Monday, December 30, 2013

Yoheyy Nishio Live Painting, Lindee Hoshikawa Live Music

Yesterday I was really lucky to be at the live painting session (or should it be called a performance?) of Yohei Nishio at the Cafe Cesura, Bellevue.

The part which made this event stand out from a row of a similar art events around the city was that Yohei was painting Lindee Hoshikawa... while Lindee was singing.

.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Bourbon Chrismas thoughts.

One of the projects of this year I wanted to write about long time ago was the experiment of infusing tea with hard liqour.

It is uncertain whose idea it was, as I heard it from Shiuwen Tai (http://www.floatingleaves.com), but she refused to take credit for inspiring this project, so I'm assuming that that was a  Canadian Santa Claus sitting at her teashop at that time who invisibly slipped in this idea into the conversation during one of the tea club meetings.

For the project I purchased an old cask (seemingly unused, although in a quiet bad condition), seasoned it with straight bourbon and put in the roasted Iron Godess oolong, generously donated by Shiuwen.


As to the present moment it seems that the tea absorbed alot of bourbon flavor, probably even a bit too much, which makes me think of using black tea instead of oolong next time. Puerh for this project seems a bit too tricky because none knows how the bacteria cultures will react to the leftover moisture in the barrel. Also, using of the black (red) tea would decrease the level of disappointment of some people who think that adding alcohol to tea is messing up the tea antioxidants and nutrition; there is a tendency that people into tea tolerate additions/infusions,flavorings to red tea much better than to any other tea variety.

Planning to taste the tea around Chinese New Year, hopefully it will dry to the stable point at that time.


Saturday, November 2, 2013

SteamCon V 2013 Seattle



I got a little late with this post - the SteamCon V was this last weekend October 26-27th, but still. A quick review of the event with some pictures of those people who made it possible to happen both as staff and as attendees.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Northwest Tea Festival 2013

It seems like a good start-up for this blog to have a report from the NW Tea Festival as its first post.

The event seemed to be busier than last year, or maybe it's because I was working in crowd control and actually saw that line of people, at first, outside, and then inside by the ticket booth.
On Saturday people were coming as early as 9am and standing there waiting for us to open doors in order to get tickets for tastings and events happening at the Festival. 
Sunday morning was not as busy as Saturday - people started to form a line around 9:30-9:45am but it was nearly as instantaneously crowded as on Saturday.