pat Penny: I love that from writing a Yixing book to a pu'er book, and you still somehow find a way to incorporate mining and Yixing. You can't get away from it. Is this your way of telling everyone you're a big Minecraft fan?

[00:24:43] Jason Cohen: No.

[00:24:43] Pat Penny: Team Roblox?

[00:24:44] Jason Cohen: Yeah, team Roblox all the way.

 I think that the Hindenburg Research is posting stuff about Roblox right now, so I guess it's not very popular. Equity short seller.

[00:24:53] Pat Penny: Ah, okay.

[00:24:53] Jason Cohen: Roblox has been inflating its number of active users fraudulently. You heard it here first.

[00:24:58] Pat Penny: The market closed.

That's why we did it at this time.

[00:25:01] Jason Cohen: Yeah. it's interesting that you say that, right? Because Yixing, this book became accidentally gigantic and was much more complicated to write. And it turns out that Yixing just touches everything. When you start writing about the production of ceramics, your first ceramics production book, you have to write about mine development, you have to write about ore processing, manufacturing, brings you straight to Joseph Needhem's questions, and all of these things are so interconnected and minutely interesting, right?

People have said before that reality is fractal in its complexity. You look at something, you think you understand it, and then you look at a component of it and realize that you have to re understand the whole thing all over again, and I think that will be true in pu'er, I think that will be true in any of the books that we write, that reality has a consistently fractal complexity.

And what's nice is that as you build up those fractal lenses, that many of them start to overlap, and you can just, instead of writing a new 100 page section, you could just say, if you want more information on this, go read book one, go read book two, this specific chapter. I think when you can write an entire book just by referencing specific chapters of previous books, I think then you're done.

Put down the writing pen and

[00:26:09] Pat Penny: Yeah, hang up your hat. You're good to go.

[00:26:11] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[00:26:11] Pat Penny: That's when we can go back to just writing about the metaverse and other things completely unrelated to tea and then in that we can just have them in the footnote, you know if you would like to learn more about this one specific topic refer to book one. Okay.

I think you hit a lot of questions in that one.

[00:26:26] Zongjun Li: Book seven or book eight, like it would just be a book about, you know referencing every single books that we have written in the past and

[00:26:33] Pat Penny: And that's the one that we put a print publication out for

It's a meta book.

[00:26:40] Jason Cohen: It's a meta book!

[00:26:41] Pat Penny: You can use that book to refer to the digital books and their chapters. Okay, I think you got a lot in that question. I'm going to ask a question that we have a listener present for. So thank you for submitting the question, Danny. A question for the Chou Bros. That's how he wrote it, but Emily, you're included, don't worry.

Could you go over the crush and pack technique a little bit more? So I think we talked about this crush and pack technique when we were in Chaozhou. We also, I think in the Wuyi episode, which we just recently put out, we talked about how we didn't really see a lot of crush and pack. We didn't really see teapots, we didn't see a lot of crush at all, even with gaiwans.

So I think just for all the listeners, either Zongjun or Jason, would either of you like to take, what is crush and pack? And then maybe we can unpack what we've been seeing between Chaozhou and Wuyi.

[00:27:26] Zongjun Li: Yeah, basically you decided a portion of the tea that you are going to dump into your teapot being slightly crushed on your hand. And how crushed it is, it's in your control, and how much tea is going to be crushed is also in your control. And that crushed portion supposedly is going to extract a little bit more and add a little bit of flavor or spice it up a little bit of the overall flavor profile of the tea that you're going to brew.

And we've been consistently using it in the past and this time in Wuyi surprisingly, we didn't actually see any practice of that technique in the city. Which was very interesting and very few people actually use teapot to begin with, and for some very few incidents, they mention something about using the teapot, or they save certain teapots for some of the very priced or expensive or rare tea that they used, and it was like one teapot for one tea. You don't really know if that was a whole marketing kind of a scheme or, like that was the actual practice of people doing that in the city, but that was what we have observed in Wuyi.

A lot of gaiwans, no crush.

[00:28:42] Pat Penny: All gaiwans, all electric kettles. Just pouring in approximately eight gram bag, little baggie of Wuyi tea into the gaiwan and then really honestly just splashy fun time. Splashy fun time's unfair. We didn't see a ton of very wet brewing but there wasn't a ton of gongfu behind a lot of the brewing that we saw, so it's just water.

[00:29:01] Jason Cohen: I didn't think that the Wuyi people were totally unskilled. It wasn't like we, we, it wasn't as much splashy fun time as say Yunnan brewing which is, really heavy pours and that kind of stuff. There's still some, there's still some skill there, I thought, but I thought it was very strange how they didn't seem to care about the kettle.

They were just using totally electric kettles, not even tetsubin on a burner or anything. And no teapots, really, at all. I personally got very marketing vibes when they were like, oh, for more special teas, we would use a teapot. And I was like, no, I don't know about this.

[00:29:37] Pat Penny: Yeah, to bring it back to crush and pack, I think if we want to just give a little bit more of a prescriptive approach, I think a lot of numbers that have been thrown out in the past, we've heard something like 60, 40, 70, 30, 80, 20 as the percent of whole leaf to crushed leaf that you're putting in the teapot, and there's a lot of different techniques as far as how you pack the pot. We often learned when we were studying with various teachers, including a lot of actually Taiwan based teachers, which is where we've seen the most of this.

I don't feel like in mainland China we've seen a lot of crush and pack. It's really been a lot of the Taiwanese teachers that we had. But you were often either adding whole leaf directly into the pot, and then crushing with your finger in the middle of the teapot where the outer leaf would then help form the cha dan or basically a wall of tea that would keep the fines from your filter.

Other ways that we've seen teachers do it and that we do it, this is what I most often do, is I take some portion of the tea I plan to brew, crush that in my hand, I add that to the teapot more towards the back, and then I'll add my whole leaf tea on top of that and in front of that. So that once I pour, my first pour I'll usually be pouring closer to the spout of the teapot.

I won't be trying to swirl or agitate and then that way the kind of crushed tea leaves are sitting closest to the handle of the teapot and the bottom. And as the tea leaves expand the whole leaves that are closer to the spout will help block those fines from going through. Hopefully that, that kind of helps all of our listeners understand a little bit more of what crush and pack is.

I think you see good examples online, too.

[00:31:05] Jason Cohen: We saw some crush and pack in Chaozhou. Not super frequent. And if you ask about it in Chaozhou, everyone knows it. It's not hidden or something like, oh, no, we don't do that. But just no one pulls out the teapot and does it with few exceptions.

Which I think is interesting. My, my understanding is that it seems to be a preference of older people, older style when tea was higher fired when they were using up the last of the teas in a bag that was naturally crushed. This idea of purposely crushing and then layering and packing seems to have at least somewhat fallen out of favor.

[00:31:42] Zongjun Li: Yeah, I, I totally agree. You see that much more frequent when you are drinking tea with older tea drinkers in Chaozhou.

[00:31:49] Pat Penny: Sometimes you're just drinking straight up dust.

[00:31:51] Zongjun Li: Yes. Straight up crush from a caddy. That was something.

[00:31:56] Pat Penny: We had some amazing dust with some teachers.

[00:31:58] Zongjun Li: Yeah. 11:00 PM at night, pure dust in a teapot, overdosed.

[00:32:03] Jason Cohen: Wired.

[00:32:04] Zongjun Li: Yeah.

[00:32:04] Pat Penny: Thanks Yang Laoshi. Yeah.

[00:32:06] Jason Cohen: For hours.

[00:32:06] Zongjun Li: Thank you.

[00:32:06] Pat Penny: No, we needed to go drink after that because we knew we couldn't sleep. That was a special experience. Okay. Hopefully we answered that question.

[00:32:14] Jason Cohen: I'll add one more thing to that. I do sometimes like crush and pack, and I have a single teapot that I use almost exclusively for crush and pack, and there is real skill and technique when doing crush and pack. And pretty frequently, you don't generally see people doing it unless they also have a teaboat, and they're going to linghu, pour boiling water over the teapot as it's brewing.

So there is a whole set of skills that go into to crush and pack beyond just the layering and the stacking. And it does produce quite a unique flavor profile. And usually the challenge there, the show of skill there, is to do your first three brews and have each brew taste identically the same.

So you're not looking for that type of dynamic shift between brews that you normally do in a less extractive brewing method.

[00:32:59] Pat Penny: Thanks for adding that color. There was another part of this question. I think we touched on it a little bit as we were talking about teapots and some of the marketing aspects. We were asked, "You mentioned that it was almost exclusively gaiwans in Wuyi. Would you consider that a function of the tourism industry in the area? Or is that something that you think developed organically because it complemented the tea there?"

[00:33:18] Zongjun Li: I think it's a little bit of both, like a lot of these teahouse or tea stores are really just a showroom of their product and you're going there, you sample the teas and it's really not about bring or having a tea moment with the people. It's about sampling all of the products and you decide what to buy, mostly.

So the gaiwan, the whole gaiwan technique, I think it's more optimized upon procurement. People wanted to come and do a quick kind of a sampling and then they make decisions.

[00:33:51] Jason Cohen: Yeah, because people wouldn't want to buy testing tea out of a yixing. They would correctly assume that there would be too much influence.

But I don't think that gaiwans are a particularly good match for yancha. I don't think they're terrible. I use them, but just not... it's like the whole region...

[00:34:07] Zongjun Li: Yeah.

[00:34:09] Jason Cohen: Yeah, that's what Wuyi Town looks like.

[00:34:12] Pat Penny: That's how I felt when we were walking around. We didn't even pop into a lot of stores, but every street had just tons and tons of tea stores. There was massive boxes of things labeled laocong shuixian (老丛水仙). There's tons of things labeled like niu lan keng rougui (牛栏坑肉桂) and we're talking about big boxes that probably have 50 kilograms of tea in it. We all know that there's only so much niu lan keng rougui, right?

So step into any one of those stores and you're likely to be served a bunch of different teas in gaiwans so that you can evaluate and I'm sure they're going to push quickly upon you how rare this tea is, how good the value is, and how it's the best tea you're going to find. Yeah, we didn't step into a lot of places like that because we knew what we would be in for, I think.

[00:34:51] Jason Cohen: No, but, the other thing, a lot of them didn't smell good, they didn't look good. The tea looked charry. It looked roasted to death. The whole place had these open bags, which is just not how you store good tea.

[00:35:04] Pat Penny: You don't like the cigarette smell from the people who are working there, smoking and getting into the bags.

[00:35:09] Jason Cohen: It wasn't like dancong where like the average level of tea quality just wandering around Chaozhou is so high.

[00:35:14] Pat Penny: Yeah.

[00:35:14] Zongjun Li: Yeah.

[00:35:14] Pat Penny: I agree with that.

[00:35:16] Zongjun Li: And it feels less organically incorporate into people's daily life in Wuyi. In Chaozhou, you have people just casually sitting around with a Chaozhou tea set and brewing tea, drinking tea, it's clearly part of their life.

Less so in Wuyi. Although we do see some culinary match with Wuyi tea with all of these very roasty, toasty, Wuyi food. That's not really Fujian food. It's actually closer to Jiangxi food. It's more spicy, it's more oily, it's more smoky. And we do see some reminiscence of that kind of culinary preference in comparison with Wuyi tea, and also like tongmu guan (桐木关), lapsang souchong (爉生酥种), all of those kind of tea practice.

[00:35:57] Pat Penny: Let's not talk about Wuyi food, because I'm pretty sure the shao kao tartar is what gave me appendicitis, so let's not talk too much about that.

[00:36:05] Jason Cohen: Emily, do you have access to Jiangxi food in Taiwan? Do you go out for Jiangxi food?

[00:36:11] Emily Huang: I don't normally go out for Jiangxi, but I'm sure there is. But I've never actually look out for it. Should I?

[00:36:19] Zongjun Li: Smoked Jiangxi duck was something like that was.

[00:36:24] Pat Penny: I will agree it was good, but we had it like four days in a row.

[00:36:27] Zongjun Li: Yeah, four days in a row was a little bit too much.

[00:36:31] Jason Cohen: It wasn't a lot of variety.

[00:36:33] Pat Penny: I think we kept getting showed the local foods, the famous things by the people who were taking us out.

[00:36:38] Jason Cohen: The same local foods again and again.

[00:36:40] Pat Penny: Which were great, once or twice.

[00:36:42] Jason Cohen: Would you like a Jiangxi roast duck?

Imagine going to Beijing and having a Beijing duck four nights in a row.

Someone's oh, you're in Beijing. You must have the Beijing duck.

[00:36:54] Pat Penny: Oh, you've been here a couple of days. Have you tried the duck yet? Let's go out for the duck. Yeah, that was the experience. I do wonder, did you guys think that we were just going to be such hardcore Chaozhou bros after being in Chaozhou going to Wuyi?

Like, I thought this year would be the year of the Wuyi bros.

[00:37:09] Jason Cohen: I thought it was going to be the year of Wuyi. I thought all I was going to be talking about, all I was going to be drinking, all of the... everything was just going to be Wuyi, but it didn't turn out that way.

[00:37:19] Pat Penny: Emily, has hearing us talking about Chaozhou and dancong non stop, has that gotten to you a little bit?

Are you going to start buying some of these dancongs with us?

[00:37:29] Emily Huang: Jason has been very persuasive, pushingly about dancong stuff.

[00:37:35] Jason Cohen: You should acquire some Dancong.

[00:37:37] Pat Penny: Maybe more than we've been pushing Yixing even, honestly, while you're writing a Yixing book.

[00:37:44] Emily Huang: Yeah.

[00:37:45] Jason Cohen: I think we've surprised everyone that dancong's not going to be the next book.

It'll come. It'll come. I wonder if the dancong book is harder than the pu'er book. I don't think it is.

[00:37:56] Pat Penny: Famous last words.

[00:37:58] Zongjun Li: Yeah. Dancong is really a lifestyle, I feel like. And I think we ought to physically live there for a while to be able to actually write it.

[00:38:07] Pat Penny: I think we probably just need to change our Instagram handle, our URL. It just needs to change to Dancong Bros or something like that. Tea Technique is so last year. It's time to change it.

[00:38:19] Jason Cohen: It doesn't yeah, it doesn't,

[00:38:21] Pat Penny: It doesn't represent who we are anymore.

Okay, let me get this next question in here. Let's see. So this one's to you, Jason. Any advice on introducing antique wares into your practice if you're newer to tea, or if you're not swimming in cash like you, Jason. I think you've described in a previous episode how you're Scrooge McDuck, just swimming through gold coins.

So you want to talk about that a little bit?

[00:38:45] Jason Cohen: Yes. You can drown in the gold coins.

[00:38:47] Pat Penny: I'll recommend it.

[00:38:47] Jason Cohen: I'll need a snorkel. Yeah, how to buy antiques without money. There's actually, there's a great book that I keep by my side at all times called Confessions of a Poor Collector.

 Top recommendation. I highly do recommend.

[00:39:02] Pat Penny: I do like that your recommendation is to buy something though.

[00:39:04] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. Starting with the book, starting with the book Confessions of a Poor Collector. That's a book, I think it was published in 60s, 70s. It's a pretty old book.

Comes back into vogue from time to time. My recommendations and my experience in buying antiques is very similar to that recommendation. He's a much more renowned collector than I am, which is easy when you're collecting great European paintings. But the number one thing is don't buy maybes. To put it very glibly, there was a very well known collector who has tons of Klimts in his collection, and just a few Casa's, but the Klimts are really what he's about, and he said, every painting that he approaches he rates them into either oh, oh my, or oh my god, and he tries to only buy the third one, the oh my god. And I would say the same certainly holds true in yixing collecting that don't split your money and buy two teapots when you can pay more for a single great piece.

And be patient and be willing to wait for what you're looking for or what things come through. And buy exclusively from trusted sources. Don't take flyers on auctions unless you have experience knowing what you're looking for. Don't think you're getting a steal on eBay. The forgers are more experienced at forging than you are at collecting.

If possible, don't buy sight unseen for your first one or two. Or call someone who's bought from someone before and talk to them about what someone says it is and what they think it actually is. Try to reach consensus. Try to have individuals that you trust that have experience and try to use their wares. One of the reasons that I do that monthly tea gathering is specifically so that people can come and they can use these wares that I'm collecting. And I would say, there are things that I have purchased for this book that were not at that oh my god level, but they were filling gaps in a collection that I feel needs to be complete in order to write this book, and then I might consider deaccessioning after.

I hate the idea of giving up pieces of the collection, but there are certainly pieces that I don't think belong in that third category of great works.

[00:41:13] Pat Penny: So it sounds like people can reach out to you once the book is done and obtain some oh, or some, oh, my teapots.

[00:41:20] Jason Cohen: Yes, they can.

[00:41:20] Pat Penny: Yeah, I would just add for my little piece of flavor, I don't own nearly as many antique teapots as you, but for newer collectors, there are some good online resources. There are some trusted vendors. Just know you will be paying a markup but there are certainly vendors online who you can trust their antique wares.

We're not here to make vendor recommendations, so I'm not going to call them out here. But if you're following the Instagram tea scene, you've probably already seen a lot of their wares before. They're not of the caliber of many of the things that you can find if you have direct connections and you're paying more, but you can feel some reassurance and sleep well at night knowing that what you got is most likely the real thing.

[00:41:57] Jason Cohen: And look for private collectors. Look for people who you've seen collecting before, and you can always reach out on Instagram and say, is there anything you're willing to part with? A lot of people do, but they're not active sellers. They're not an active market.

 Also, great recommendation from The Confessions of a Poor Collector. There are three things that make people sell art. The three Ds. Death, divorce, and debt, right? And if you can find anyone with one of those problems...

[00:42:22] Pat Penny: Yeah, Jason, we, we all hope that your company works out, but if it doesn't, we've got some capital for you.

[00:42:29] Jason Cohen: A lineup of willing and ready buyers.

[00:42:33] Pat Penny: I've seen a couple of nice pieces. I've handled a few of your nice teapots.

[00:42:38] Jason Cohen: It's fine, Pat. You're in the will. He'll wait.

[00:42:40] Pat Penny: I will, yeah.

[00:42:42] Zongjun Li: Grab a number.

[00:42:44] Pat Penny: I don't know, Zongjun, I met him first. I might be ahead of you. We'll see.

[00:42:47] Zongjun Li: Oh. I see.

[00:42:49] Pat Penny: It depends on what the cause of death is, probably. There's some clauses in there.

[00:42:53] Zongjun Li: Huh.

[00:42:53] Pat Penny: Poisoning by tea? I think we're both out.

[00:42:57] Zongjun Li: Mao cha or another Wuyi trip.

[00:43:00] Pat Penny: Yeah, another Wuyi trip might do it. Another

Wuyi trip. The mao cha would do it.

[00:43:04] Jason Cohen: Another bit of songshu tartar.

[00:43:07] Pat Penny: I don't have any more appendixes to lose from that.

[00:43:09] Zongjun Li: This season of Christie's auction, relics of the Wuyi bros.

[00:43:15] Pat Penny: I don't know, I don't know who those people are. The Wuyi bros, I've never heard of them. Yeah, there we go.

Okay Emily. You've been a little quiet on here because I think some of these questions were very trip related and you weren't on the trip with us. So we've got one here that's not trip related.

What's been inspiring you all recently? And I'm gonna specifically put that towards the tea practice, so for your tea practice, what's been inspiring you either to learn or to try new things? How have you been getting motivation to continue learning about tea.

[00:43:43] Emily Huang: That sounds like a simple question, but it's actually really hard to answer because I think what inspires me changes all the time. From every chapter edit, sometimes I find this, hey, this seems pretty interesting. And then I spread out and then I look for that.

Sometimes it's more occasional where, you know, I might go somewhere, I might visit ri yue tan (日月潭) and then my tea would be very hongcha (红茶) heavy.

So it was really hard for me to answer what inspires me recently, I feel like it really depends on what I experience, and I like to change it up a bit. But I must say, the most inspirational part would be being a part of this team.

Getting to hear all these different experiences and trips to Wuyi or to upcoming trips, all that, very exciting.

[00:44:39] Pat Penny: Yeah, pit stop in Taiwan on the way to Wuyi again next year. Yeah, that makes sense to me though. I think definitely travel and whatever's happening recently definitely influences my tea practice as well.

I'm gonna pass it off to Zongjun. What's been inspiring you to learn and grow in your tea practice?

[00:44:55] Zongjun Li: Recently it has just really been digging of my old piles. After having more stationary set up, finally I can start experimenting out of these tea collections that I have piled up in the past few years and try to brew them and try to experiment them and try to see what's good, basically.

It's been fun. It's been a fun trip. All these teas serve as a little bit of a reminder, a piece of memory that I can think of when I drink them. That was great.

[00:45:26] Jason Cohen: Were you inspired at all by seeing the tea agriculture in Japan?

You had mentioned that once or twice that you had some stories about that. Is that inspiration or is the opposite of inspiration?

[00:45:35] Zongjun Li: It's not necessarily an inspiration. Most of the teas that I had in Japan were not that good. Especially for a lot of the sencha, or uh, fukamushicha.

Oh, not that good of my preference, first of all. People spend a lot of time trying to create this tea I, I do respect that. But what they have end up creating is something that's just so different from a Chinese tea drinker.

That I don't necessarily, I'm not really getting convert into those tea categories. Maybe except hojicha. Hojicha is its own world. And

[00:46:11] Pat Penny: I'm a hojicha bro too, don't worry.

[00:46:14] Zongjun Li: And that preference also applied to matcha too. There are some matchas that taste excellent, it's just phenomenal out of the world good, and for a lot of the matchas I think the whole consumer preference kind of has its own Sony moment.

It's so evolved for the domestic market that it's a little bit hard for the outsiders to get into very easily.

[00:46:39] Jason Cohen: I'm convinced matcha is a better flavor for baked goods than it is for drinks.

[00:46:43] Pat Penny: So my inspiration is almost the exact opposite of yours, Zongjun. I was in Japan a little bit this summer as well, not as specifically for tea, but I did go to quite a lot of tea shops. I think we've talked about at length in other podcasts our preference acquisition and how Japanese tea always felt like it was an area where we enjoyed the tea, but we never felt like we found things that rose to the level of a lot of the same products we were drinking in the Chinese tea world, or even in the Korean tea world.

I only feel now, this is 10 years after first moving to Japan, right? And Jason and I had gone to Japan 12 years ago. Being in the tea world for 14 years, I only feel like I've started to find really good Japanese tea in the last year or two, and so I did get a lot of great tea this summer, some of it thanks to Jason's recommendations, some of it some other shops I really like. And I have really been going down the Japanese tea rabbit hole, and as I mentioned up top, took that Japanese kind of fundamentals tea course which was good.

 I would recommend it for anyone who's just getting into Japanese tea. For everyone here, a higher level might be appropriate. But it did kick me in the butt to start studying, not the Japanese way of tea, not chanoyu. I don't think any, I don't think anything will kick me in the butt hard enough to start doing that again.

But to start really studying the teas themselves more. So I've really been going down that rabbit hole alot. And then in addition, there was a Northwest Tea Fest here just about two weeks ago. Saw a lot of friends and vendors, mostly in the kind of Chinese Taiwanese tea space, and just sitting down with a lot of people for a good amount of time having tea with them again. I think just relit the fire a little bit to keep pushing and learning more.

[00:48:18] Zongjun Li: To echo a little bit of your journey of finding good Japanese tea. I totally agree with that. Don't get me wrong, there are good Japanese tea out there for you to drink and try, but it's really hard to find them. Like the whole Japanese tea industry, it's so strikingly similar to Chinese tea industry. Like something that I learned throughout the trip is that there are only 1.6 percent of Wuji tea is actually made in Wuji. And all the other Wuji tea were like Kagoshima, like mass produced tea leaves that just end up getting processed in Wuji for it to be called Wuji tea.

It's just identical to how, like, all of these longjing (龙井) and biluochun (碧螺春) are made in China. They are all Guizhou tea or Sichuan tea, and they just end up being processed over there to be labeled as the region.

[00:49:04] Pat Penny: Taiwanese high mountain oolong, the same thing.

[00:49:07] Zongjun Li: Yeah, it's it's so interesting to see similar kind of phenomena, it's also happening in a different country. Definitely, you need to take some effort into finding those good teas. They do exist, but it's it's hard to find.

 Definitely not off from a tea shop, right after you get from a JR off,

[00:49:25] Pat Penny: Agreed. The stations have some great things in them. Maybe don't go to the tea shops in the stations.

[00:49:29] Zongjun Li: Yeah.

[00:49:31] Pat Penny: Yeah. Jason, did we give you an opportunity to answer this one?

[00:49:33] Jason Cohen: No.

[00:49:34] Pat Penny: Oh, we'll just skip you.

We're good.

[00:49:37] Zongjun Li: Bye.

[00:49:39] Jason Cohen: And that's all the time we have. I guess I have a, a three part ish answer to this. The long term inspiration, the things that keeps me writing day after day, are twofold. One is going back to places where we've been like Yixing or like Chaozhou and, having tea brewed for me, brewing tea for someone, discussing teas and really seeing a step up in the knowledge and the stature. Returning to Chaozhou this year and sharing tea with people.

There's certainly a recognition that comes with the frequency of the visits and the familiarity and then being, with everyone more comfortable, presenting theories and ideas or having presented theories or ideas last year and coming back this year and they're like, ah, we tried that.

That was a good idea. Even now, our friends in China who are living this every day are taking tea techniques seriously. And are executing some of the ideas that we have about experiments or about manufacturing techniques and things like that.

I think that's a real source of inspiration, that this isn't just new information or new codification in English. It's truly a new codification in Chinese as well. That's number one. Number two is some of the commission work that we're doing. I get really excited about that. We've said we have a new commission of Yixing teapots that's already done.

It just happens to be somewhere in the Chinese department waiting shipment to the U.S. So there's going to be a new set of Yixing teapots that are going to be very helpful in writing the next portion of the book. And then the last thing, I don't know if you guys want to comment on either of those things, but the very last thing that I'll mention, which is very minor and is a very short fleeting inspiration, is I don't use social media. Right? Pat runs the Tea Technique Instagram.

[00:51:28] Pat Penny: It barely runs it, but yes.

[00:51:30] Jason Cohen: The apps on my phone are encrypted text messaging and my personal and work email. And I don't really look at a lot of social media or anything, but I do, from time to time Nancy follows all of the tea people and I will scroll through and every once in a while there's just something that I'm sure is benign and supposed to be friendly and promotional and I just find it like pure rage bait. This is not correct, this is total fluff.

And this must be corrected. Thankfully, I don't have any desire to start flame wars off of Nancy's Instagram account. So I use, usually.

[00:52:05] Pat Penny: So you log into the Tea Technique one and start the flame war there.

[00:52:08] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Let's go bomb throwing from the Tea Technique. No, normally that inspires notes either that one day get written something in the book that's a, a direct refutation of something that I read or every once in a while I'll go on Cult of Quality for my less refined and more combative opinion pieces.

[00:52:27] Pat Penny: Very tangential. We don't have to talk about this for very long.

 But just talking about scrolling through Tea Instagram, I would say over the last year, I've noticed a lot more chuan xin diao (穿心铫). And this is something that we've been talking about for I don't know, 12 years and starting to see it pop up a lot. So I think we need to get a couple more entries in one of the books about it to just make sure that all these search engine optimizations pull up Tea Technique.

[00:52:48] Jason Cohen: I'm not saying that we started it, but we were talking about chuan xin diao before most people knew what chuan xin diao were.

[00:52:55] Pat Penny: We certainly didn't start it because somebody made chuan xin diao at some point, so they started it. But we're gonna, we're gonna claim restarting it in the the Western facing tea culture.

We've got just two questions left, and Emily, I know you have to leave really soon, so I'm gonna pass this question off to you, Emily. This is just a real lighthearted one from an Instagram follower. What stuff have you been either reading, watching, listening to what's been your recent piece of media that you've been engaged in?

[00:53:20] Emily Huang: Oh I've been watching some K drama on and off. And I have to say, I have to say I'm super into the export of K pop, including dramas and music, and everyone will know that, but I don't know if anyone in the audience is similar to me, where I look for concentrated summaries of these dramas on YouTube. And then I just

[00:53:50] Pat Penny: Because they've been going on for so long that you need the summary or

[00:53:53] Emily Huang: No it's just like I won't have to go through 16 episodes of stuff and then they would

[00:53:58] Pat Penny: You want the plot you want

[00:54:00] Emily Huang: I want the plot and then I watch it at two times speed. Yeah so a lot of my media algorithms would be those kind of summarized dramas or doggy, kitty YouTubers and that's most of my media stuff.

[00:54:20] Pat Penny: Yeah. We've all seen your cat pictures. Pretty cute. But that's Phu, right?

[00:54:26] Emily Huang: Panghu, yeah, he's a lot bigger. Fat tiger. Yes, he's an orange cat named Panghu, fat tiger.

[00:54:35] Pat Penny: So cute. So cute. Okay Emily, thank you for joining us.

I know you need to drive, so thanks for your time today.

[00:54:40] Emily Huang: Thank you.

[00:54:42] Pat Penny: Jason, Zongjun, gonna pass the same question off to either of you.

[00:54:45] Zongjun Li: I'll start. Recently, aside of all of my regular habits of reading and watching, I got into our urban exploration. Seeing all of these urban relics in the past few decades in China, it's amazing and I've been taking a lot of photos and reading a lot of photo taking techniques

[00:55:05] Pat Penny: Zongjun is holding up a camera, just so everyone knows.

[00:55:07] Zongjun Li: Yeah, and a lot of these diaries of people venture into these abandoned buildings and the history of these buildings, how they got built because of certain policies of the local government or certain construction sites being abandoned because of certain things happened to some companies and reading the history of the companies and we actually end up entering into a few sites.

And we're digging out, like, all these old records of like, how many concretes got imported on that day and when did it stop? And what kind of economic situation was at that time? It's very interesting. It's, it's a physical epitome of a piece of modern history in your head.

[00:55:47] Pat Penny: Very nice. That's pretty intense. It also sounds like a lot of those places would be haunted, but that's for you. That's for you to enjoy. Don't think about that when you go in them next time.

[00:55:56] Zongjun Li: Yeah,

[00:55:56] Pat Penny: Jason?

[00:55:57] Zongjun Li: Definitely getting some Tadao Ando vibe in all these concrete structures.

[00:56:03] Jason Cohen: Obviously I keep up quite a heavy pace of reading usually going through like four or five books at the same time. I have tea stuff, I have usually something on nonfiction. I just read Picasso's War, excellent book on the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Highly recommend, excellent book. Despite being titled Picasso's War, it actually has relatively little to do with Picasso. Picasso was the white whale of the Museum of Modern Art. It took them until World War II to be able to acquire Picasso pieces, and then I'm also reading cover to cover Modernist Cuisine which is 4, 000 pages.

[00:56:44] Pat Penny: More of a reference book for me, but

[00:56:45] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

So I like to read reference books, cover to cover. It helps me

[00:56:50] Pat Penny: And write them. You like to write them cover to cover too.

[00:56:53] Jason Cohen: Yeah. You can see, there's a theme here. Outside of that, I love cinema critique. I really love movies. You'd think I'd spend enough hours a day staring at a screen and wouldn't want to do more, and that's partially true. But there's something to me about movies that just find to be really amazing, and I have a Letterboxd that if anyone's truly interested in they can message me I'll give you my Letterboxd link where I review and rate movies on the side.

[00:57:20] Pat Penny: Hot take, Jason finds movies amazing.

[00:57:23] Jason Cohen: What do you mean? Too many of my movies are rated highly?

[00:57:26] Pat Penny: No, I mean you just watch good movies. That's what it is.

[00:57:28] Jason Cohen: Oh, yeah. Oh, I find amazing movies.

[00:57:30] Pat Penny: Yes, yeah, you also said I find movies to be amazing

[00:57:34] Jason Cohen: I do!

[00:57:34] Pat Penny: I thought that was one of the spiciest things you said

[00:57:37] Jason Cohen: Anyway, recently I've been watching a lot of movies with Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe and made during that era, and I find the plots to be more complicated, the dialogue to be more witty, the action to be more realistic, and you watch one of those versus, say, a contemporary Marvel film and you wonder did people really get that much dumber?

[00:58:01] Pat Penny: You mean the plot needing to be restated multiple times just in case anyone forgot what they were watching?

[00:58:08] Jason Cohen: There's a film reviewer who I like, the best critique that I heard is that the thing that went wrong in Hollywood is that we used to have grown ass adults writing movies for other individuals with life experiences and now we have inexperienced children writing movies for other inexperienced children.

 And it's a pretty searing critique on social commentary on the state of the world today, but it's hard to find too much fault in it when you see that most Marvel films are ranking in at like a four point something.

[00:58:42] Pat Penny: This is the greatest movie experience I've ever had. It made me think about life and deep stuff.

Okay well, I'll maybe take this down a notch and go a little more lowbrow with mine. Not immediately at least, I've been reading Moving Toward Stillness. It's a book on kind of martial arts philosophy. It's just an anecdotal book. It's just a fun little read, but that's been fun to read before bed.

Normally, I read sci fi, but I found it to be a little too engaging recently and needed something that can kind help me stop thinking before bedtime. So that's been good. And then moving into the low brow, I've been reading a lot of WebToons and Manga. One piece is still going strong.

A thousand plus chapters in there. And then on the music side, there's been one artist that I've really enjoyed over the last year, been into them for a much longer, but they've had a big break this year. They're called Bill Murray, not related to the actor in any way, shape, or form but it's a really fun group that basically combines some elements of heavy music, like heavy metal and more of the hardcore kind of music with a little bit of a hyper pop and a country twang to it.

It sounds like it shouldn't work, but it's really skillfully done and just super fun and if you watch any of their kind of live stuff they're just so much fun to see doing their thing so, I've been really enjoying that. Jason, I think you had one question that was submitted by email, right?

[01:00:00] Jason Cohen: Before we get there, I'll check out Bill Murray, that sounds interesting to me, but on the low brow or low brow high brow, or the highest brow the low brow that you were talking about, I've been reading Sandman.

[01:00:11] Pat Penny: Sandman's excellent. Neil Gaiman in general is excellent.

Graveyard Book was really fun. I just read that this year.

[01:00:16] Jason Cohen: I haven't read that, but I have been overwhelmingly impressed by Sandman.

[01:00:20] Pat Penny: Yeah. He's one of the best fictional authors of all time.

[01:00:24] Jason Cohen: Yeah. I don't know if that's highbrow or lowbrow, but it was amazing.

[01:00:26] Pat Penny: It's a book. Books are books.

It's a graphic novel. Yeah. it's not anime, it's not manga.

Yeah.

And I love those things, but you can admit what's high in lowbrow though. It's okay. . It's okay. I don't need to always be reading art books. It's alright.

[01:00:37] Jason Cohen: It's something you would like Zongjun. You haven't read Sandman, any Neil Gaiman?

[01:00:41] Zongjun Li: I have not, but I definitely,

[01:00:42] Jason Cohen: Oh, I think it's something you would really like.

[01:00:44] Pat Penny: Jason, I'm going to pass it to you for the last question.

[01:00:47] Jason Cohen: Do you have any Yixing teapots that you regret buying? To which I can say, yes.

[01:00:52] Pat Penny: I can also say yes, yeah.

[01:00:56] Zongjun Li: Yeah, the neon water polish, the green luni (绿泥) of

[01:01:00] Pat Penny: the lu-est of the ni.

[01:01:01] Jason Cohen: Yeah, I don't know, every once in a while I'll purchase something and use it and say what in the world was I thinking.

Really my only super bad purchase I guess my only really super bad purchase was I have a 80s F1 zini (紫泥) that is perfectly fine teapot, good for what it is. But for pairings and usability, I find that it's really a hongcha pot. And there's other teapots I prefer from that.

And then I bought a wuhui siting zhuni (焐灰思亭朱泥) that I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know why I did that. So I would consider deaccessioning either of those.

[01:01:41] Pat Penny: I of course also have multiple pots that I regret buying. Many of them were during the earlier parts of my buying time, so it's just tuition.

But I do have two pots that I think I was quite excited about when I bought them. It's not like they were crazy expensive, I thought that there was some provenance to it. And they have both, whether or not they are what they were said to be, they've both become hei cha pots because they don't do anything good for any other interesting teas.

[01:02:07] Jason Cohen: I don't need to get into my tuition pots. I wouldn't sell my tuition pots. I wouldn't deaccession those. I couldn't say to someone here, buy these from me.

[01:02:13] Pat Penny: I don't like them. They suck. Here you go.

[01:02:17] Jason Cohen: Yeah, these are not

[01:02:18] Pat Penny: Those are called gift teapots for your enemies.

[01:02:23] Jason Cohen: Best friends.

[01:02:25] Pat Penny: Zongjun?

[01:02:25] Zongjun Li: Yeah, I'm so well protected by my teapot purchasing senpai throughout the journey. But the only teapot that I think I will not buy again for practical purpose is a wuhui. I found wuhui teapot being very not versatile or practical with tea.

Like any other clay or finish can do a better job than wuhui. Basically you are charcoal roasting your very good geisha coffee beans. And it's going to taste like charcoal roasted coffee beans. And you can wuhui anything into wuhui. And the outcome is going to be the same.

[01:03:05] Pat Penny: Obviously there'll be more on the experimentation sections of the chapter, but we continue to experiment with wuhui and I've found very few pairings that I enjoy but none that can't be done better with a different clay or a different style of firing.

[01:03:20] Zongjun Li: Yeah, it does a good job with hongcha and shou pu'er, you can brew anything with hongcha

[01:03:26] Pat Penny: That's about what I'm using, yeah.

[01:03:28] Zongjun Li: Yeah, they taste pretty good.

[01:03:30] Pat Penny: Jason hates your charcoal comparison.

[01:03:33] Jason Cohen: I don't like charcoal comparison because the Japanese kissaten fresh charcoal roasted coffee with a fan. That stuff is amazing.

[01:03:39] Pat Penny: Age Sumatra.

[01:03:41] Jason Cohen: Yeah, 1992 vintage. How could you complain about that stuff? Café de l'ambre?

[01:03:47] Zongjun Li: Yeah, but that's kissaten, right? You're not using a wuhui, but a kissaten.

[01:03:52] Jason Cohen: I was making charcoal coffee. It's charcoal coffee.

[01:03:55] Zongjun Li: Charcoal coffee.

[01:03:57] Jason Cohen: Yeah, they do live charcoal roasting in some of the kissatens.

[01:03:59] Pat Penny: Okay, I think we're going to finish off here today, but definitely want to thank everybody who joined the stream, everybody who submitted questions. And Jason, I'm going to pass it to you for the usual closing remarks.

[01:04:12] Jason Cohen: Yes, thank you everyone for joining us in this edition of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations.

This will probably be our last AMA for 2024. Next year as we said we're gonna try to finish off the Yixing book and we're gonna go to Yunnan and start looking at writing the pu'er book. Thank you all. This is amazing to have you.