Review - Kamjove Tea Maker Revisited

This is a follow-up to this review!

Well, a couple of weeks ago I was invited by a friend to visit her at her daughter’s house in London. Naturally I was not about to go without my teas, so the Kamjove and my nice new little tea cup (which I shall review later) and a small selection of tea travelled with me. I’m fortunate to have known them for a long enough that they tolerate my little foibles.

So, how did it fare? I have to say that I was very pleased – it allowed me to keep making my nice teas while taking up very little space and making very little mess (I hope! At least, nobody complained). Having arrived mid afternoon, and leaving a little later the next day, I would say that this saw about a day’s worth of constant use – at least as much use as it would get over a day at work.

While the mechanism worked just fine – and even rinsing bits of leaves from under the filter wasn’t too hard – where it does have a problem is staining. Clear plastic parts and the filter itself are a magnet for tea stains and because you can’t disassemble it, you’ll have to look to soaking to solve that problem.

I’ve taken a rather old fashioned approach and used bicarbonate of soda. A heaped teaspoon went into the glass jug and then hot water was added though the filter until both the jug and mechanism were full – then I added another teaspoon to the filter chamber. After leaving it to fizz and soak for a few hours I came back and gave everything a good rinse and the parts a light scrub using a toothbrush (a very handy washing-up tool!).

You can see from the before and after pictures that the soak did the trick rather nicely. I doubt that the Kamjove will ever have quite the same gleam as it is did when brand new but this has done the job of making it look and feel clean and presentable again.

If the move to our new office goes ahead as planned, then the Kamjove may have to become a bit of a work horse – I drink a lot of tea – and so it shall probably require that I soak and scrub it this way every night after use. A small price to pay to enjoy my teas though.

Review - Menghai Dayi Golden Needle White Lotus Pu-Ehr Ripe 2012

Well, if I’m going to start looking at some puer teas on this blog, I should start with one that I really like – a lot.

I’ve mentioned in a previous post about the different varieties of puer and I’ll say again here that I really do like ripened puer, though I’m only really starting to explore these teas properly. This one is a solid, popular brand and one of the factories that created the ripening process in the first place – it is also one of the more costly and most subject to counterfeiting. Dragon Tea House has proven a reliable seller for me so far and so I didn’t mind spending out on a few of the big burnt biscuits from them to see what the fuss is all about. Of the two ripened puers from Dayi that I purchased, this was the most expensive at about £35 – however, it is a 357g cake which means that it is within my £10 per 100g quality price point. So it is not as costly as it might first appear and certainly a lot cheaper than some of their other teas.

Buying from Dragon Tea House does have an advantage over some other stores in that they do allow you to buy smaller quantities (either 10g, 100g, or the full 357g cake). So, if you aren’t sure that you want to spend that much in one go, either because of concern over cost or because you are unsure that you will like it, you can pick up 10g and try it out.

It is a rather handsome looking wrapper of cotton paper and on the reverse is the first of Dayi’s security seals with a hologram thread and separating segments.

Inside is an equally handsome looking cake of tea, a rich brown and sweet smelling.

And on the top side, another of Dayi’s security labels, this time embedded in the leaves.

The cake breaks apart easily, which is nice after I’ve had to tackle one or two that seem pressed to the point of fusion. The quality of the leaves is even throughout and there’s not much in the way of twigs and nothing by way of dust.

I have to say that from the first steeping I knew that I would be buying this brand again. This is a very tasty tea indeed and with the balance of flavour that I particularly enjoy in a puer – that is is a pleasant earthy base note with crisp bitter-sweet top notes. I also managed to get a lot of good tea from this.

It is easily worth the money when compared to other puers (and I’ll be posting reviews for quite a few here over the coming weeks – but I shall spread them out a little as I don’t want anyone to think that the blog has such a specific focus) and at a price I consider very reasonable for good quality. I dare say that I’ll be trying to buy another cake of this soon.

You can find this sold at Dragon Tea House

China - Silver Needle from High Teas

First off, I have to apologise for being a little behind it publishing my reviews – life has been catching up with me a little. I still hope to post around one review a week but I guess it was a little ambitious of me to think that I wouldn’t run into obstacles. This time I shall unashamedly blame my netbook and the hassle of cloning and installing a new solid state drive. It took a while but it is now zipping along nicely enough for me to be writing these reviews at work (outside of working hours), as I drink the tea, which should streamline my work-flow considerably.

So, without further ado...

There are two broad varieties of white tea: White Peony and this, my favourite of the two, Silver Needle. Naturally, preference is personal and a lot of folk prefer Peony for its fuller flavour but I have other teas to meet that need.

This example comes from High Teas, one of my favourite web based stores that keeps a good range at competitive prices. At £15.95, this is above my £10 per 100g price point for quality, so by my rules it has to earn that extra cost – I needn’t keep you in suspense about that though, I’ve purchased this many times before and can happily report that I’ll purchase many times in the future for a lot more if need be. This is tasty tea!

Aptly named, when you open the bag you find a downy pillow of long, silvery, feathery needle leaves that have a sweet and melon like aroma that is reflected in the flavour. There is a certain pleasure in pulling a small bundle of leaves away, and this is from the start, a very pretty leaf. For the aesthetes among you, making this tea is all pleasure.

As always, I do a quick wash and let the leaf ‘wake up’ as folk like to say these days, and then I brew this one rather lightly – as with so many teas, how long you brew it depends upon your own preference, so the watchword is always experiment. Brewed lightly though, it has a pale gold colour and a very delicate flavour, faintly sweet with, as mentioned, an almost melon like note to it. It is beautiful but also refreshing, lending itself to be either a keep-you-going through the day as you work tea, or a special relax and unwind at the end of the day tea.

If you are new to Chinese teas, like the idea of green tea but find it a little bitter or as one friend put it, too grassy perhaps, then a white tea like this is a good option for you to try. I cannot recommend this tea enough and High Teas have come through with a good quality example at a price that I’m happy to pay.

You can find it here.

Moral Landscaping

Sometimes you feel you have to air an opinion that will divide people’s opinion of you: either as someone they might agree or if not agree then debate with or, in this case, as the muddleheaded product of infantile and meaningless philosophy. But what the hell?! It is my blog and mine to do with as I please – so I shall set my pigeon among the cats...it shall either fly, get gobbled up, or perhaps simply be ignored.

There is a lot of wordage on the internet now over Sam Harris’ Moral Landscape Challenge – which is not surprising and this was surely the point of the exercise. With this simple and inexpensive gauntlet, Harris has purchased for himself and his book the sort of publicity that might have cost ten times the $2000 prize he had offered. It was a smart move on his part.

To be honest, I was not impressed with the book at all, any more than by his presentations that I watched on YouTube after reading it. It seemed all over the place, poorly structured and frankly, a bit of an anti-climax. My impression of the man was, I regret, of one who indulges in disingenuous dismissal, while neglecting the giants to waste time tilting at windmills.

Perhaps I’m overreacting but it it difficult not to react to so much hubris and arrogance, insulting more cautious minds while advocating torture and condemning opponents as stupid, all with the self assured manner of a cleric preaching to a congregation. As an atheist it troubles me that the likes of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are being seen by the public as the de facto representatives of atheists and the atheist movement – something that I suspect many religious apologists might welcome and encourage. But of course, they don’t represent me, nor a great many other advocates atheism.

It was no surprise to me when I read The Moral Landscape to find that it endorsed a form of utilitarianism. There is little that is original or exciting about Harris’ account of morality – save perhaps one element: his understated and under-defended response to Hume. His analytical response to the is/ought gap is something that I have some sympathy for and I suspect that something along those lines is going to be important to any coherent moral theory. But his answer is to say that we can only meaningfully value well-being as basic, dismissing any other suggestion as stupidity. From this he just assumes utilitarianism, taking the goal of moral action to be the maximum aggregate of well-being in conscious creatures. But like other utilitarians before him, I think that he has missed the target.

Well-being has much in common with other utilitarian goals, such as happiness, and pleasure. Unlike physical commodities, they are nothing without the people who experience them. If there are no people, there will still be gold and rice, albeit without their value - but there will be no well-being, not even the idea of it. Well-being only exists and can only intelligibly have value in the context of those who can be in a state of well-being.

I cannot meaningfully be asked to value well-being purely in and of itself because purely in and of itself it is nothing. Utilitarianism can however try to ask me to value the well-being of myself and of other people, which suggests a question: why should I value the well-being of other people, or even of myself? Harris might want to dismiss the question as meaningless (what else would I value as basic to morality?!) but that move would be difficult to defend as the question has a simple and obvious answer: because I value those people. What is basic to my morality is not valuing well-being somehow abstracted, but simply valuing people – the rest, their well-being, and their happiness, I value as a consequent.

On the other hand, Harris would have us value people based upon their utility for impersonally bringing about well-being and so he can indeed advocate torture with the ease that I cannot. Or to put it in Kantian terms, where I would value persons as ends in themselves, utilitarianism values them as means to an end.

Of course, making people (or subjects of experience, if we are to take a broader approach) basic to morality is not without its own limitations. But I think that the dream of such clearly guided decision making, with calculably right answers is the pipe dream of the utopian and one with its own sharp limits that get glossed over.

Harris actually acknowledges some of the challenges and limitations proposed by opponents of utilitarianism but does little to address them. One of these is the limit of our knowledge of consequences. Let’s allow Harris all other objections for a moment and consider the moral principle: Right action is that which will maximise the aggregate well-being in conscious creatures.

Our problem is that in practice, we cannot know what this will be – we simply cannot know all the consequences of an action over time, not of the one we might choose, nor of any alternatives we might consider. We could reply by saying that we can form an educated opinion as to what that action might be. However, we should note immediately that this requires we relativize the principle thus: Right action is that which the agent honestly believes, within the limits of his/her knowledge, understanding, and reasoning, to be that which will maximise the aggregate of well-being in conscious creatures.

This is still not enough. The point of the limit is that we cannot know all the consequences and so the answer, while it may in truth exist, is actually irrelevant to us. We might reply to this by saying that while we cannot know all the consequences, we can form an educated opinion as to what at least some of them may be over a limited period of time. This requires that we further relativize the principle thus: Right action is that which the agent honestly believes, within the limits of his/her knowledge, understanding, and reasoning, to be that which will maximise the aggregate of well-being of conscious creatures at a point of time that he/she honestly honestly believes, within the limits of his/her knowledge, understanding, reasoning, and imagination (forecasting the future requires at least some imagination), represents the optimal limits of his/her foresight (optimal because there must be a point at which our foresight becomes too unreliable judged against the useful span of time being considered).

Along with a fuzzy element to utilitarian calculus, this brings with it a not too subtle shift of focus. The goal of morality cannot be the actual maximum aggregate of well-being as we cannot know how to go about it: the answer is both unknowable and thus irrelevant to us. The focus of moral thought becomes the agent’s desire to maximise well-being in the world within the limited scope of his/her knowledge, understanding, and reasoning on at least two different levels. This does not rule out the role of science that Harris desires but it does change how we must judge actions. An action is not right or wrong universally but only so relative to the agent taking it – we cannot judge another’s actions wrong because in their shoes we would have known better and acted differently because we weren’t in their shoes and it is not on our understanding that the rightness of the action is to be judged.

Some terrorists may be so subjected to indoctrination that their reasoning is so impaired and their understanding so curtailed, that they may honestly believe within the principle given, that the right thing to do will be to bomb a public building full of civilians. We cannot judge that action wrong according to our understanding – it isn’t a choice that we are making. We may have to judge the action right for them, though equally we can still call it right for us to try and prevent that action, which is our choice to make and be judged by.

Of course, a limit of utilitarianism is not necessarily a criticism of it but then sauce for the goose, as they say...so I offer this by way of illustration in case you are tempted to cry limits to my gander.

And the future of this book? Well, as a work of philosophy, it doesn’t hold a candle to some other, better written, better informed, and more carefully considered works of utilitarian thought. As a work of popular science it doesn’t really work either – it isn’t really science: it’s substance consists of a poorly argued philosophical assertion as to what morality is, followed by the assertion that science can do a good job of informing it, something ethicists have been asserting for a long, long, time before Harris. It is certainly written to be a popular book though, and for an audience who want morality without religion but who also want it free of philosophy. To be very cynical – an audience that still wants its morality fed to it but from a different source that it feels happier with.

I would love to say that the ideas in this book will die away but they are not new ideas, they are dressed in modern language with a few new tricks of neuroscience in the mix but what we have here is still mutton dressed as lamb. It is tough and enduring. I would also love to say that such an impersonal and potentially totalitarian ethic will not gain purchase in society – but then, the impersonal and totalitarian ethics of some fundamentalist religions do just fine. Ethics like these promise what a lot of people want: clear instruction on how to live, meaning less responsibility in deciding how they should live, and a principle that is easier to care about than people (because caring about people really can be very, very hard).

Review - Milk Oolong

This is another odd one to pin down as there are a lot of folk with conflicting accounts. What everyone does agree on is that this is a Taiwanese Oolong, grown at high altitudes. After that, well, almost anything goes. One web store recounts this little tale:

“It’s said that it came about when the moon fell in love with a comet. The comet passed her by, as comets will do. The moon cried milky tears, which chilled the tea fields, withering the leaves and giving them a delicate creaminess. It’s been a rare luxury ever since.”

Which gives it the ring of something ancient – but really is just another example of modern orientalism as I’m fairly sure that this is a cultivar developed in the early 1980s.

Another site insists that the milky flavour must be natural because diary products are rare in Asia, while others say that they are all flavoured by steaming over milk. By whatever means it might be flavoured, there is a broad consensus that the tea has a natural silkiness but that flavourants are also sometimes used to create a more milky/vanilla taste and aroma.

I have limited knowledge of this one, so I can only review telling you what this tastes like and if it tastes any good. I have certainly had poor milk oolong in the past, one that had a milky/vanilla flavour that didn’t last beyond the second or third steeping and after that had a somewhat bitter greet taste that put me off trying another.

As it happened, Dragon Tea House had included a sample of their milk oolong in with one of my orders – I resisted trying it for a while but then caved in one adventurous date and gave it a go. I was glad that I did and promptly ordered a 250g bag that day.

It arrived in one of those vacuum packed bags so solid that it felt through the parcel like it might have been sent in a box. Cut open, there is a strong aroma, a little caramel but perhaps more vanilla. I didn’t steep the leaves for very long but long enough for a good flavour.

That flavour is silky smooth vanilla that does not, I’m happy to say, over-power the pleasant tasting oolong and what is more, it lasts steeping after steeping. The packaging says to expect at least six good steepings and it certainly manages that and more.

So, is it flavoured? Who knows! Do I really care? Not really, not if it tastes this nice. In fact, I find it relaxing and at once just refreshing enough – a very worth while tea and at about £13 for 250g, it’s at a very good price and is set to become a regular presence on my shelves. Recommended!

Visit Dragon Tea House here.

Review: Kamjove Tea Maker

This little device, with perhaps a little more refinement to its design, could be to Chinese tea what the cafetiere has been for coffee.

I picked up this one as a contingency – there is a planned move to another office (well, to be honest, it’s an ex-storage room that’s being converted), which will be possibly mean much smaller desks. If I have to retire my tray and other tea ware back to home use, then this might still allow me to continue making the teas that I want.

There is quite a range of these with different capacities and variations in shape and lid design. However, they all share the same basic mechanism. As a trial, I picked up the 200ml model for about £7. It comes with a little plastic tea scoop in a sturdy box that I think has had some additional packing added inside (these Chinese eBayers don’t hold back on packaging – whatever you are buying, no matter how delicate, it is going to reach you in in excellent condition).

The product consists of a glass jar with a plastic chamber that sits in the top half of it. The chamber has a filter at the bottom and below that, a covered aperture. You put the leaves into the chamber, then add your water and cover with the lid. Once the tea is ready, just press a little button on the lid to open the aperture, allowing the tea to drain into the jar below while the leaves remain in place for you to add more water for another brew.

This is an elegant solution but implemented with a couple of flaws and something that you need to be aware of: this is sold as a 200ml device and the glass jug is indeed able to hold that. However, about half it’s capacity is taken up by the upper chamber and that has a small than 100ml capacity. Essentially, this will make you enough for two regular Chinese tea cups or one larger one. If you want to brew a western cup of tea, then look to the larger sizes and keep in mind that whatever the size quoted, you’ll be making a little less than half that in tea.

The first flaw – at least it is as I see it – is that the chamber and lid are made from a cheap and I suspect rather brittle plastic that could be very easy to break. The second flaw, and one in the design itself rather than the materials, is that the chamber components don’t seem to come apart for cleaning – which means that if any leaves get below the filter (and they can certainly do that at the sides), then you can’t remove the filter to get them out. It might be a good idea to be careful not to use any small/broken leaf tea or the last of the tea at the bottom of the caddy with lots of tiny bits in it.

So, how does it fare in use?

The chamber sits very comfortably in the jar which is well made and has a handle securely fixed by a metal cuff. Into this I added a scoop of a very nice milk oolong (I’ll probably post that review next Saturday).

Now, I filled this just about to the brim and you’ll see that the capacity of the chamber is somewhat less than half of the 200mil capacity of the jar.

There was a little drip here and there into the jar, but very little and certainly nothing to be a problem – just enough to steam it up though.

The button pushes in with very little pressure but doesn’t feel delicate and in seconds the tea is in the jar, leaving the tea leaves behind for your next brew.

You should note that on this model, the lid only sits on top of the chamber, so you’ll want to hold it in place with a finger while pouring.

What you get is enough tea to fill two of my little tea cups – which is about what I get from my little gaiwans and that suits me just fine. For a larger tea cup, you would probably be best to get a 500ml model – perhaps £5 more, which is still a reasonable price I feel.

Finally, cleaning. I’ve mentioned that there is a little clearance between the side of the chamber and the filter. Rinsing proved sufficient to do the job of getting any little particles under there but I have to say that I would prefer that I could just take the filter out and get in there to do a manual job. Of course, it may be that I’m missing something really obvious – if you know of a way to dismantle it with damaging the thing, please, please, let me know!

My concerns may yet prove unwarranted in practice and I shall certainly write more about this family of devices in the future. As it is, at £7 together with a little cup and small flask, means that you can be brewing your first cup after less than £20 expense. In spite of this reservation, I have to say that I really like these little devices and if space is an issue for you, then you can’t go far wrong for this sort of money – just make sure that you get one large enough for your needs, I would guess that the volume of tea made is going to be about 40% of the quoted capacity. I hope that I’m not going to need to use this but after a try out, I’m confident that if it come to it I think this will do the job.

These are available from numerous traders on eBay - I made this purchase from Dragon Tea House (I believe in Shanghai). They post goods promptly and anything I've ordered has arrived in two weeks on the dot!

Update: You can read a short follow-up on keeping this stain free here!

What is Puer?

Puer tea is a bit of an odd subject with many opinions and very little consensus. This is a dark tea from Yunnan and from what I can discern, in the past it was usually pressed into bricks or cakes for transport (some tea was also pressed to use as currency). The pressing was carried out when the tea was in a raw, unprocessed state and over-time it developed into a darker tea. This ‘ageing’ may have taken place during lengthy transport and storage times. In the 1970s a couple of tea factories began maturing the tea more quickly using a controlled process of fermentation. Accounts say that this matured tea is not the same as the aged tea but it is ready to drink.

So now we have three broad varieties of puer: There is the raw (Sheng) puer, the aged dark (aged sheng) puer, and dark (ripe or cooked) puer. To add a little confusion, the dark puer is also sometimes aged to mature. These teas can be found either loose or pressed into various shapes, predominantly bing cha (flat round cakes, which I know as burnt biscuits), and tou cha (which I know as burnt buns).

The value and status of these is all a little muddled and uncertain. There is a lot of mystery and romance woven into this part of tea culture over recent years, often comparing cakes of fine puer to fine wines, aging and improving and gaining in value as they do. This is a very, very poor analogy – the ageing and improvement of wine is well understood chemistry, while the maturation of puer tea very definitely is not – nobody seems to agree exactly what the processes are that mature the tea, nor even the best conditions for storage to facilitate it, some requiring dry conditions, others requiring humidity. There is also something a bit odd in pressing the tea for ageing rather than as a finished product – while that would make it easy for storage and transport, a compacted cake must surely not be the best state for maturation by any means – be that by oxidation or fungus, or whatever else gets suggested. For sure, genuine aged cakes of puer fetch stunningly high prices but you’ve also little guarantee of what you are getting – the risk of counterfeiting aside, you cannot know the conditions under which the tea has been stored so that you could have something with a taste worthy of the price paid or which just tastes of muddy compost.

As mentioned, counterfeiting is a growing problem, to the extent that some commentators recommend avoiding the best known labels, focussing instead on less well known factories that command a lower price and so present less incentive to the counterfeiters.

I have never sampled a tea matured over any significant period but I do enjoy both the ripened puer and young raw puer (both of which have the virtue of being rather more affordable, though still seldom actually cheap if you want something really nice).

The raw tea tends to be very astringent and some people talk about it having an adverse effect on their stomachs, though I’ve never had a problem with it – but I do brew it very lightly. The aged product is supposed to mellow somewhat and while 7 to 10 years is still thought to be fairly young by some, it has gained a new, softer flavour profile. As it gets older than this, the tea takes on the characteristics of a darker tea, with a full bodied mellow taste.

I have toyed with the idea of trying to age some tea myself – there is a cupboard at the top of the attic stairway that might be reasonably suitable. I don’t plan to waste a fortune on cakes to put away but I may collect a few samples to try out every five years or so just to see. I’m tempted to call them my retirement teas – but truth be known, with the way things are in this country, I suspect that I shall retire in a box carried out of the office. Instead, I shall just think of them as 60^th and 70^th birthday presents to myself. Or, if they end up tasting awful, I’ll just call them failed experiments, chalk it up to experience, and be satisfied that it’s a mistake I won’t have enough years left to repeat. At the end of the day, there are so many uncertainties with ageing tea that my feeling is that it’s best not to too risk much on it – if you have a good tea, enjoy it now. A bird in the hand...and all that jazz.

To end this entry, and worthy of note anyway, there are very many varieties of mini tou cha now. These little single serving cakes are individually wrapped and very handy as travel tea. Unfortunately, a lot of these tend to be made from very substandard product, with a rather composty flavour – but I have purchased some good ones, so do look out for reviews in the future.