Roberto Cohen (2nd-year Winner)
Essay
Tea in Theory and Practice
Tea is the most popular beverage in the world behind water, and yet the extent of most people’s knowledge, in both the east and the west, is usually limited to knowing the basic difference in taste between black and green tea. In reality, the world of tea is vast, and tea touches the history and culture of almost any place on earth, from Colombia to Scotland to Korea; however, the western literature on the subject is sparse and often quite shallow in its analysis. Thus, the purpose of my collection is to gather the most informative and beautiful books on tea and its associated traditions.
The books in this collection fall into one of three categories – cultural/historical, informational, and encyclopedic – each of which seeks to illuminate a different perspective. The most straightforward of these categories is the encyclopedic books. These books, such as Tony Gebely’s Tea: A User’s Guide or 日本茶图鉴, seek to document all world’s different types of teas, often specializing to a particular region, such as China or Japan. The books I term “informational” elucidate tea science, tea production. I’d like to highlight two books in this category. First, Tea: A Nerd’s Eye View, a cheaply printed self-published book by a former Cornell professor, provides an incredibly insightful view into the chemical mechanisms of tea, tea production, and tea tasting. Secondly, and possibly my favorite book in the collection, 茶味里的阴知识, is a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of tea (Taiwanese tea in particular), which even illuminates minute things like the way in which tea plants defend themselves against tea jassids. This book is also written in clear and illuminating prose and is decorated with beautiful watercolor illustrations and artful photography. The final category of books is those which illuminated the cultural and historical aspects of tea.
This collection was acquired comparatively recently. I acquired what I consider to be the two seeds of my collections – Tea: A User’s Guide and The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook – in early 2019. It was not until the spring of 2020 when I began to do put significant time into researching tea, that I realized how poor and muddled the western literature on the subject was. At that point, I resolved to build my own collection, which would represent the true array of humanity’s knowledge about tea in both the east and the west. Over the course of the spring and the early summer, I began quickly acquiring books, each chosen to illuminate a particular aspect of tea or its associated traditions. I’ll readily admit that this collection was constructed within the combined madness and cabin fever of quarantine, but rather than a rash buying spree, I see it as a moment of inspiration.
As I have discussed, my collection remains in its infancy, and there are still many acquisitions I know wish to make and other acquisitions I will discover later. My hope is primarily to significantly increase the amount of technical and culturally focused books in my collection. For example, I am very interested in acquiring a book published by the Tea Association of Shizuoka Prefecture entitled 茶の品種, which is an encyclopedia of all the different Japanese tea varietals. In the more culturally-focused domain, I’d like to acquire books that delve deeply into lesser-known aspects of tea culture, such as Patricia Graham’s Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha and Noufissa Kessar Raji’s L’art du Thé au Maroc.