Coffee and Tea: How the Taiwanese Ingest Their Caffeine

image from thatsweird.net

Currently, I work as a barista in Nova Scotia, so I thought it quite appropriate to make my next entry about coffee and tea. I can’t think of one country where neither are consumed, but the coolest thing about different cultures is that everyone drinks them very differently. Some are very ritualized (like Japanese green tea rituals) and some seem to be consumed with a strange combination of utility and art (see your local snobby Starbucks).

So I figured that Taiwan must have their own thing. As I found out, Taipei has no shortage of coffee and tea houses. I found what looks to be at least one hundred listed here – and that’s just in Taipei!

In this entry then, I’ll list a few phenomenons of tea and coffee that seem unique to Taiwan.

1) Bubble Tea

I may as well get the most talked about thing overwith. Bubble tea is outrageously popular in Taiwan. As it should be – it originated there.

Bubble tea bears a striking resemblance to any blended ice drink at Starbucks or Tim Horton’s, but if you look at the bottom you’ll see tiny “bubbles.” These are actually little pearls made of tapioca. This is topped with tea and cream, sealed with a plastic top and sipped through a fat straw.

You can get many different flavours of bubble tea, usually fruit flavours, and the tea is often green or black tea. As often is the case of popular commodities, no one can really agree on the tea house which first began making the presumably delicious drink.

According to Wikipedia, however, the drink came to Canada before it became popular in the United States.

2) “Old Man’s Tea”

Taiwan, like China and Japan, has a particular tea ritual which translates from lao ren cha to “old man’s tea.” I like that. Despite its misleading title, “old man’s tea” is practiced by the newer generation as well as the old. This is also referred to as Gongfu Tea ritual, which the Chinese practice as well.

This involves oolong tea, which I was pleased to hear, as I’ve been really into Oolong tea as of late, and apparently Taiwan in particular is known for their Oolong tea. Oolong tea – and I can tell you this from some previous research I did on tea – is a semi-fermented tea, more potent than white tea but less potent than green. Unlike white, green, and black teas, the recommended steeping time for oolong teas is 6-7 minutes (as opposed to 1-3 minutes).  At least this is the case in Western practice, and that’s just for tea snobs like myself.

image from squidoo.com

But anyway. I digress.

There is a pretty exceptional article here on Taiwanese tea culture, especially as compared to Chinese culture. It seems that the major differences are that Taiwanese people still insist on using a tea set (like the one pictured above) whereas the Chinese offer tall cups with tea leaves in the bottom. If you’re really curious about the whole ritual, I highly recommend the link above.

3) Coffee, anyone?

I found several interesting articles on Taiwanese coffee:

Monkey coffee: Taiwanese farmers find coffee beans that monkeys have spit out (because they could cause indigestion) and use them to make gourmet coffee. It’s like selling the seeds your cousin spit out while enjoying his watermelon for three times the price.

Salty Lattes: A Taiwanese chain coffee house is selling lattes with sea salt in them, which apparently brings out the flavours in the coffee, and they’re trying to score big in the U.S. coffee market with their unique product.

Aside from some of the weirdness, I have read that Taiwan is particulary heavy with the coffee culture, according to this article – which was interesting but not particularly informative.

To conclude, unsurprisingly, Taiwan has an exceptionally interesting coffee and tea scene, and it has given me yet another reason to bounce in my seat in excitement to go. The autumn can’t come soon enough.