Tea Time for Sarah

"'The Bay Area is the center of the current tea renaissance. No other city has
this range and depth."

I love seeing stories like this in the Chronicle. This is a huge piece about serious tea shops in the Bay Area, where you can do and sample one of hundreds of carefuly picked, shipped and stored varieties. I love doing this, especially at the original Chinatown Imperial Tea Palace. It was a revelation to me that the proprietor actually is aging his own puer collection in a 40,000 sq foot warehouse. I love making puer tea - the stuff smells like musty hay in the most pleasant way possible. And the effect of drinking it is unlike any other caffeine effect - it actually makes my head feel like a gentle balloon is being inflated inside.

I have to thank Stanley, the proprietor of the erstwhile cafe in my Embarcadero office building, for first introducing me to puer. He leaned across the counter like a drug dealer and said, psst, wanna try something different? That always gets me going. He showed me a little bell-shaped pellet about the size of a thumbtack, wrapped in thin white tissue paper - a tuocha, or compressed nugget of tea. The resulting brew was thick and dark and refreshing in a way tea had never been for me before. I was hooked. I paid a premium to get this stuff over the internet for a while, and to my delight you can now buy it in the regular tea section at Andronico's. I love this town.

Tea's time / Bay Area artisan teahouses offer tastes to rival the complexity of fine wine