of the Lazy Literatus

Month: February 2021

Memories of Mandal Gaon

Mandal Gaon is a village in the state of West Bengal, India—in the Darjeeling region. Like many villages in the area, the inhabitants are mostly of Gurkha descent; a Nepalese ethnic group brought over to India by the British to work the newly planted tea gardens. Since then, over the course of time, the towns they occupied also became hubs for individually owned gardens. While they rarely produced tea themselves—save for private consumption—they did provide fresh tea leaf for plantation factories.

Mandal Gaon had one such plot run by Mr. Moktan. Toward the end of the 20th century, as Indian tea planatation laws grew more lax, private growers “cropped” up. Moktan was one of them, changing out his potato and corn fields for tea garden space. Situated at an altitude of 5,500 feet, and with the benefit of Darjeeling weather, he planted close to 8,000 small leaf sinensis chinary.

Image owned by Tea Leaf Theory.

My Ass-Backwards Journey with An Ji Bai Cha

Over the course of years, I’ve had strange relationships with many teas. I’m kind of a steep-slut that way. But none have been as ass-backwards as my journey with An Ji Bai Cha.

Image owned by Seven Cups

A Year of Weird and Wonderful White Teas

Toward the end of any year, content creators, influencers, media pundits (social or otherwise) are encouraged to create look-backs or listicles of the year-that-was. Throughout my long and industrious “career” as a tea blogger, I’ve made such reflections in the past. Usually commenting on how weird the year was, or how wonderful some aspect of it turned out. 2020, though . . . ?

Yeah, I don’t wanna.

It was a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE year by all objective measures. I won’t even go into detail as to why, I don’t have to, most of you reading this have felt the “Terrible” in your own lives. While I got away from feeling most of the brunt of 2020, my mental state did not. To the point where I took an unintended hiatus from writing anything for close to three months.

The result of that was a rather unwieldy backlog of tea stories I had yet to tell. Some I may not even get to, come to think of it. So, to close the year out (almost a month after it ended), I thought I’d egress—not with a story—but with a theme. For you see, over the course of the year, something(s) weird and wonderful did chance by me. White teas, quite a few weird and wonderful white teas.

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