Northwest Tea Festival

I posted in another thread about the NW Tea Festival, held this weekend in Seattle. This is the 8th years of the festival, which gets bigger and better each year. I attended three tasting classes: Introduction to Professional Cupping, Advanced Professional Cupping and Historic Teas. I have been drinking tea avidly for about 15 years, but am always learning something that expands my understanding and enjoyment of tea.

One of the highlights of the two-day festival was meeting Mike from the Badger and Blade forum. He flew to Seattle from San Diego for the weekend. This was his first time at the festival and he got to enjoy two glorious fall days in the great, green Pacific Northwest. For those who live in the Los Angeles area, there is a tea festival scheduled there on December 5-6, 11 am to 5 pm at the Japanese-American National Museum. For more information: www.teafestivalla.com

I plan to post more about the festival later.


Tim

Hi everyone! I'm going to tag along in this thread, because I spent two days at the festival and met Tim there for a few gaiwans of tea over both days.

The NW Tea Festival is a really good show. It's not a trade show, but one that people can drop in and sample. This year was their eighth running; the organizers have done a really good job of bringing the show up to where hundreds of people can spend two days talking and drinking tea. I'd say there were about two dozen vendors selling various teas and teaware, with roughly half focusing on more traditional teas and the other half catering to the tea party/afternoon tea/Teavana scented & flavored tea market. There was great local vendor and tea room attendance as well. Vendors were pouring anything they could, but it generally wasn't the super-expensive pu-erh, oolongs or gyokuro.

The festival had a main programming stage (free), two tasting rooms and two workshop areas. Attendees were allowed to select one guaranteed access to a tasting and a workshop per day subject to availability. Some workshops were pay-to-play (e.g. had materials fees), and you could have registered for some of those ahead of time. I didn't attend anything presented on the main programming stage, but was able to attend two workshops and two tastings. Those tended to be quite rushed, but overall fairly informative.

There were deals to be had, which was nice. I bought quite a bit of puerh for general consumption, and the other loose-leaf teas I picked up were priced much better than online or even at their own stores.

Pics later, once I can get to Tapatalk and a wifi connection.

Finally able to get a few minutes to post pics.

As I said before, about half of the exhibitors were more of the traditional tea sellers.

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Crimson Lotus, a local puerh seller.

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The owner of Crimson Lotus, Glen Bowers, ran this gongful table and poured puerh both days. He was pretty much sitting all weekend at the table!

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Teahouse Kuan Yin, another seller. (As of this posting, I've been on a recent puerh cake kick, so a few pictures are puerh shots.)

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They were selling the flavor profile wheels, which is useful in the same way that flavor profiling for chocolate, cheese and wine occur.



Miro Tea, a sponsor of the show. They were pouring a decent amount of good tea all weekend. TinyTim and I met there for an hour of puerh.

Some of the retailers were a little more approachable to newer tea drinkers.



"An afternoon to remember". Lots of flavored teas and flavored herbals. They basically sold packets of tea that were $5-7 each, but the amount you received varied depending on the tea.



Harney and Sons. Actually, they had some fantastic tea from the perspective of a traditional English tea seller.



Matcha demo sponsored by SA Japanese Green Tea.



A vendor not selling tea, but handmade tea cozies and hot pads. She had a lot of them on sale!

Then there are the vendors that have good marketing and/or make you wonder what their market is.



B. Fuller's Mortar and Pestle. This vendor did a steampunk style setup, serving tea from Pyrex beakers and selling vials and Mason jars of loose leaf tea.



Admit it - it's not everyday you see something like this.



Queen Mary Tea Room. Yes, you too can become a "tea queen"! They market themselves very much like The Pampered Chef, but as an afternoon tea party company. (I kind of felt sorry for the one guy working the booth all weekend, impeccably dressed as he was.)

Every attendee was able to take part of one free tasting and one workshop per day on a space-available basis.



Both of my workshops were puerh workshops; this one had a materials fee. I was able to taste 1995 CNNP 7542, and part of this presentation was on identifying real aged 7542 vs. something that isn't. (Most of the fake puerh tea is either 7542 or 8582; they market pre-2000 cakes but are typically 2006-08 cakes that have been wet-stored later on.) I attended the Saturday workshop on puerh history, production and types that was really good.

I also attended a tasting of High Mountain oolong teas and a tasting of hot vs. cold-brew teas.

And of course, you can buy tea and teaware. This is what I came home with.



Starting with the bags and going clockwise:

* 2 oz Alishan black tea
* 2 oz hojicha (inexpensive and actually quite good)
* 2006 or 2008 (need to find notes) Menghai shou tuocha (no-name but tasted well, and $16 for ~250g)
* handful of 2003 shou mini-bricks, for when a cheapo shou craving kicks in or I travel
* 2004 YS You Le sheng (our own Jim might have sampled this one, and his review made me pick it up untasted)
* 2006 Mengku imperial shou (excellent tasting, but I wonder if I overpaid)
* 2013 Xiaguan 8663 shou (357g sampler for $15, picked up as a blind buy)

mikeschu said:

And of course, you can buy tea and teaware. This is what I came home with.

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Thanks for all the pictures. I enjoyed reading your show report and hope you will enjoy these teas.