#phoenix contains multitudes and that's what's so interesting about him
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Hey I have a question for you if you ever end up writing more meta on wandlore. In book 7 Harry's wand spits flames at Voldemort. The explanation we're given is that it imbibed some of his powers in the graveyard. The problem is it didn't react to him like this when Harry faced him in book 5. I think this is just a plot hole on JKR's part but from an in-universe POV do you have thoughts on what could have caused this? Only thing I can think of is either that Voldemort briefly possessing Harry in book 5 further linked them and/or that in book 5 Harry didn't even try to defend himself because he was taken by surprise and thus didn't try to do anything before Dumbledore intervened. Interesting to hear your ideas.
Hi!
This is a really fun ask, I love me some wandlore! That and one of my favorite pastimes is solving JKR magical plot holes by figuring out the magical theory she didn't think all the way through.
So, the first thing I did was compare the two scenes you mentioned. This is the one from book 5:
“I have nothing more to say to you, Potter,” he said quietly. “You
have irked me too often, for too long. AVADA KEDAVRA!”
Harry had not even opened his mouth to resist. His mind was
blank, his wand pointing uselessly at the floor.
(OotP, 813)
This is the one from book 7:
It was over: He could not see or hear where Voldemort was; he glimpsed another Death Eater swooping out of the way and heard, “Avada—”
As the pain from Harry’s scar forced his eyes shut, his wand acted of its own accord. He felt it drag his hand around like some great magnet, saw a spurt of golden fire through his half-closed eyelids, heard a crack and a scream of fury. the remaining Death Eater yelled; Voldemort screamed, “No!”
(DH, 58)
Now, honestly, you're right, if the magic imbued Harry's wand in the graveyard I'd expect it to react to the killing curse Voldemort casts in book 5 the same as it did in book 7. And clearly, it does not. Even when it's the same situation, same spell, same enemy, Harry can't defend himself (if for different reasons). In both, his wand isn't even aimed at Voldemort at first at all.
So, I started wondering what is different between the scenes. Clearly, the situation is almost identical, so what difference could affect how Harry's wand reacts?
And then it hit me: Voldemort's wand.
In the first scene, in book 5, Voldemort is using his own wand, yaw and phoenix feather, brother wand to Harry. In the scene in book 7, the wand Voldemort uses is Lucius'.
So, my theory is that Harry's wand reacted differently because Voldemort wasn't carrying its brother, but a different wand.
So, with this in mind, let's try to explain what Harry's wand is doing and why.
The explanation we get in the books is that the Piori Incantatum in the graveyard essentially "charged" Harry's wand against Voldemort specifically:
“I believe that your wand imbibed some of the power and qualities of Voldemort’s wand that night, which is to say that it contained a little of Voldemort himself. So your wand recognized him when he pursued you, recognized a man who was both kin and mortal enemy, and it regurgitated some of his own magic against him, magic much more powerful than anything Lucius’s wand had ever performed. Your wand now contained the power of your enormous courage and of Voldemort’s own deadly skill: What chance did that poor stick of Lucius Malfoy’s stand?”
(DH, 600)
But I already mentioned here, that I don't think this scene is the real Dumbledore. So, I'm not sure how much faith can be placed in this explanation, especially since when Voldemort carried the brother wand, Harry's wand didn't shoot out golden flames.
(As an aside, I don't think wands can sponge up magic like that at all...)
But I think Harry's subconscious is right about the flames resulting from the multitude of magical connections between Voldemort and Harry. After the graveyard, they are, like, crazy magically connected. We've got:
Soul - Harry has a piece of Voldy's soul because he's a Horcrux
Blood (spirit) - Voldemort used Harry's blood in his resurrection ritual so their lives are bound to each other.
Magic - wands share a core.
And I'm going to forgo talking about the prophecy for this, but it's kind of bonkers how many layers of magic are binding them. And I think this is the key to it all.
So, essentially you have two wizards, that for the intent and purposes of magic, are as close as kin as possible. By soul and spirit, they are an extension of each other. So certain magic (like Lily's blood protection that is based on blood) probably sees Voldemort as an extension of Harry or vice versa. But they are not the same, as Dumbledore said in OotP: "but in essence divided", and other magic can recognize that (like the Elder Wand).
And the wands know this. Voldemort's yaw wand and Harry's holly wand are referred to as brothers, and I think that name is quite telling. Brother wands don't seem to want to fight each other, they share a core so they aren't meant to turn on each other, they are kin, extensions of each other. This is why the Priori Incantatum happened in the graveyard — to stop them from fighting. And if Harry cast a spell in the ministry in OotP, it would've happened again.
I think that first Priori Incantatum did change something and mattered for what happened in book 7. It basically was like an introduction. Afterwards, Harry's wand can recognize Voldemort, his magic, and his wand.
What I think happened with Lucius' wand is not far from Harry's subconscious explanation. The wand recognized Voldemort as Harry's kin, an extension of Harry himself, but he was carrying an unfamiliar wand - an enemy wand. I think the combination of kin with an unfamiliar wand is what caused it. Kind of like a jealous sort of "Harry isn't supposed to be with another wand". The yaw wand was fine because it shared the same core, the wands are connected just like Voldemort and Harry, so the brother wand wouldn't register as a threat.
For the holly wand, being attacked by an extension of Harry with an unfamiliar wand, felt off. Wrong. The magic felt wrong like it was 3 inches too far to the left. And I think that's what it reacted to. To the sense of wrongness that comes with seeing a familiar person somewhere, they really shouldn't be. This whiplash, I think, is what registered as a threat to the holly wand.
We know some wands can be sentient to this degree. Sycamore wands, burst into flames when they get 'bored':
It is a quirk of these handsome wands that they may combust if allowed to become ‘bored’, and many witches and wizards, settling down into middle age, are disconcerted to find their trusty wand bursting into flame in their hand as they ask it, one more time, to fetch their slippers.
(from Pottermore)
Hazel wands die with their masters:
so devoted to its owner that it often ‘wilts’ (which is to say, it expels all its magic and refuses to perform, often necessitating the extraction of the core and its insertion into another casing, if the wand is still required) at the end of its master’s life
(from Pottermore)
So I think it's completely in line with what we know about wands that Harry's wand would get protective when something in Voldemort's magic feels off due to the unfamiliar wand. On the same page about wand woods holly wands are said to be very volatile and protective, so the behavior fits its personality. I think Harry's wand is protective of him and acts up to protect him when it recognizes it needs to. Voldemort and Harry's connection along with Voldemort using a different wand registered to the holly wand as a threat it needs to protect against.
TL;DR
Harry's wand recognized Voldemort as a kin of Harry. Voldemort's wand is its own kin, and therefore not a threat in OotP. The moment Voldemort, whom Harry's wand now recognizes, used an unfamiliar wand (Lucius' wand) Harry's wand registered him and the unfamiliar wand as a threat and reacted to protect Harry. The magic flames shot out were its own, not Voldemort's sponged-up magic.
At least, that's my theory.
#asks#iamnmbr3#hp#harry potter#wandlore#wizarding world#hollowedtheory#hp meta#harry potter meta#harry james potter#voldemort#hp theory#harry potter theory
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so I was late to asking u things and I don't want u to have to repeat yourself so answer all the questions in the thing that you haven't already answered thank u 😌
the way I had to pull out my laptop to answer these bc I couldn’t keep them straight on my phone clipboard................ fdskjfsdkj I think I’m gonna put most of these under a read more so they don’t take up too much dash space. thank u!! <3
zinc white; how are you really feeling today? no one-word answers please!
honestly I’m great! it is currently almost 2 in the morning but my day was nice, I got some new clothes, did my laundry, made a good dinner...good vibes all around, loving it for me rn
yellow ochre; name an artist/band whom you just discovered & can’t get enough of!
I haven’t really listened to a lot of new music lately dkfjskj I think the most recent new artist I started listening to was orville peck?? but that was back in like february
naples yellow; where do you feel most at home?
uhh when I’m at home. yes I’m a homebody <3
raw sienna; with whom do you feel most at home?
truly it’s with the thots I just feel so at ease
golden ochre; describe the relationship you have with your closest friend.
it’s just easy, u know? like no matter what we’re doing, even if we’re just vibing on our own together, it’s nice. I can tell them absolutely anything and it’s not weird and I don’t have to force it out at all
cadmium orange; what do you like to do on your days off?
ok first I always see if any of my friends are busy fkdjsfkj and if they aren’t I see if they wanna just chill or w/e but otherwise just like. turning some music up and sitting in my room with a book/a couple movies I love is ideal for me on a day off. I am very simple I just like to chill
orange lake; do you have anyone you can turn to when you’re sad?
yes! there are two whole people in this world that I spill absolutely everything to bc I trust them with my life and esp when I’m sad bc they always make me feel better. talking to them when I’m having A Day is like I vent and instantly I am normal again. they know who they are I’m sure but for transparency’s sake, it’s u (robin) and maya, no one else gets to unlock my tragic backstories <3
titans; do you prefer slow mornings or relaxing evenings?
relaxing evenings!
shakhnazaryan red; are you currently binge-watching anything?
actually I am currently rewatching cycles 1 through 22 of america’s next top model, I’m on like cycle 5 rn I think. having the time of my life, thanks for asking
red ochre; are you more right-brained (creative) or left-brained (analytical)?
I am very much more into creative endeavors, like work-wise, but I feel like the way I think about things is much more analytical. like I prefer Making things, writing or various crafts or what have u, but even when I create I think about the things I’m doing like analytically?? so ig left-brained
burnt sienna; is there a painting that brings you peace when you look at it?
boy with squirrel by john singleton copley. I love him
english red; what animal do you relate to most?
interesting question! I have no idea. maybe birds? like a finch, maybe. they seem like they have fun
cadmium red; do you have a “type” when it comes to a significant other?
this one is hard for me to answer bc like. I truly have no idea what a “type” is idk if that’s an ace thing or what. no? maybe? all the people I’ve had crushes on have been vastly different, in terms of like physical looks so probably not actually. I’m not attracted to muscular people tho bc I don’t think they have feelings <3
carmine; what does your ideal second date look like?
once again I have never pictured a date. I just want to hold hands! I think for the ideal first date question I said it just had to be going somewhere where we could Do things together, like walking around a museum or going through shops downtown or something, and that does still apply here, but for the sake of shaking it up, uhh...idk maybe staying in and watching a movie. like not at a theater no one needs to know my business like that but like. at a House. whoever’s, I’m not picky, again ideally I just want to hold hands.
madder lake red; would you ever kiss someone (or accept a kiss) on a first date?
yes. literally if the first thing u do is kiss me I am okay with it. I’m 23 someone just take the shot and kiss me already I’m going crazy over here
quinacridone rose; what’s something you’re really looking forward to?
really looking forward to the holidays personally I got everyone some really good gifts this year and I can’t wait to hand them out. also my copy of 13 storeys is supposed to finally ship out this week, for real this time! so that’s exciting too
violet rose; what does your dream house look like?
u know that idealized house with the yellow paint and the white trim? yes. just small and cute and homey
violet; is there any place in particular you’d like to settle down?
I guess not?? I’d like to be somewhere near my mom bc she’s important to me but like. as long as I’m living with someone I love it doesn’t really matter where I don’t think
blue lake; what would you like to do/accomplish before you settle down?
uh. settling down to me equates to like falling in love and living together so honestly that could happen any time. I need to get a job before we live together so I can like Help Out but like. really any time
cobalt blue spectral; what is the most beautiful place you have ever been to?
I have not been to a lot of places! I’ve been to new york, and san diego, and like. phoenix outside of where I live so. actually if I can include like buildings in places I would like to say that one opera house I went to in new york. I learned I wasn’t a fan of operas BUT I also learned those chandeliers were cool as hell
ultramarine; when was the last time you were in a good mood? do you know/remember what sparked it?
I’m usually in a good mood, I think? my baseline mood is genuinely just like. happy/chill, pero I think the last time I felt Euphoria (tm) was a couple days ago when my mom and I made a really nice dinner together and my brother was there and we just played board games all night
blue; what’s the most recent dream you remember?
I have this recurring habit of waking up from dreams but only barely so when I fall back asleep it feels like I just woke up within the dream? anyway the last one was like that but in one of the times I ‘woke up’ I looked out the window and instead of outside there was like this. static photo of buffalo grazing in open fields?? and it was like green screened kinda, so when I move the image moved with my line of sight it was weird. that’s how I knew it was a dream and woke myself up again, only to immediately fall back asleep and feel like I was waking up from a dream within a dream again
bright blue; what does your dream family look like? any kids or pets? how many of each?
I think living with friends would be cool. like I want to have a significant other I live with but also if we lived with other friends that would be fun. kids, maybe! would be something I’d have to discuss with whatever partner I have in the future. if yes to kids, max two. also I don't want babies, preferably I would adopt older children. pets absolutely, however many doesn’t matter. I’m open to just living in a house with the love of my life and like twelve dogs, that’s ok with me
blue cobalt; do you like your name? would you give yourself a different name if you could?
I do like my name! I think it’s nice and it feels like it fits me. I don’t think I’d change it ever, but if I did I think maybe I’d go with jude bc yes I do love to project <3
prussian azure; what’s your favorite scent?
it’s a tie between suntan lotion and the lumber aisle of any hardware store
azure blue; what’s your favorite type of tea, if any?
vanilla rooibos tea supremacy!
turquoise blue; if you could start a garden, what would you plant?
lots of flowers, first of all. also some kitchen herbs. maybe some fruits!
cerulean blue; if you were guaranteed to have a viewership, would you start a youtube vlog?
yes <3 I want to force people to listen to my pretentious horror opinions and get paid for it
glauconite; describe your body without using any negative adjectives.
look I just have to say it: I’m hot. last night I took a photo and saw my nose from the side and went “omg who IS she” like it’s cute. I’M cute. I’ve seen my ass in the mirror and nothing can top it, sorry
yellow green; picture yourself walking in a field. what do you see & hear in this scenario?
all I’m getting is those scenes from horror movies where eerie whistling starts and like birds start going crazy
green light; are you in a comfortable place in life? if not, what do you think might make it better?
I think so?? I’d like to be more financially secure, pero. I think for the most part yeah I’m alright
green; name three countries you want to visit; do you have any actual plans in place to visit any of them?
ireland and greece for sure, ireland is the one I have most planned out in my head. ig maybe england for the third one, just bc I know my mom wants to go and also I’m very bad at geography so I don’t know what counts as a country. I had to look all these up, I do want to visit them tho, genuinely! esp ireland
emerald green; do you speak any languages besides english? are there any additional languages you want to learn?
the one I’m most fluent in is spanish! and I’m still cracking along at russian, currently I can hold a conversation with like a 4 year old and we can understand each other, it’s pretty cool. I really wanna get into learning irish!! I have a few resources downloaded onto my phone I just haven’t gotten around to it yet
oxide of chromium; what’s your favorite book?
a little life <3 yes I hate it when things are sad just to be sad yes this is my favorite book I contain multitudes
mars brown; what’s a movie that always puts a smile on your face/makes you laugh?
the burbs! I’ve seen it so many times but it always hits
burnt umber; what’s something you plan to do before the day is over to take care of yourself?
the day IS over it’s like two thirty am now but uh. drink some water before I sleep probably
voronezhskaya black; what or who is your go-to outlet for when you need to vent?
I post the “kirby’s fucking pissed” meme on twitter and then I ask u (robin) if I can yell for like five minutes and then I feel valid and then I am normal again
payne’s gray; describe your aesthetic?
it’s a little bit jock and it’s a little bit 1980s skater boy but the best way I can really Describe it is just “gay”
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8 Things We Hope to See in Legacies Season 2
The return of Legacies is just around the corner! The Vampire Diaries and The Originals spin-off returns for its second season in October, when we will finally find out what happened to Hope (Danielle Rose Russell) after that jaw-dropping Season 1 finale that saw Hope jump into Malivore — with Landon's (Aria Shahghasemi) brother Clarke (Nick Fink) in tow — in order to stop it from opening and releasing all the monsters that had been imprisoned inside.
Now all memories of Hope have been erased, with her various loved ones unable to even remember she existed. But this Hope-less world isn't going to be a replica of Lizzie's wish world in which Hope never existed. Despite Landon, Alaric ( Matt Davis), Josie (Kaylee Bryant), and the others being unable to remember Hope, they will be aware that something is missing from their lives; they just won't be able to identify precisely what that is.
Check out everything to expect of Legacies Season 2 in the video above, and read on for our eight biggest hopes (pun totally intended) for what's next on the supernatural drama.
1. They don't draw out Hope and Rafael's predicaments too long.
While we're curious to see what Hope's experience inside Malivore is like and what Rafael (Peyton Alex Smith) does while trapped in his wolf form, what we're really interested in is seeing how these experiences affect them moving forward. Only when all of our favorite characters are back together will we truly be able to dig into how grave the consequences from the events in the Season 1 finale are. We're also excited by the chance to see interesting new dynamics between our heroes, many of whom will likely be drastically changed by what they've undergone. So don't spin your wheels too long, Legacies, because we want to get into the meat of this season ASAP.
2. We get some clarity on what Malivore is and isn't.
A golem, a hell dimension, a father, formerly a pit of black goo — Malivore contains multitudes. But the logic of how exactly Malivore is all of these things at once remains a bit murky. It would be great if this season could establish more ground rules that make what Malivore is and isn't capable of easier to understand. The more we know about how powerful Malivore is, the more terrifying Malivore will be as a Big Bad.
3. Backstories for M.G. and Kaleb.
Season 1 revealed M.G.'s (Quincy Fouse) family is a lot more interesting than we ever would have guessed when it came out that his mother was the leader of Triad. However, creator Julie Plec told TV Guide that there aren't plans to make Triad a big part of Season 2, which means we likely won't see too much of M.G.'s mom clashing with her son this season. Still, even though we might not get to see a lot of M.G.'s complicated family dynamics in the present, it'd be nice to find out more his family dynamics in the past. We're dying to know more about how he became a vampire in the first place and what happened with his parents when they first discovered what had befallen their son. Additionally, it would be great if Season 2 featured a lot more of Kaleb (Chris Lee), who really evolved over the course of Season 1 from a total prick to one of our favorite Salvatore School students. Legacies could benefit a lot from fleshing out its ensemble of characters, and an easy way to do that would be to dig into Kaleb's history before joining the Salvatore School and explore how his past shaped him into the person we met at the beginning of the series.
4. More vampire action!
Having a school for supernatural students is such a fun premise, but it felt like so many of the monsters they faced were defeated primarily by witchcraft. With the three leading female characters all witches (Hope has yet to die and activate her vampire side) it makes sense why this would be the case. But that being said, let's up the vampire action in Season 2! We want to see more fangs, compulsion, super-speed, and all the stuff that helped make The Vampire Diaries and Originals edge-of-your-seat TV.
5. Alaric's love interest actually sticks around.
Why can't Alaric ever be happy?! That's the true mystery of The Vampire Diaries universe. With Emma (Karen David) off on her "sabbatical," aka Fear the Walking Dead, and Alaric almost definitely out of a job at the Salvatore School, we're really hoping the poor man catches a break. It does seem he's getting a new love interest in Sheriff Mac (Bianca Kajlich), but just giving him someone to romance isn't enough to appease us at this point; we're looking for Alaric to find his next great love — and for her to survive long enough for them to earn a real happily ever after.
6. A Decade Dance.
We got Miss Mystic Falls last season; now it's about time we get a Decade Dance! The period-themed dances were a beloved staple of The Vampire Diaries, and seeing as Season 2 is introducing a few new human characters, this seems like a perfect opportunity to bring them back. And if Legacies can't give us a Decade Dance this season, could we at least get a Founders' Day ball or something? Just don't leave us hanging completely, OK, Julie?
7. More insight into what being a phoenix means for Landon.
The revelation that Landon is actually a phoenix was inspired. (Who saw that coming? Seriously.) But in the middle of trying to stop Malivore from opening and Lizzie (Jenny Boyd) and Josie finding out about The Merge, we didn't really have a lot of time to dwell on what exactly comes with being a phoenix other than, you know, rising from the dead. Does this mean Landon is immortal? Does he have any other special powers? We gotta know, and we're sure Landon is curious too!
8. Way more cameos from The Originals and The Vampire Diaries stars.
This really goes without saying, doesn't it? As of now, nothing has officially been announced, but Plec has told us that she believes there's a good chance we'll see some of the Originals this season. While we're still holding out for a cameo from Kai (Chris Wood), seeing some of Hope's family would be a pretty great consolation prize.
Legacies returns Thursday, Oct. 10 at 9/8c on The CW.
#Legacies#TheOriginals#TheVampireDiaries#TVD#HopeMikaelson#LizzieSaltzman#JosieSaltzman#AlaricSaltzman#LandonKirby#MG#RafaelWaithe#LegaciesSeason2#Tribrid#Malivore#GeminiCoven#TheMerge#KaiParker#CarolineForbes#AlwaysAndForever#FreyaMikaelson#RebekahMikaelson#KolMikaelson#NewOrleans#NOLA#JuliePlec#TheCW
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Dear Past Self: Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz Interviewed
Why looking back once in a while is integral to embracing the future...
Pete Wentz is driving around LA, speaking to me over the phone about his newly-launched range of jewellery and apparel, Ronin.
As far as rock star business enterprises go, it’s certainly extravagant, and the website’s description of the rings, pendants and hoodies held therein – “born out of the idea of wandering, a samurai without a master, and the free dreams that accompany facing the world on your own” – adds to the initial sense that Wentz’s professional career may have ballooned into parody, the kind of project Connor 4 Real from Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping might have signed off on.
“We would go and sample products in the jewellery district in downtown LA, learning why one gold looks more yellow than the other,” he tells me when I ask about it. “It’s been a really interesting learning experience.”
But then Pete Wentz, to borrow Lana Del Rey’s favourite American poet Walt Whitman, is large; he contains multitudes, and some of those multitudes just happen to involve samurai-themed lockets. Among other projects, he owns a clothing company, a film production company, a nightclub, and a minority share in American USL soccer team Phoenix Rising.
“It scares me sometimes, watching him,” Patrick Stump once joked. “The two seconds you're not with that dude he's made 30 decisions that are going to affect our band for the rest of the year.”
Ah yes: he’s also, you may recall, the bassist in Fall Out Boy.
The band recently released a new single, ‘Dear Future Self (Hands Up)’, to accompany the release of their second career-spanning retrospective, ‘Greatest Hits: Believers Never Die – Volume Two’.
Such records are inevitably a time for bands to take stock of what they’ve already achieved and what value they might continue to offer the world, and the single seems to acknowledge that duality: “Dear future self, I hope it's going well / I'm drunk on cheap whiskey in an airport hotel,” Stump reflects on the new track. Like Janus, the Greek god of beginnings, endings, and Wyclef Jean collaborations, Wentz finds himself gazing in all directions.
In the near future lies a reminder of the past. Despite the fact that all three bands have new albums coming out, it’s perhaps an easy take to view next year’s ‘Hella Mega Tour’ – Green Day, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy performing at a number of stadium dates together on a triple-headliner bill – as a nostalgia trip.
Is it something Wentz worries about?
“I think about that for sure,” he says. “There’s a danger that, once you become known as one thing, the world knows you as that thing forever. When you’ve been doing art for 15 or 20 years you do have to think about your legacy, but it’s really important to remember why you did it in the first place.”
However cynical your view, it’s hard to argue that the band don’t deserve a victory lap with two of the most influential acts in pop-punk history. “It would be insane for us to turn this tour down because we grew up on ‘Dookie’ and the ‘Buddy Holly’ video – those things were super influential on the early years of our band. So this is wish fulfilment in that way. But then I think that’s why it’s important that we did the Wiz Khalifa tour, that we do remix albums, you know? We wanna do both.”
On musical terms, at least, Fall Out Boy have often done just that. Their first two albums, ‘Take This to Your Grave’ and 2005’s breakout ‘From Under the Cork Tree’, are perhaps their most straightforward in genre terms – but even then, ‘Dance Dance’ was arguably more playful and inventive than anything the cross-sections of pop, emo and punk had served up in the preceding decade. By the time 2007’s ‘This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race’ hit number two in the Billboard charts – their commercial peak to date – the band were already steadfastly toying with hip hop and R&B in both their production values and collaborators.
“I think that there was a time when we were doing that and people were scratching their heads a little bit,” Wentz says. As he rightly points out, the days of cultural tribalism in listener habits are all but dead now in the Spotify age. “I think genre has broken down so much more now, the way people listen to music, that people are more open to it.”
‘Make America Psycho Again’ is a fine example, a collection of remixed tracks from 2015’s ‘American Beauty/American Psycho’ featuring guest appearances from Azealia Banks, Migos and Big K.R.I.T. among others. The title, of course, is a direct reference to the campaign slogan Donald Trump was using in his Presidential election campaign at the time. I ask whether the band are cautious about straying into political territory.
“I don’t think you can avoid it anymore,” he tells me, picking back up after the signal drops on our international call. “We live in a time of super inauthenticity – people taking pictures of food that you don’t even know if they eat, people having fear of missing out – and so I think, in a weird way, to cut through you have to be super authentic. Which is, to me, what people like Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish, Skrillex, Kanye, and whatever do. You just gotta be who you are and cut through all the noise. And I think people are… maybe not more forgiving, but more appreciative of you being honest about that stuff.”
There was a period in the 00s when Wentz was unavoidable; the video for ‘This Ain’t a Scene…’ hilariously parodied the bassist’s newfound gossip-mag status – later compounded by his marriage to Ashley Simpson in 2008, and subsequent divorce less than three years later – but inevitably, it wasn’t always something he could brush off. In February 2005, Wentz attempted suicide by taking an overdose of the anxiety medication Ativan, and ended up spending a week in hospital recovering.
Today he still finds the pace of modern life extremely deleterious to mental health, not least dealing with the quagmire of social media on a daily basis. “Every day you wake up and there’s a new take, and it’s kind of relentless,” he says with a sigh. “It can get a little numbing when you look out across social media. It can feel really lonely.
“I think that now, more than ever, who you are and what you project into the world will inform your politics, how you interact with people, how you feel when you wake up in the morning. I just want to craft things that are important to Fall Out Boy, to insert something meaningful into people’s lives. That’s really, really what’s important.”
For all the extracurricular projects, it’s clear that Wentz’s heart still beats faster for Fall Out Boy. He’s ready to keep taking the band forward, he tells me. “But it’s got to be something interesting. It’s got to have a perspective. There’s something exciting about Quentin Tarantino being like, ‘I’m just doing 10 or 12 movies and that’s it’. It’s exciting because it makes every movie have meaning. So to me, whatever it is, the next thing has to have perspective, has to have meaning, has to have feeling.”
And what might that look like?
“Maybe it’s scoring a movie, I don’t know. It’s got to be something a little bit different, I don’t think it can be a straight-up album from us.”
Beyond the nightclubs and bling, Wentz is a remarkable philanthropist – a term which has perhaps been sullied in recent times for its application in sanitising billionaires, but which feels appropriate given Wentz’s personal history, and the fact that his work directly supports those who suffer from the same mental health issues that he’s battled over the years. His work as a spokesperson for The Jed Foundation’s ‘Half of Us’ campaign, a program aimed at lowering the rate of teenage suicide, has been invaluable. It’s the kind of supported he could have used 15, 20, 25 years ago.
“I think we live in a time where there is less of a stigma around mental health, and I hope the next generation will feel even more open to speak about it,” he tells me. “Knowing that you’re not alone and other people are going through similar things is so important for our culture to move ahead. So many times when I was younger I thought: am I the only person who feels this way? I think it can be less isolating to know that, hey, Jay-Z feels that way sometimes too.”
For Wentz, who now has three children, the idea of young people today facing those problems alone is terrifying: “I’m raising kids in this world, and I think it’s important for them to know that talking about this doesn’t mean you’re weak or alone. None of it’s weird, none of it’s you by yourself. Young people need to feel that they’re part of the community as a whole.”
Across such an extraordinary life and career, I wonder if he carries any regrets. There’s a brief silence on the line, one that transcends the usual delay carried between the pink-sunset streets of LA and the Cardiff Travelodge I’m calling home for the night.
“In my twenties I felt lots of anxiety and lots of stress about every decision that we made, instead of just living life. I’ve realised that sometimes you’ve just got to live life and trust that you’ll make it from A to B to C. Live through the ups and downs. I think that’s something important that we don’t always impart on young people.”
Spoken like a man who knows real gold when he sees it.
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Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong
It’s true! Everything you know about tea is wrong—or at least, if you’re me. I grew up on tea bags; I can still see them right now, a yellow box of Lipton tea bags, hanging out in the back of the middle shelf of the bank of cupboards in my mother’s kitchen. Maybe this article should have been titled “Everything Jordan Knows About Tea Is Wrong”—I apologize for making assumptions by using the royal you.
Until a very short time ago, tea was this very ancillary, secondary, overlooked thing in my life. I usually drank it (if I drank it at all) served as iced tea, sweetened of course if I was in the American South, or served dry as a bone over great hulking chunks of ice with a lemon wedge on that rare hot day in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I didn’t take tea seriously—I ignored it on coffee shop menus, I didn’t make it for myself at home, I couldn’t really tell you anything about the various styles and varieties. I didn’t own a gaiwan or any tea-making gear, even at the entry level. I was oblivious to its many cultures and subcultures and rich history.
I was fucking up and I didn’t even know it.
And then very suddenly, everything changed. It started, like literally every major event over the last decade in my life, because of coffee. More specifically, because of a story I was assigned to write for Sprudge. We had noticed an uptick in tea quality at high-end cafes, specifically here in Portland, where the San-Francisco-based tea company Song Tea was showing up on the menu at a couple of the good local coffee bars. We started following Song and realized they were being placed in several well-respected cafes around the country. A hypothesis emerged.
In the early days of Sprudge you could tell if a coffee shop was any good just by the gear. If you walked into a coffee bar in 2009 and they had a La Marzocco and a Mahlkönig, you knew they likely gave a shit. Nowadays it’s harder to tell quite so easily, as the third wave coffee movement has exploded and things like gear and interior design have become more copycat. But maybe this tea brand was on to something; maybe Song was sort of like a third-party quality control vetting system, and that by only going into good coffee shops, we could look at them as a kind of hack. “If a cafe serves Song, they must be good.”
Photos from our 2016 interview with Peter Luong by Zachary Carlsen.
And so I went to San Francisco and interviewed Peter Luong, Song Tea’s founder, who grew up in his family’s tea shop and has been traveling for tea sourcing since he was a kid. You can read the interview here—it’s an okay interview, I think, and it helped turn more people on to the good work Peter is doing. But the subtext of that interview is what leads us here today. Because throughout it, while I asked Peter rudimentary questions about Song’s approach to tea in a coffee context, he was making tea the entire time. Teas like I had never, ever tried before—wonderful buttercream oolongs and chocolatey roasted tieguanyins, Cypress smoked black tea like a campfire jujube and endlessly complex Sichuan greens, all of it served in a procession of simple, stunning, utterly pleasurable teawares. Peter was serving me his own personal take on gong fu cha as I interviewed him, and honestly, it changed my life.
I left high. Floating. Tea drunk, tea stoned, whatever you want to call it. (Although if we really want to get into what psychotropic most mimicked by a sizable consumption of tea, I think it’s closest to a gentle microdose of psilocybin.) Blowing like a feather in the wind around Pacific Heights, with a laptop full of notes and no particular place to head next, clutching my backpack now full of teas for steeping back home.
And steep back home I did—pot after pot, with a strict 10:00pm cutoff so as not to mess with my sleep schedule, chasing the sensory memory of that incredible experience in San Francisco. I love a rabbit hole, a new world to explore, and tea—like coffee, and like natural wine—offered a vast and never-ending beverage culture to soak up like a sponge.
Tea quickly became a daily part of my creative and personal life. I found myself writing better, or at least writing more voluminously (which I know should not be mistaken for “better” but often feels like it) while consuming an ever-growing raft of teas. I started exploring different brands, seeking out interesting tea accounts on Instagram, pouring through websites big and small, from tea purveyors based in China to tea purveyors based a few blocks from my house. I started collecting teawares, began following talented ceramicists from around the world, and started—slowly at first—to begin making tea for others, as a form of expression for this new passion.
I also began traveling with tea in mind, seeking out tea experiences in different parts of the country and digging out time for tea alongside Sprudge’s busy travel schedule. An hour here, an hour there, ducking out of a festival on my lunch break or landing with an extra day to explore tea shops across a city. Along this path I started talking with the people who run these tea shops and bars, asking them about their own journeys with tea, their own perspectives on the drink and the multitudes it contains.
And through it all, I learned a couple of surprising things.
First, tea people are by and large kind to each other. I learned this first by haunting the Instagrams and Reddit forums for tea drinkers, and by taking on some local tea writing for the alt-weekly here in Portland, which got me into more and more local tea bars, begetting more and more happy, sunshiney, tea-stoned conversations. On the internet, and IRL, tea conversations appear at least to this outsider to be mostly full of positivity and kindness. It’s one of the nicest Reddits, which is really saying something, and on Instagram you have to look hard to find tea people being shitty to each other. I can assure you this is not always the case in coffee, and it is really not the case in wine.
Tea scoop and rest inside Floating Mountain. Photo by the author.
The notion of tea’s inherent kindness landed while I was sitting in a tea bar on New York’s Upper West Side called Floating Mountain, whose owner, Lina Medvedeva, escaped the world of Manhattan finance to open a serene, meditative, beautiful little second floor tea bar and gallery above W 72nd Street. Over a single pot of Phoenix Dan Cong (I can still taste its warm red comforting flavors now, months later writing this) we talked about her past life, her upbringing in Russia’s far east, near Vladivostok (“We grew up drinking tea like water”), and how Floating Mountain came to be. It was once a tailor shop, and today is imbued with the most glorious Manhattan light, streaming in through floor to ceiling windows, like an oasis of energy and calm in the middle of the city, just blocks from The Dakota and Central Park.
Lina’s gong fu cha is minimalist, with everything just so—nothing extravagant, nothing loud. A tea scoop from the Czech Republic, made from vitrified bogwood. A simple porcelain gaiwan. A glass water kettle. An hour became two, and I was then hopelessly late for my next appointment, but I remember asking: “Is it just me, or do tea people seem rather content? Like as a culture, it seems to be a pretty positive place…do you agree?”
“You can never know the inside of another mind,” she replied, “but the tea speaks. There isn’t much left to say.”
The house of Liquid Proust. Photo by the author.
A few weeks and a thousand miles later I sat for another tea experience, where I learned a lesson on tea’s power to transform our very souls. This time it was inside an unassuming house, on a nondescript street amongst a row of clapboard little boxes in suburban Columbus, Ohio. This is the home of Andrew Richardson, who goes by Liquid Proust on Instagram and runs a fast-growing digital tea company of the same name. His focus is on rare and aged teas, typically from Yunnan but also some truly remarkable oolongs from Taiwan and eastern China. His entire business and network of tea community happens online, and walking up to the house, you would never in a million years guess that inside it dwells one of the foremost young American collectors and distributors of vintage single-origin tea.
Nearly every surface inside of Andrew’s house is covered in tea: tuongs, satchels, bags, parcels, caddies, ceramic resting jars, wooden commemorative chests, boxes and boxes and boxes with China Post shipping labels affixed (oh, what the mailman must think!) and enough shipping material to ensure safe passage between here and Mars and back, Express Class. There is more tea in this house than one person could drink in a thousand lifetimes, though I suspect Liquid Proust would die happy trying. In his cluttered office (tea, tea everywhere) across an industrial minimalist metal tea table, Andrew brewed me a procession of increasingly rare and fine teas, and talked to me at length about his growing business.
Liquid Proust began as a side hustle from Andrew’s full-time job, which is as a business advisor and student in a corporate MBA program. He fell down a particular sub-section of the tea rabbit hole, chatting with tea purveyors in China and Taiwan and Malaysia using auto translate programs, assuming financial risk by purchasing lots–large and small–of vintage tea, and documenting all of it on Instagram. Today his website is an ever-changing array of tea offerings, collaborative buys and special lots, handpacked from his home in Ohio.
Tea has been a transformative force in Andrew’s life. “Tea has taught me to be accepting,” he told me. “I grew up in a very conservative religious family, and without tea, I think I be like… somebody totally different. A Christian conservative Trump supporter, most likely.” He grew up drinking Bewley’s tea bags with his family, he tells me sheepishly, and I can relate. As tea gained more and more prominence in his life, the old vestiges and relationships of his past life fell away. He fell into a new world of tea drinkers and tea lovers—diverse, international, accepting, kind. His doors are always open to fellow tea heads on the same journey.
“People come to this house from around the world,” he tells me, as we look over jar after jar, bag after bag, an entire living room given over to boxes to ship, every square inch of kitchen counter overflowing with tea from his remarkable collection. “We just start laughing together, and talking. It’s almost like drinking beer—if you drink enough tea you get silly after a while, and then you get to really hear about people’s lives, their views on religion and love, and who they truly are. I would have never had this conversation before—I would have never known you.”
Too soon I was back outside in the Ohio chill, waiting for a Lyft to take me back into the city, my bag and mind and heart crammed full to bursting with tea. I started crying in the back of the car.
As a Western tea drinker, tea doesn’t need me. Not economically, not culturally, and certainly not spiritually. Indeed, there is something almost comically absurd about obsessing over tea here in America, thousands of miles from where it’s cultivated and revered, separated by a vast ocean both literal and cultural, although I’d like to think it’s kind of modern and cool too—bridging language and culture gaps digitally over a shared love for something truly good. But the economy and language of tea is quite happily percolating along in the countries where tea is produced, a brisk market of sales and consumption and obsession. Tea is not, like coffee, primarily an export crop. It’s more like wine—the cultures that grow it most revere it, and typically keep all the good shit close to home. Indeed, as I understand it is only relatively recently that truly great teas from China and Taiwan have even been available for mass consumption in the United States. General access to premiere quality tea in America is a fairly new thing informed by the opening up of China’s flexible take on communism vis-a-vis small business growth, the linking of our world through the towering modern marvels of online shopping, international shipping (thanks China Post!) and global free trade.
Tea prices, trade wars, globalism: all of this is made possible by international commerce and the free movement of goods and services and ideas through international markets. Like coffee, tea is an unexpectedly and explicitly political product to consume in the best of times. And today? When these trade freedoms are imperiled by tariffs and racism and shudderingly incompetent political leadership? Drinking good tea in America right now is a profoundly political act, more so than at any time since the American revolution.
Tea doesn’t need the West but I think we need it. I think we could all stand to sit with this stuff as a regular part of our lives; not to replace coffee in the mornings, or instead of wine at night, but as a bridge and a complementary force alongside the other drinks we already love. Tea is a vast, bottomless, endlessly complex world of styles, producers, history, modern expression, accoutrement and idiosyncrasy. It is a lifetime—indeed, many happy lifetimes—of culinary inquiry. Drinking good tea can make your life better. Drinking good tea has definitely made my life better, made me a happier person and a more creative thinker, a better friend and colleague and partner. It has comforted me in times of sadness and tragedy, and I have celebrated good news with it, and it has been there for me as alacrity fuel of the highest order on plain old boring work nights.
I strongly recommend drinking a lot of good tea to anyone who wants to better know their own mind. Bathe your brain in theanine any possible chance you get. Think of it almost as like a performance-enhancing drug for your life.
I will end this essay by telling you a secret. I’m “the guy from Sprudge” which means that every so often at an event (be it family or promotional) someone expects me to make coffee. And I can do it serviceably well enough. I’m okay at it, but I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, or that I approach it with the easy confidence and muscle memory of a champion barista or anything. My coffee brewing prowess is nothing special, and I always kind of dread being asked, because it comes with a lot of expectations that frankly I’ve done nothing to deserve beyond stringing lots of flowery words together.
But I love making tea. Adore it, really. I love making it for myself, for my friends and family, for guests at our Sprudge offices in Portland, at parties or brunches or pretty much wherever. I love (and I mean love) the ceramics; I love the tactile change from dry to porous; I love the flavor variation across a long session; I love the steeping rhythm; I love the intimacy it creates, the way you really get to know someone somewhere between the fourth and seventh cup. Some of the very best conversations of my life have taken place over the last two years, with friends new and old, across a gaiwan.
My dream is that someday I will be able to give my own personal expression of gong fu cha to someone else and change their life, too, by opening their eyes and mind up to what tea can be, just as Peter Luong and Lina Medvedeva and Liquid Proust have done for me.
It’s the least I can do.
Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
Editor: Liz Clayton.
All photos by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace) unless otherwise noted. The top image for this feature depicts a ceramic teascoop “chahe” from Russian ceramicist Anton Filonov, distributed in the United States by Liquid Proust.
Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.
The post Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong appeared first on Sprudge.
Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee
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Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong
It’s true! Everything you know about tea is wrong—or at least, if you’re me. I grew up on tea bags; I can still see them right now, a yellow box of Lipton tea bags, hanging out in the back of the middle shelf of the bank of cupboards in my mother’s kitchen. Maybe this article should have been titled “Everything Jordan Knows About Tea Is Wrong”—I apologize for making assumptions by using the royal you.
Until a very short time ago, tea was this very ancillary, secondary, overlooked thing in my life. I usually drank it (if I drank it at all) served as iced tea, sweetened of course if I was in the American South, or served dry as a bone over great hulking chunks of ice with a lemon wedge on that rare hot day in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I didn’t take tea seriously—I ignored it on coffee shop menus, I didn’t make it for myself at home, I couldn’t really tell you anything about the various styles and varieties. I didn’t own a gaiwan or any tea-making gear, even at the entry level. I was oblivious to its many cultures and subcultures and rich history.
I was fucking up and I didn’t even know it.
And then very suddenly, everything changed. It started, like literally every major event over the last decade in my life, because of coffee. More specifically, because of a story I was assigned to write for Sprudge. We had noticed an uptick in tea quality at high-end cafes, specifically here in Portland, where the San-Francisco-based tea company Song Tea was showing up on the menu at a couple of the good local coffee bars. We started following Song and realized they were being placed in several well-respected cafes around the country. A hypothesis emerged.
In the early days of Sprudge you could tell if a coffee shop was any good just by the gear. If you walked into a coffee bar in 2009 and they had a La Marzocco and a Mahlkönig, you knew they likely gave a shit. Nowadays it’s harder to tell quite so easily, as the third wave coffee movement has exploded and things like gear and interior design have become more copycat. But maybe this tea brand was on to something; maybe Song was sort of like a third-party quality control vetting system, and that by only going into good coffee shops, we could look at them as a kind of hack. “If a cafe serves Song, they must be good.”
Photos from our 2016 interview with Peter Luong by Zachary Carlsen.
And so I went to San Francisco and interviewed Peter Luong, Song Tea’s founder, who grew up in his family’s tea shop and has been traveling for tea sourcing since he was a kid. You can read the interview here—it’s an okay interview, I think, and it helped turn more people on to the good work Peter is doing. But the subtext of that interview is what leads us here today. Because throughout it, while I asked Peter rudimentary questions about Song’s approach to tea in a coffee context, he was making tea the entire time. Teas like I had never, ever tried before—wonderful buttercream oolongs and chocolatey roasted tieguanyins, Cypress smoked black tea like a campfire jujube and endlessly complex Sichuan greens, all of it served in a procession of simple, stunning, utterly pleasurable teawares. Peter was serving me his own personal take on gong fu cha as I interviewed him, and honestly, it changed my life.
I left high. Floating. Tea drunk, tea stoned, whatever you want to call it. (Although if we really want to get into what psychotropic most mimicked by a sizable consumption of tea, I think it’s closest to a gentle microdose of psilocybin.) Blowing like a feather in the wind around Pacific Heights, with a laptop full of notes and no particular place to head next, clutching my backpack now full of teas for steeping back home.
And steep back home I did—pot after pot, with a strict 10:00pm cutoff so as not to mess with my sleep schedule, chasing the sensory memory of that incredible experience in San Francisco. I love a rabbit hole, a new world to explore, and tea—like coffee, and like natural wine—offered a vast and never-ending beverage culture to soak up like a sponge.
Tea quickly became a daily part of my creative and personal life. I found myself writing better, or at least writing more voluminously (which I know should not be mistaken for “better” but often feels like it) while consuming an ever-growing raft of teas. I started exploring different brands, seeking out interesting tea accounts on Instagram, pouring through websites big and small, from tea purveyors based in China to tea purveyors based a few blocks from my house. I started collecting teawares, began following talented ceramicists from around the world, and started—slowly at first—to begin making tea for others, as a form of expression for this new passion.
I also began traveling with tea in mind, seeking out tea experiences in different parts of the country and digging out time for tea alongside Sprudge’s busy travel schedule. An hour here, an hour there, ducking out of a festival on my lunch break or landing with an extra day to explore tea shops across a city. Along this path I started talking with the people who run these tea shops and bars, asking them about their own journeys with tea, their own perspectives on the drink and the multitudes it contains.
And through it all, I learned a couple of surprising things.
First, tea people are by and large kind to each other. I learned this first by haunting the Instagrams and Reddit forums for tea drinkers, and by taking on some local tea writing for the alt-weekly here in Portland, which got me into more and more local tea bars, begetting more and more happy, sunshiney, tea-stoned conversations. On the internet, and IRL, tea conversations appear at least to this outsider to be mostly full of positivity and kindness. It’s one of the nicest Reddits, which is really saying something, and on Instagram you have to look hard to find tea people being shitty to each other. I can assure you this is not always the case in coffee, and it is really not the case in wine.
Tea scoop and rest inside Floating Mountain. Photo by the author.
The notion of tea’s inherent kindness landed while I was sitting in a tea bar on New York’s Upper West Side called Floating Mountain, whose owner, Lina Medvedeva, escaped the world of Manhattan finance to open a serene, meditative, beautiful little second floor tea bar and gallery above W 72nd Street. Over a single pot of Phoenix Dan Cong (I can still taste its warm red comforting flavors now, months later writing this) we talked about her past life, her upbringing in Russia’s far east, near Vladivostok (“We grew up drinking tea like water”), and how Floating Mountain came to be. It was once a tailor shop, and today is imbued with the most glorious Manhattan light, streaming in through floor to ceiling windows, like an oasis of energy and calm in the middle of the city, just blocks from The Dakota and Central Park.
Lina’s gong fu cha is minimalist, with everything just so—nothing extravagant, nothing loud. A tea scoop from the Czech Republic, made from vitrified bogwood. A simple porcelain gaiwan. A glass water kettle. An hour became two, and I was then hopelessly late for my next appointment, but I remember asking: “Is it just me, or do tea people seem rather content? Like as a culture, it seems to be a pretty positive place…do you agree?”
“You can never know the inside of another mind,” she replied, “but the tea speaks. There isn’t much left to say.”
The house of Liquid Proust. Photo by the author.
A few weeks and a thousand miles later I sat for another tea experience, where I learned a lesson on tea’s power to transform our very souls. This time it was inside an unassuming house, on a nondescript street amongst a row of clapboard little boxes in suburban Columbus, Ohio. This is the home of Andrew Richardson, who goes by Liquid Proust on Instagram and runs a fast-growing digital tea company of the same name. His focus is on rare and aged teas, typically from Yunnan but also some truly remarkable oolongs from Taiwan and eastern China. His entire business and network of tea community happens online, and walking up to the house, you would never in a million years guess that inside it dwells one of the foremost young American collectors and distributors of vintage single-origin tea.
Nearly every surface inside of Andrew’s house is covered in tea: tuongs, satchels, bags, parcels, caddies, ceramic resting jars, wooden commemorative chests, boxes and boxes and boxes with China Post shipping labels affixed (oh, what the mailman must think!) and enough shipping material to ensure safe passage between here and Mars and back, Express Class. There is more tea in this house than one person could drink in a thousand lifetimes, though I suspect Liquid Proust would die happy trying. In his cluttered office (tea, tea everywhere) across an industrial minimalist metal tea table, Andrew brewed me a procession of increasingly rare and fine teas, and talked to me at length about his growing business.
Liquid Proust began as a side hustle from Andrew’s full-time job, which is as a business advisor and student in a corporate MBA program. He fell down a particular sub-section of the tea rabbit hole, chatting with tea purveyors in China and Taiwan and Malaysia using auto translate programs, assuming financial risk by purchasing lots–large and small–of vintage tea, and documenting all of it on Instagram. Today his website is an ever-changing array of tea offerings, collaborative buys and special lots, handpacked from his home in Ohio.
Tea has been a transformative force in Andrew’s life. “Tea has taught me to be accepting,” he told me. “I grew up in a very conservative religious family, and without tea, I think I be like… somebody totally different. A Christian conservative Trump supporter, most likely.” He grew up drinking Bewley’s tea bags with his family, he tells me sheepishly, and I can relate. As tea gained more and more prominence in his life, the old vestiges and relationships of his past life fell away. He fell into a new world of tea drinkers and tea lovers—diverse, international, accepting, kind. His doors are always open to fellow tea heads on the same journey.
“People come to this house from around the world,” he tells me, as we look over jar after jar, bag after bag, an entire living room given over to boxes to ship, every square inch of kitchen counter overflowing with tea from his remarkable collection. “We just start laughing together, and talking. It’s almost like drinking beer—if you drink enough tea you get silly after a while, and then you get to really hear about people’s lives, their views on religion and love, and who they truly are. I would have never had this conversation before—I would have never known you.”
Too soon I was back outside in the Ohio chill, waiting for a Lyft to take me back into the city, my bag and mind and heart crammed full to bursting with tea. I started crying in the back of the car.
As a Western tea drinker, tea doesn’t need me. Not economically, not culturally, and certainly not spiritually. Indeed, there is something almost comically absurd about obsessing over tea here in America, thousands of miles from where it’s cultivated and revered, separated by a vast ocean both literal and cultural, although I’d like to think it’s kind of modern and cool too—bridging language and culture gaps digitally over a shared love for something truly good. But the economy and language of tea is quite happily percolating along in the countries where tea is produced, a brisk market of sales and consumption and obsession. Tea is not, like coffee, primarily an export crop. It’s more like wine—the cultures that grow it most revere it, and typically keep all the good shit close to home. Indeed, as I understand it is only relatively recently that truly great teas from China and Taiwan have even been available for mass consumption in the United States. General access to premiere quality tea in America is a fairly new thing informed by the opening up of China’s flexible take on communism vis-a-vis small business growth, the linking of our world through the towering modern marvels of online shopping, international shipping (thanks China Post!) and global free trade.
Tea prices, trade wars, globalism: all of this is made possible by international commerce and the free movement of goods and services and ideas through international markets. Like coffee, tea is an unexpectedly and explicitly political product to consume in the best of times. And today? When these trade freedoms are imperiled by tariffs and racism and shudderingly incompetent political leadership? Drinking good tea in America right now is a profoundly political act, more so than at any time since the American revolution.
Tea doesn’t need the West but I think we need it. I think we could all stand to sit with this stuff as a regular part of our lives; not to replace coffee in the mornings, or instead of wine at night, but as a bridge and a complementary force alongside the other drinks we already love. Tea is a vast, bottomless, endlessly complex world of styles, producers, history, modern expression, accoutrement and idiosyncrasy. It is a lifetime—indeed, many happy lifetimes—of culinary inquiry. Drinking good tea can make your life better. Drinking good tea has definitely made my life better, made me a happier person and a more creative thinker, a better friend and colleague and partner. It has comforted me in times of sadness and tragedy, and I have celebrated good news with it, and it has been there for me as alacrity fuel of the highest order on plain old boring work nights.
I strongly recommend drinking a lot of good tea to anyone who wants to better know their own mind. Bathe your brain in theanine any possible chance you get. Think of it almost as like a performance-enhancing drug for your life.
I will end this essay by telling you a secret. I’m “the guy from Sprudge” which means that every so often at an event (be it family or promotional) someone expects me to make coffee. And I can do it serviceably well enough. I’m okay at it, but I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, or that I approach it with the easy confidence and muscle memory of a champion barista or anything. My coffee brewing prowess is nothing special, and I always kind of dread being asked, because it comes with a lot of expectations that frankly I’ve done nothing to deserve beyond stringing lots of flowery words together.
But I love making tea. Adore it, really. I love making it for myself, for my friends and family, for guests at our Sprudge offices in Portland, at parties or brunches or pretty much wherever. I love (and I mean love) the ceramics; I love the tactile change from dry to porous; I love the flavor variation across a long session; I love the steeping rhythm; I love the intimacy it creates, the way you really get to know someone somewhere between the fourth and seventh cup. Some of the very best conversations of my life have taken place over the last two years, with friends new and old, across a gaiwan.
My dream is that someday I will be able to give my own personal expression of gong fu cha to someone else and change their life, too, by opening their eyes and mind up to what tea can be, just as Peter Luong and Lina Medvedeva and Liquid Proust have done for me.
It’s the least I can do.
Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
Editor: Liz Clayton.
All photos by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace) unless otherwise noted. The top image for this feature depicts a ceramic teascoop “chahe” from Russian ceramicist Anton Filonov, distributed in the United States by Liquid Proust.
Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.
The post Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong appeared first on Sprudge.
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Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong
It’s true! Everything you know about tea is wrong—or at least, if you’re me. I grew up on tea bags; I can still see them right now, a yellow box of Lipton tea bags, hanging out in the back of the middle shelf of the bank of cupboards in my mother’s kitchen. Maybe this article should have been titled “Everything Jordan Knows About Tea Is Wrong”—I apologize for making assumptions by using the royal you.
Until a very short time ago, tea was this very ancillary, secondary, overlooked thing in my life. I usually drank it (if I drank it at all) served as iced tea, sweetened of course if I was in the American South, or served dry as a bone over great hulking chunks of ice with a lemon wedge on that rare hot day in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I didn’t take tea seriously—I ignored it on coffee shop menus, I didn’t make it for myself at home, I couldn’t really tell you anything about the various styles and varieties. I didn’t own a gaiwan or any tea-making gear, even at the entry level. I was oblivious to its many cultures and subcultures and rich history.
I was fucking up and I didn’t even know it.
And then very suddenly, everything changed. It started, like literally every major event over the last decade in my life, because of coffee. More specifically, because of a story I was assigned to write for Sprudge. We had noticed an uptick in tea quality at high-end cafes, specifically here in Portland, where the San-Francisco-based tea company Song Tea was showing up on the menu at a couple of the good local coffee bars. We started following Song and realized they were being placed in several well-respected cafes around the country. A hypothesis emerged.
In the early days of Sprudge you could tell if a coffee shop was any good just by the gear. If you walked into a coffee bar in 2009 and they had a La Marzocco and a Mahlkönig, you knew they likely gave a shit. Nowadays it’s harder to tell quite so easily, as the third wave coffee movement has exploded and things like gear and interior design have become more copycat. But maybe this tea brand was on to something; maybe Song was sort of like a third-party quality control vetting system, and that by only going into good coffee shops, we could look at them as a kind of hack. “If a cafe serves Song, they must be good.”
Photos from our 2016 interview with Peter Luong by Zachary Carlsen.
And so I went to San Francisco and interviewed Peter Luong, Song Tea’s founder, who grew up in his family’s tea shop and has been traveling for tea sourcing since he was a kid. You can read the interview here—it’s an okay interview, I think, and it helped turn more people on to the good work Peter is doing. But the subtext of that interview is what leads us here today. Because throughout it, while I asked Peter rudimentary questions about Song’s approach to tea in a coffee context, he was making tea the entire time. Teas like I had never, ever tried before—wonderful buttercream oolongs and chocolatey roasted tieguanyins, Cypress smoked black tea like a campfire jujube and endlessly complex Sichuan greens, all of it served in a procession of simple, stunning, utterly pleasurable teawares. Peter was serving me his own personal take on gong fu cha as I interviewed him, and honestly, it changed my life.
I left high. Floating. Tea drunk, tea stoned, whatever you want to call it. (Although if we really want to get into what psychotropic most mimicked by a sizable consumption of tea, I think it’s closest to a gentle microdose of psilocybin.) Blowing like a feather in the wind around Pacific Heights, with a laptop full of notes and no particular place to head next, clutching my backpack now full of teas for steeping back home.
And steep back home I did—pot after pot, with a strict 10:00pm cutoff so as not to mess with my sleep schedule, chasing the sensory memory of that incredible experience in San Francisco. I love a rabbit hole, a new world to explore, and tea—like coffee, and like natural wine—offered a vast and never-ending beverage culture to soak up like a sponge.
Tea quickly became a daily part of my creative and personal life. I found myself writing better, or at least writing more voluminously (which I know should not be mistaken for “better” but often feels like it) while consuming an ever-growing raft of teas. I started exploring different brands, seeking out interesting tea accounts on Instagram, pouring through websites big and small, from tea purveyors based in China to tea purveyors based a few blocks from my house. I started collecting teawares, began following talented ceramicists from around the world, and started—slowly at first—to begin making tea for others, as a form of expression for this new passion.
I also began traveling with tea in mind, seeking out tea experiences in different parts of the country and digging out time for tea alongside Sprudge’s busy travel schedule. An hour here, an hour there, ducking out of a festival on my lunch break or landing with an extra day to explore tea shops across a city. Along this path I started talking with the people who run these tea shops and bars, asking them about their own journeys with tea, their own perspectives on the drink and the multitudes it contains.
And through it all, I learned a couple of surprising things.
First, tea people are by and large kind to each other. I learned this first by haunting the Instagrams and Reddit forums for tea drinkers, and by taking on some local tea writing for the alt-weekly here in Portland, which got me into more and more local tea bars, begetting more and more happy, sunshiney, tea-stoned conversations. On the internet, and IRL, tea conversations appear at least to this outsider to be mostly full of positivity and kindness. It’s one of the nicest Reddits, which is really saying something, and on Instagram you have to look hard to find tea people being shitty to each other. I can assure you this is not always the case in coffee, and it is really not the case in wine.
Tea scoop and rest inside Floating Mountain. Photo by the author.
The notion of tea’s inherent kindness landed while I was sitting in a tea bar on New York’s Upper West Side called Floating Mountain, whose owner, Lina Medvedeva, escaped the world of Manhattan finance to open a serene, meditative, beautiful little second floor tea bar and gallery above W 72nd Street. Over a single pot of Phoenix Dan Cong (I can still taste its warm red comforting flavors now, months later writing this) we talked about her past life, her upbringing in Russia’s far east, near Vladivostok (“We grew up drinking tea like water”), and how Floating Mountain came to be. It was once a tailor shop, and today is imbued with the most glorious Manhattan light, streaming in through floor to ceiling windows, like an oasis of energy and calm in the middle of the city, just blocks from The Dakota and Central Park.
Lina’s gong fu cha is minimalist, with everything just so—nothing extravagant, nothing loud. A tea scoop from the Czech Republic, made from vitrified bogwood. A simple porcelain gaiwan. A glass water kettle. An hour became two, and I was then hopelessly late for my next appointment, but I remember asking: “Is it just me, or do tea people seem rather content? Like as a culture, it seems to be a pretty positive place…do you agree?”
“You can never know the inside of another mind,” she replied, “but the tea speaks. There isn’t much left to say.”
The house of Liquid Proust. Photo by the author.
A few weeks and a thousand miles later I sat for another tea experience, where I learned a lesson on tea’s power to transform our very souls. This time it was inside an unassuming house, on a nondescript street amongst a row of clapboard little boxes in suburban Columbus, Ohio. This is the home of Andrew Richardson, who goes by Liquid Proust on Instagram and runs a fast-growing digital tea company of the same name. His focus is on rare and aged teas, typically from Yunnan but also some truly remarkable oolongs from Taiwan and eastern China. His entire business and network of tea community happens online, and walking up to the house, you would never in a million years guess that inside it dwells one of the foremost young American collectors and distributors of vintage single-origin tea.
Nearly every surface inside of Andrew’s house is covered in tea: tuongs, satchels, bags, parcels, caddies, ceramic resting jars, wooden commemorative chests, boxes and boxes and boxes with China Post shipping labels affixed (oh, what the mailman must think!) and enough shipping material to ensure safe passage between here and Mars and back, Express Class. There is more tea in this house than one person could drink in a thousand lifetimes, though I suspect Liquid Proust would die happy trying. In his cluttered office (tea, tea everywhere) across an industrial minimalist metal tea table, Andrew brewed me a procession of increasingly rare and fine teas, and talked to me at length about his growing business.
Liquid Proust began as a side hustle from Andrew’s full-time job, which is as a business advisor and student in a corporate MBA program. He fell down a particular sub-section of the tea rabbit hole, chatting with tea purveyors in China and Taiwan and Malaysia using auto translate programs, assuming financial risk by purchasing lots–large and small–of vintage tea, and documenting all of it on Instagram. Today his website is an ever-changing array of tea offerings, collaborative buys and special lots, handpacked from his home in Ohio.
Tea has been a transformative force in Andrew’s life. “Tea has taught me to be accepting,” he told me. “I grew up in a very conservative religious family, and without tea, I think I be like… somebody totally different. A Christian conservative Trump supporter, most likely.” He grew up drinking Bewley’s tea bags with his family, he tells me sheepishly, and I can relate. As tea gained more and more prominence in his life, the old vestiges and relationships of his past life fell away. He fell into a new world of tea drinkers and tea lovers—diverse, international, accepting, kind. His doors are always open to fellow tea heads on the same journey.
“People come to this house from around the world,” he tells me, as we look over jar after jar, bag after bag, an entire living room given over to boxes to ship, every square inch of kitchen counter overflowing with tea from his remarkable collection. “We just start laughing together, and talking. It’s almost like drinking beer—if you drink enough tea you get silly after a while, and then you get to really hear about people’s lives, their views on religion and love, and who they truly are. I would have never had this conversation before—I would have never known you.”
Too soon I was back outside in the Ohio chill, waiting for a Lyft to take me back into the city, my bag and mind and heart crammed full to bursting with tea. I started crying in the back of the car.
As a Western tea drinker, tea doesn’t need me. Not economically, not culturally, and certainly not spiritually. Indeed, there is something almost comically absurd about obsessing over tea here in America, thousands of miles from where it’s cultivated and revered, separated by a vast ocean both literal and cultural, although I’d like to think it’s kind of modern and cool too—bridging language and culture gaps digitally over a shared love for something truly good. But the economy and language of tea is quite happily percolating along in the countries where tea is produced, a brisk market of sales and consumption and obsession. Tea is not, like coffee, primarily an export crop. It’s more like wine—the cultures that grow it most revere it, and typically keep all the good shit close to home. Indeed, as I understand it is only relatively recently that truly great teas from China and Taiwan have even been available for mass consumption in the United States. General access to premiere quality tea in America is a fairly new thing informed by the opening up of China’s flexible take on communism vis-a-vis small business growth, the linking of our world through the towering modern marvels of online shopping, international shipping (thanks China Post!) and global free trade.
Tea prices, trade wars, globalism: all of this is made possible by international commerce and the free movement of goods and services and ideas through international markets. Like coffee, tea is an unexpectedly and explicitly political product to consume in the best of times. And today? When these trade freedoms are imperiled by tariffs and racism and shudderingly incompetent political leadership? Drinking good tea in America right now is a profoundly political act, more so than at any time since the American revolution.
Tea doesn’t need the West but I think we need it. I think we could all stand to sit with this stuff as a regular part of our lives; not to replace coffee in the mornings, or instead of wine at night, but as a bridge and a complementary force alongside the other drinks we already love. Tea is a vast, bottomless, endlessly complex world of styles, producers, history, modern expression, accoutrement and idiosyncrasy. It is a lifetime—indeed, many happy lifetimes—of culinary inquiry. Drinking good tea can make your life better. Drinking good tea has definitely made my life better, made me a happier person and a more creative thinker, a better friend and colleague and partner. It has comforted me in times of sadness and tragedy, and I have celebrated good news with it, and it has been there for me as alacrity fuel of the highest order on plain old boring work nights.
I strongly recommend drinking a lot of good tea to anyone who wants to better know their own mind. Bathe your brain in theanine any possible chance you get. Think of it almost as like a performance-enhancing drug for your life.
I will end this essay by telling you a secret. I’m “the guy from Sprudge” which means that every so often at an event (be it family or promotional) someone expects me to make coffee. And I can do it serviceably well enough. I’m okay at it, but I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, or that I approach it with the easy confidence and muscle memory of a champion barista or anything. My coffee brewing prowess is nothing special, and I always kind of dread being asked, because it comes with a lot of expectations that frankly I’ve done nothing to deserve beyond stringing lots of flowery words together.
But I love making tea. Adore it, really. I love making it for myself, for my friends and family, for guests at our Sprudge offices in Portland, at parties or brunches or pretty much wherever. I love (and I mean love) the ceramics; I love the tactile change from dry to porous; I love the flavor variation across a long session; I love the steeping rhythm; I love the intimacy it creates, the way you really get to know someone somewhere between the fourth and seventh cup. Some of the very best conversations of my life have taken place over the last two years, with friends new and old, across a gaiwan.
My dream is that someday I will be able to give my own personal expression of gong fu cha to someone else and change their life, too, by opening their eyes and mind up to what tea can be, just as Peter Luong and Lina Medvedeva and Liquid Proust have done for me.
It’s the least I can do.
Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
Editor: Liz Clayton.
All photos by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace) unless otherwise noted. The top image for this feature depicts a ceramic teascoop “chahe” from Russian ceramicist Anton Filonov, distributed in the United States by Liquid Proust.
Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.
The post Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong appeared first on Sprudge.
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