Hello All,
My computer ace friend, who is now in China, were having a conversation
about a month ago over tea about starting our own tea site. He had the
rather brilliant idea of starting a wiki for tea. This lets folks
submit entries on teas they've tried, complete with pics. We've gotten
a start on it. Before I can do more, I need a digital camera. Steve (my
friend and proprietor of said site), being in China and possesing a
digital camera, will, I hope, make some good contributions. We've
gotten a start with two teas. The descriptions and pics aren't great,
but we hope to improve it. Once I clear it with him I'll post the link.

Does anyone know of something along these lines that already exists? I
think the format works well for bringing together tea enthusiasts.

Regards,
Nico

HI Nico,
I think your ideas cool. And you want to start a wiki site?

we already have wiki tea sites and the tea wiki is a featured site
recommended by wiki, here is my own link and the tea wiki that i help
on i translate the names/words of tea into english and some back to
chinese to check the validity of the tea classification. Since if we
are talking about a tea grown it china of course the chinese name will
be the original name, this helps in spotting duplicate names..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu-Wo_Tea_Ceremony

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea

we already have wiki tea sites and the tea wiki is a featured site
recommended by wiki, here is my own link and the tea wiki that i help
on i translate the names/words of tea into english and some back to
chinese to check the validity of the tea classification. Since if we
are talking about a tea grown it china of course the chinese name will
be the original name, this helps in spotting duplicate names..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W u-Wo_Tea_Ceremony

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T ea


What my friend and I are working on is a Wiki site to which people can
submit entries for teas they have tried, and which other people can
edit and add to. I haven't seen anything like this yet.

I think tea newbies would benefit from a survey of different teas and
methods of preparation, etc. Chinese folks who contribute to this forum
may not realize how difficult it is to learn about and aquire good tea
in the US and other non-Asian countries. Mediocre tea is plentiful.
Even when you can get good tea, it's not easy to find straight forward
info about it and to find people to talk to about it. This is
especially the case which Chinese tea, which I hold to be the best, and
is slowly gaining popularity in the US.

I realize this forum does a lot of that, but what is missing, I think,
is a structured layout of different teas and tea types, methods, etc.
The openness that wikis provide allows experts from around the world to
contribute. I would love to have some Chinese people help out here. I
will provide more updates as the project comes along.

Nico

i know what you mean about america and tea, they/we gotta long way to
go. i live in asia and the US so when i am in asia i get my teas, with
the internet now it make it easier at least than 10 years ago to get
teas. getting back to your project, is it on the internet if it is not
put some of it up and we can take a look i have seen some sites that do
reviews on teas, one was an asian girl, cute pic. but really she was
doing reviews the problem with most sites is the are so commercial, try
my site for tea info... its not that much but at least i aint selling
tea!!!
http://teaarts.blogspot.com/

also if you need some help once you get something i can see i would be
glad to help. i just dont like getting involved in stuff that doesnt
go through. also i think danny would be good for the chinese
translations for the teas....i guess i or we should ask him first
hahahha////

-icetea

also if you need some help once you get something i can see i would be
glad to help. i just dont like getting involved in stuff that doesnt
go through. also i think danny would be good for the chinese
translations for the teas....i guess i or we should ask him first
hahahha///

Thanks,
The reason I haven't given out the link yet is because my friend and
not I am the webmaster of the host site, and I need to coordinate the
next steps with him. I will let everyone know as soon as I've
corresponded with him.

The place to share information about tea is REC.FOOD.DRINK.TEA.
Anybody or anything else is just pretenders. The information in this
group from the past ten years would choke a server. In most cases a
Wiki topic is better than nothing but not by much. The topics would
probably be nothing more than something about someone's favorite tea.
There's no such thing as mediocre teas just one's you don't like.
Price is not one of the four given tastes your buds are able to detect.
Blogs will replace Wiki because the author has the vested time and
interest. I'm waiting for the first IPOD cast about tea. I'm from the
old school of 'letters'. Dancing icons on webpages doesn't do it for
me. I probably wouldn't tune in on a webcast of anyone making tea in
their kitchen. I saw Martha Stewart do that once and she got
everything ass backwards. To help the newbies learn about tea it'll
have to be in Chinese because there are more of them. The rest of the
world knows more about tea than someone at Starbucks. My only advice
to newbies it's your tastebuds and anything else is just idiosyncratic
personality quirks and probably people with too much money to spend. I
just sent my brother two kilos of different commercial teas not costing
much more than a penny/gram and told him to have fun. I included a
couple of the asian 700ml treated shock quartz glass pots with metal
infusers which didn't cost more than a couple of bucks each. Babelfish
can translate any Chinese tea term characters I throw at it. I wished
it could handle pinyin terms. I get the clue from sites like TaoBao
and Ebay and store them in a simple Notepad file with utf-8 encoding.
I think the forest of teas from China are known in the West. It's just
the trees that sometimes get in the way. The earliest reference I have
to puerh for example is The Culture and Marketing of Tea, C.R. Harler,
1956, Oxford Press which I previously mentioned. It was the second
edition 10 years after the first. I don't know if puerh was mentioned
in the first post war book. What I learned about tea over the decades
was from my own purchases in stores and hitting the stacks for
additional information before Usenet. I'm using Ebay and Chinapost to
fill in the holes of my desired representative architectural collection
of puerh. Anything else I can find locally. If you can make a pot of
tea then our tea knowledge only differs in minutia.

Jim

Nico wrote:
we already have wiki tea sites and the tea wiki is a featured site
recommended by wiki, here is my own link and the tea wiki that i help
on i translate the names/words of tea into english and some back to
chinese to check the validity of the tea classification. Since if we
are talking about a tea grown it china of course the chinese name will
be the original name, this helps in spotting duplicate names..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W u-Wo_Tea_Ceremony

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T ea


What my friend and I are working on is a Wiki site to which people can
submit entries for teas they have tried, and which other people can
edit and add to. I haven't seen anything like this yet.

I think tea newbies would benefit from a survey of different teas and
methods of preparation, etc. Chinese folks who contribute to this forum
may not realize how difficult it is to learn about and aquire good tea
in the US and other non-Asian countries. Mediocre tea is plentiful.
Even when you can get good tea, it's not easy to find straight forward
info about it and to find people to talk to about it. This is
especially the case which Chinese tea, which I hold to be the best, and
is slowly gaining popularity in the US.

I realize this forum does a lot of that, but what is missing, I think,
is a structured layout of different teas and tea types, methods, etc.
The openness that wikis provide allows experts from around the world to
contribute. I would love to have some Chinese people help out here. I
will provide more updates as the project comes along.

Nico

jim nice post, the only thing i can add is if possible dont use a metal
anything and stick to glass or clay/porcelain ceramic, also use a
teapot with no infuser and pour over a strainer (again if possible not
metal but metal will work because it is not in contact long) then it
goes into the tea pitcher, (hope danny doesnt see me writing
'pitcher')hahhaha. the reason to skip the infuser is it cramps my
style,,,,i mean the tea's infusing/infusion.
icetea

I'll bother to reply to this when I'm able to discern what you're
talking about.

I'll bother to reply to this when I'm able to discern what you're
talking about.

To clarify, the above comment was directed at Jim.

To clarify again, I'm not looking to suplant this forum, which I am
certainly in no position to do, but rather to have a little space for
people to share their tea experiences in a forum whose structure would
make it accessible.

The place to share information about tea is REC.FOOD.DRINK.TEA.
Anybody or anything else is just pretenders.

Jim, I honestly don't know what I have done to provoke this antagonism,
but I view it, frankly, as incredibly childish and not worth any
further consideration. I certainly won't be intimidated, which is the
only rational for this that I can make out.

Nico

I think tea leaves need room to dance. The infuser is a compromise.
It gets the leaves out of the pot. I used the same clay Chinese pot
with clay infuser and bamboo handle at work for 20 years. It was
relatively shallow so you had to 'top' the pot for the infusion. After
the first cup no more brewing. I'd dump the leaves on a napkin, fold
and put in waste basket. It was no problem for cleaning services.
That was work. At home no infusers anywhere. I use a strainer or a
tea sock. Mostly my modified tea press where the strainer has been
retrofited to the lid and only comes into play when pouring. Sort of
an external strainer in the pot. I enjoy the agony of the leaves which
is why I only use glass for the pot. I like the British cup strainers
which fit on the tea cup rim so you can use two hands for the pot.

Jim

sherdwen wrote:
jim nice post, the only thing i can add is if possible dont use a metal
anything and stick to glass or clay/porcelain ceramic, also use a
teapot with no infuser and pour over a strainer (again if possible not
metal but metal will work because it is not in contact long) then it
goes into the tea pitcher, (hope danny doesnt see me writing
'pitcher')hahhaha. the reason to skip the infuser is it cramps my
style,,,,i mean the tea's infusing/infusion.
icetea

"Nico" writes:

[...]

To clarify again, I'm not looking to suplant this forum, which I am
certainly in no position to do, but rather to have a little space for
people to share their tea experiences in a forum whose structure would
make it accessible.

In what way is RFDT inaccessible?

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html

Lewis 9/6/05

"Nico" writes:

[...]

To clarify again, I'm not looking to suplant this forum, which I am
certainly in no position to do, but rather to have a little space for
people to share their tea experiences in a forum whose structure would
make it accessible.

In what way is RFDT inaccessible?

/Lew

Just think, Lew. With his own forum, Nico could pick and choose among those
who want to participate. He could cut right to the wheat, and chuck the
chaff. Of course, he will be lonely, but what they hay.

Michael

You don't have too. It is one of my stream of consciousness tea rants
brought on by lonely bloggers,webmasters,portals looking to generate
traffic for their own special interest. I give you Usenet is media
challenged. But for a discussion group we can hold our own while
Google never forgets and everything else is trash blowing down the
street. The only reason I stick around is this curmudgeon still can
learn a thing or two about tea. I'm sitting on the sofa drinking
another cup of Xiaguan Iron Cake. I've noted the taste of the single
note versus the complexity of others in another post. It stuck me it
is the taste of camphor from a recent cooked crop so I don't have to
spend my money on old stuff.

Jim

Nico wrote:
I'll bother to reply to this when I'm able to discern what you're
talking about.

Hey, Michael, pull out your old album of the Velvet Underground with
the Banana. That Nico is the same gender (I think).

Jim

Michael Plant wrote:
Lewis 9/6/05

"Nico" writes:

[...]

To clarify again, I'm not looking to suplant this forum, which I am
certainly in no position to do, but rather to have a little space for
people to share their tea experiences in a forum whose structure would
make it accessible.

In what way is RFDT inaccessible?

/Lew

Just think, Lew. With his own forum, Nico could pick and choose among those
who want to participate. He could cut right to the wheat, and chuck the
chaff. Of course, he will be lonely, but what they hay.

Michael