I did not understand oolong when I first encountered it.
It seemed unnecessarily complicated.
Green tea was green tea. Black tea was black tea. I understood where they stood.
Oolong seemed determined to remain somewhere in between.
Perhaps that was what initially kept me from appreciating it.
Over time, however, I began to realise that the space between things can be where the interesting things happen.
Oolong does not belong neatly to one category. Its range is remarkably wide. Some are light and floral, others dark and roasted. Some feel almost delicate, while others carry a depth that develops over several infusions.
There is no single oolong experience.
That is precisely what changed my mind.
I began returning to the same leaves, brewing them differently, paying attention to how they changed from one infusion to the next. What I had initially mistaken for inconsistency began to feel more like character.
Oolong does not always reveal itself immediately.
It asks you to stay.
I think tea lovers understand this instinctively. There is something satisfying about a tea that does not give everything away in the first cup. The aroma changes. The texture shifts. A sweetness appears where you did not notice it before.
Even the leaves themselves tell part of the story.
Tightly rolled leaves slowly unfurl in the pot, revealing more of themselves as they open. It is difficult not to find something quietly satisfying about watching that happen.
Perhaps this is why oolong eventually became one of the teas I return to most often.
Not because it is the best tea.
I no longer think there is such a thing.
But because it reminds me that tea does not need to fit neatly into a category to be worthwhile.
There is value in the middle.
In uncertainty.
In the things that take a little longer to understand.
Oolong changed the way I think about tea because it taught me that the space between two familiar ideas is not necessarily a compromise.
Sometimes, it is where the character lives.
With quiet regard,
N. P. Lim
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There is a word in tea that carries unusual power. Rare. It immediately creates curiosity. A rare harvest. A rare batch. A rare tree. A tea that may never return. The suggestion is simple: if something is difficult to obtain, it must be more valuable. Sometimes, this is true. Some teas are genuinely limited because…
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Some words carry a whole childhood inside them. Li ho. I heard it at kopitiam tables, across corridors, from uncles who never waited for a real answer. It meant “how are you,” but it also meant I see you. So when I saw that name on a tea shop sign, somewhere in the middle of…
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For a long time, I thought I was looking for the perfect tea. I imagined there would be a moment when I found the one. The tea that made every other tea feel unnecessary. The tea I would recommend to everyone. The tea that would finally make me understand what true appreciation was supposed to…
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Teh O: Understanding the Tea Order Behind the Name
There is a stall near where I grew up that has changed hands twice, but the tea has stayed the same. I still remember the first time I ordered teh o on my own, sometime in my early teens, mumbling the words at the counter and half-expecting to get them wrong. The uncle didn’t blink….
