"Green" Ash

The following post was written by Drew Hanson.

One of the advantages of living in a house with a wood-burning fireplace and using it regularly during the winter season is the seemingly endless supply of ash that is produced. For some people, the thought of having to deal with ash is so repugnant that they install ‘instant-on’ gas fireplaces instead. I, on the other hand, revel in my good fortune. Not only have I judiciously incorporated ash into my garden soil, but I’ve also used it to make an ash glaze for my ceramic pieces. Most recently, however, I’ve recycled my ash in a new way by making batches of shimeshibai, the moist ash which is used on top of the basic ash formation in the ro (sunken hearth used in the tearoom in the wintertime).

During the ro season, I use charcoal almost exclusively in my sunken hearth. My choice to heat water in this way requires that I have a ready supply of moist ash. In the past, I ordered bags of ash from Japan and processed it in the traditional way into shimeshibai. This year, I decided to ‘do it myself.’

Like so many processes in tea, making shimeshibai is labor intensive; however, the end product is well worth the investment of time and energy. Its color is rich, and its fragrance is earthy and slightly spicy. And there’s the added pleasure of having used the fireplace ash in a ‘green’ way.

Here’s how I make my shimeshibai from ‘scratch.’

I don’t remove ash from the fireplace after each use. Rather, I pile it in the back corners, making ‘mountains’ similar to those that are created when ash is arranged in the ro. These mountains help to direct air flow down and under the burning logs, insuring a steady, hot flame. (I use my fireplace as a supplementary heat source.) More importantly, as the mountains grow with new additions of ash, their weight compacts the ash closer to their bottoms. This compacted ash is the ash I use for shimeshibai.

I carefully shovel out a bucketful from the bottom of one or both the mountain and then begin to sift it. First, I use a wide mesh sieve to remove any large cinders and other debris. Next, the ash is sifted through a medium mesh sieve. I use a regular kitchen strainer that I purchased for this purpose. Finally, I put the ash through the traditional Japanese sieve designed for ro ash. The difference in texture from first to last sifting is truly amazing.

Now it’s time to wash the ash. As I fill the bucket with water, I stir the mixture. Immediately, the very fine ash particles—the ‘flyaways’ as it were—start coming to the surface. I skim off these particles, and when the ash settles, I pour off the top water (which in itself may be used to water house plants) and refill the bucket. I continue filling, stirring, skimming and pouring until no more particles come to the surface. I fill the bucket with water one more time.

Next, I line a colander with a large piece of cotton fabric which I wet and wring out. Typically, I use a large kitchen towel made from a flour sack. I set the lined colander on top of another bucket, stir the ash/water mixture and pour it into the colander where it will drain for a day. On day two, I squeeze out any water remaining in the ash and dump the wet blob into a plastic dish pan.

I now bring approximately two and a half quarts of water to the boil, throw in a handful of houjicha and some whole cloves (10-12) and let the brew boil slowly for half an hour. I strain the tea over the ash and stir it well. The tea leaves and cloves go into the compost.

For the next three or four days, whenever I pass the ‘ash tea’ I give it a stir. Initially, the layer of ash is very difficult to incorporate into the liquid. However, over time it becomes easier, and after the second day of soaking, I can see that the ash has begun to change color. Four days into this part of the process, it’s time to drain the ash again. As I did the first time, I set up the colander, wet towel and bucket. I give the ash tea one final stir and then pour. This time I let the ash drain for two days and then dump it into the plastic pan and break it up into pieces.

Over the next several days, the pieces of ash will slowly begin to dry. I monitor the drying process very carefully, continuing to break the chunks down into smaller pieces. When the ash feels damp to the touch, not wet, it’s time to start working with it. I don a pair of rubber gloves and rub handfuls of ash between my palms. At this point, the ash resembles damp, dark cornmeal. After all the ash has been rubbed, I bring out the sieves and begin to sift it all again. This time, however, I use only two sieves—medium and fine mesh. I put the ash through the medium mesh twice, wait a day and then put it through the fine mesh.

Voila! Shimeshibai . . .

And only 10-12 days have gone by!

The Gift of Tea

This past holiday season made me think about giving presents in the context of tea. I’m not talking about giving or receiving tea items (though that’s always nice!), but a way of thinking about tea: hosting a tea gathering for someone as a kind of “gift.”

As a student, when I started learning how to plan a tea gathering, my teachers told me that the most important thing to think about is your guests. What kind of food would your guests like to eat? What kind of bowl would they like to drink tea from? What would be meaningful for them?

It sounds easy, but it’s really not. When you practice tea, you gradually start to develop your own aesthetic. For example, some people really like colorful or playful tea utensils; some people prefer utensils that are asymmetrical, cracked, or even outright ugly, but which embody the wabi aesthetic that’s so valued by tea practitioners. Some people prefer exclusively Japanese utensils, while some prefer the creative challenge of sourcing local items that can be used in tea ceremony.

Is it better to hang a scroll in Japanese calligraphy that your guests can’t read, or a scroll written in English that’s aesthetically at odds with a Japanese-style room? The answer is to put yourself in your guests’ shoes, think about their experiences in tea, and do you best to choose what you think they would appreciate.

As the host, the temptation to show off during a tea gathering is enormous. It starts with good intentions – we’re all taught, from the first day we practice, that we should use try to use special utensils for our gatherings for the sake of our guests, to give them a memorable experience. And as new students, we can all remember the sense of wonder when our teachers brought out their rare, beautiful, artisan-made items. Experienced students know when the host brings out a special bowl or tea container, and they truly treasure the opportunity to hold it in their hands. When the time comes to host a gathering, we’re tempted to bring out our own favorite items, to share them with our fellow tea people.

So where’s the line between bringing out a tea bowl because you like it, and bringing it out because you think your guests will like it? Or, to put it a different way, where’s the line between serving your guests and serving your own ego? Can you put your personal preferences aside for the sake of your guests, if you know your guests would like something different? As a host, can you truly put your heart into making tea in a bowl you don’t like?

I struggle with this myself sometimes. But I truly believe that being able to put your guests’ taste first – to be able to make tea in a bowl that they like but that you don’t – is one of the keys to becoming a true tea person.

Last Class of the Year

Last Saturday was our final class of 2008. It’s really amazing to see the change in the house over the seasons. In the summer, we open all the doors and have lessons in the 15-mat room to take advantage of as much air circulation as we can manage. In the wintertime, we’re all shut into the small tearoom, and even the doors that we’d normally have open are shut to keep the heat in. The house gets incredibly quiet – all the better to hear the water boiling in the kettle. It feels like the rest of the world is a thousand miles away.

The past couple of weekends the tsukubai – the water basin outside the tearoom where guests can wash their hands before coming in – had a thin sheet of ice on the top. The pond wasn’t quite frozen, but getting there. Inside, we were trying to think warm thoughts while we waited for the tea water to heat up. The tearoom does have electricity, but not heat, so the outlets have to support not only the electrical element for the kettle but a space heater also. Sometimes they don’t play well together.

But on the last class, all of our regular students were able to make it, and we had a lovely surprise visit from one we hadn’t seen in a while. The students from our beginner’s class were just wrapping up a twelve-week introduction to tea, and they did a fantastic job. It’s always fun to watch their transition from knowing nothing about tea to being able to do a tea ceremony from beginning to end. It gave everything a feeling of completion.

We’ve got a long winter break coming up, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no tea. Everybody practices in their own way, from doing tea on their own to studying books to working on their cooking or sweet-making. And we’ve got the memory of the warmth in the tearoom to carry us through the New Year. I with you all the same joy and good company throughout the holidays!

Warmth in Your Hand

I heard a story on the radio the other day about a psychological study done by Yale University. The study showed that people who are holding something warm in their hands are more likely to perceive other people as “warm,” and therefore more likely to behave in a friendly, generous way. Here’s a link if you want to read the whole story.

Of course, I immediately thought of tea. In the tearoom, when a guest is about to drink a bowl of tea, they rest the bowl on their left hand and wrap their right hand around the side for support, so the bowl is less likely to fall.

If the guests are in the proper frame of mind—that is, if they’ve been watching the host prepare the tea, and allowed their mind to slip into the harmony of the movements—then they’re already in a heightened state of awareness. It’s hard to describe, but the tea tastes different when it’s drunk as part of a tea ceremony. You taste more of the nuances, whether the tea is fresh and grassy or more earthy and complex; whether it was whipped into a thick foam or whether it’s thinner and more woody. You feel the shape of the bowl in your hand, whether the shoulder at the bottom is round or square, whether the texture is rough or smooth, whether the clay around the rim is thick or thin.

Of course, that’s the ideal. If you study tea ceremony with a teacher, then the vast majority of the time you’re drinking tea in a classroom setting. Everybody has their good days and their bad days, the times when they’re paying attention and the times when they’re just going through the motions. That affects the taste of the tea, too. I know if it’s been a while since I’ve had matcha, I approach my first bowl with much more attention (and gratitude!) than my third or fourth bowl of the day.

But I think there really is something visceral about sitting with your hands wrapped around a warm bowl of tea, something that’s comforting even when it’s 90 degrees outside and the room isn’t air conditioned. I never thought about it before, but I think that the warmth of the liquid does add to the experience of drinking tea. Everything combines to give us a feeling of fellowship as we drink the tea together, and isn’t that the goal?

And since I was drinking a nice cup of sencha as I wrote this, I’ll be thinking of you all warmly until next time…

Robiraki Accomplished!

Sunday was our Robiraki gathering. The day before it had been rainy but amazingly warm, up close to 70 degrees. We were crossing our fingers that the weather would hold out, but overnight the temperature plummeted. Sunday was sunny with highs in the 50s, which was okay, except for the gusts of chilly wind.

We had to keep a close eye on the weather because the site where we held the gathering – also the place where we hold our lessons – has no central heating (or plumbing, for that matter, which is a challenge all its own). It’s a reproduction of a 16-century Japanese house with a garden and koi pond. It’s a beautiful place to be at any time of year, and by a tiny Robiraki miracle, some of the maple leaves held on to add some color to the garden. One of our big fears was that the weather would turn freezing suddenly, and that our guests would be so cold they couldn’t enjoy themselves. (The house is wired with electricity, so we can use space heaters, but they aren’t much help in the big room.) But fortunately, the weather was fine, especially with a charcoal fire in the middle of the gathering. That sumi kicks out a lot of heat!

The crew of hosts and servers arrived at 9 a.m. to open the house and begin setting up. We had to carry all our tea utensils and serving dishes into the house, as well as the food itself. The tea utensils were set up in the kitchen of the tearoom, and we put tables on the veranda near the door to set up our serving area. It was convenient for serving, but we had the occasional wind gust sending things blowing away and keeping us on our toes.

There’s always little glitches that happen on the day of a gathering. Somebody forgets some crucial piece of equipment, somebody forgets to set up something in the tearoom, or the preparations take too long and you’re just not ready by the time the guests arrive. Amazingly, not one of those things happened this time. We did have a guest come who we weren’t expecting, but that worked out, since another guest never arrived. The number of guests is actually a major concern, because when you’re serving food, the trays are set up for the exact number of people who are coming. An extra person can throw the entire gathering off if the hosts don’t have enough food or extra trays. (If there’s one person too few, the kitchen helpers just eat the extra food.)

The guests arrived just before noon and gathered in the waiting area. Just as we were about to begin, our big glitch – the fire alarm went off! There was no fire, fortunately; the fire alarms at the house are equipped with particle detectors, and as nearly as we could tell, it was being set off by the particles carried in by the wind, which was unusually strong. Fortunately, we got it shut off quickly, and we began without a hitch.

Due to a fractured leg, I can’t sit seiza (kneeling) right now, so for the first time in many years, I wasn’t able to come into the tearoom to do tea or even to serve the food. It was hard for me to judge how things were going in the room, but based on reports from Drew and Mary Lynn, who laid the charcoal and prepared the tea, everything went fine.

The gathering started with the laying of the charcoal, followed by serving the meal. The food in the bento box was served cold, but it was followed by a serving of soup. The soup is tricky, because it includes dumpling that have to be warmed beforehand, and it has to be served piping hot in the tearoom. So once the guests got their initial serving of food, we had to rush to get the soup into the bowls and out to the guests before it got too cold.

In a more formal gathering, there would be several more courses of food, but we decided to keep it simple so that the gathering didn’t take too long. This time of year, it starts getting dark around 4:30 in the afternoon, and the house has (you guessed it) no electric lights.

After the food, we served sweets in anticipation of drinking the thick tea, or koicha. Then there was a break.

The break was supposed to be fairly brief, but just as we were breaking, the fire alarm went off again, and this time nothing we did would make it shut off. Half an hour and many phone calls later, we finally got the system shut down and could go on!

The next phase was thick tea, which was made by Drew. Usually, the host makes tea for everybody in the same bowl, and the bowl is passed around, with everybody sharing. Because there were so many people at this gathering, we did a variation in which you use two bowls, the first one for the first half of the guests, and the second one for the second half.

Once the thick tea was served, there was thin tea, or usucha. This tea was prepared by one of our students, Mary Lynn – her first time making tea during a gathering like this, and she did a great job. I assisted in whipping extra bowls of tea in the kitchen so that she didn’t have to do all 13 by herself, although I think she could have done it if she needed to!

After that, the gathering was over. It was just around 3:30, and after we said our final goodbyes, we really had to race the darkness to get everything cleaned and packed up before it got too dark to see. We did it, though, and just as the final light left the sky, we locked up and headed off on our separate ways, happy that the guests all enjoyed themselves and had some good tea.

Preparing for a Gathering

This week, our tea group is in the middle of preparations for an annual celebration called Robiraki. November is the month when we switch from summer season, when we heat the water in a raised brazier, to the winter season, when we use a sunken hearth. Normally, this celebration is held at the very beginning of November, but because of various schedule conflicts, we put it off until this weekend.

In a lot of ways, Robiraki is like the “New Year” of the tea world. The weather is getting colder, the last of the leaves are falling, and we’re just cracking open the tea that was harvested this past spring. Unlike the calendar New Year in January, which is a flashy, festive occasion, Robiraki is more subdued – it’s a time to embrace the season and look ahead to the bare coldness of winter.

Planning a tea gathering is a lot like planning a large party – there’s the guest list to coodinate, invitations to send, food to cook, and an added dimension, utensils to choose. Every item that’s used in the gathering, from the tea scoop and tea container to the scroll that hangs in the alcove, is carefully chosen to fit the season, and it all has to match – not in the sense of being the same color or pattern, but in the sense of being harmonious when you put them next to each other. For example, you wouldn’t want to put a very small tea bowl next to a very large tea container, because the proportions would look strange. You also wouldn’t want to put something bright and colorful next to something that was very worn and dull – the “mood” of the pieces needs to match, too.

The past couple of days for me have been all about food. I’m sharing the cooking responsibilities with Drew, one of the other teachers, but there’s still a lot to do. Even shopping can be a challenge. We try to incorporate as much traditional Japanese food as possible into our gatherings, but there are a lot of things that we just can’t get here. I’m lucky that there’s a small Japanese grocery store not too far from my neighborhood, and a larger Korean grocery store nearby. If we’re doing a big meal for the gathering, we trek up to New York, where there’s an even larger Japanese grocery store called Mitsuwa. However, that’s about a two-hour drive each way, so I don’t go very often.

Yesterday was shopping – running around and getting all the various foods we’ll need – and today I did most of the cooking. The most time-consuming thing was cutting the carrots; I’m trying out a new flower design that was meant to look like a chrysanthemum. I’m not sure it succeeded, but we’ll see how it goes over with my co-hosts on the day of the gathering.

Tonight I sifted the tea (two different kinds), and also the ash for the hearth. We’re using charcoal to heat the tea instead of electricity, which means that a couple of days ago, I washed the charcoal so there’s no excess dust (dust can create sparks, which are a big no-no in a room covered with dry grass mats!). Drew has been washing a portion of the ash so that it’ll still be moist when he lays the fire in front of the guests (creating a color contrast).

There’s still more to do tomorrow, but the biggest challenge is to make sure that we don’t forget to bring anything on the day of the gathering. Wish us luck!

October Tea

The leaves are changing colors in our area now, a stunning visual reminder that the weather is getting colder and that soon, the trees will be bare and the snow will be falling.

In the tearoom, we’re also experiencing a transition. In October – and only in October –tea practitioners have the option of doing a style of tea called “Nakaoki.” Nakaoki literally means “placing in the middle,” which is a reference to the location of the furo, the brazier which holds the fire.

So let’s take a moment to review. In the wintertime, the fire is contained in a sunken pit in the middle of the floor called a ro. That way, the fire is close to the guests, and helps them to keep warm (very important in the days before central heating!). In the summertime, the fire is moved to a raised brazier called a furo and moved away from the guests to help them keep cool. (If you’re thinking, “What about the host?” the answer is, the host suffers. That’s his job.)

In Nakaoki, the furo finds a middle ground – directly in front of the host, closer to the guest but still not too close for a warm October day. That affects the position of all the other utensils, of course, but for the guest, the net effect is the same: the water is boiled, the tea whisked, and the wonderous beverage served.

There are little seasonal practices like this in almost every season, each designed in their own way to accommodate the weather conditions. But October is a particularly special month, not only because of the changing of the leaves (giving tea people an opportunity to do chabako, or picnic-style tea) but because it’s the transition from summer to winter season. November, when the sunken hearth is opened, is kind of like the “New Year” of tea ceremony (although we also celebrate the calendar New Year in January). It’s the time when the tea which was picked earlier this year is ground into powder and used for the first time.

But there will be time to think about that later. Right now, the mornings are crisp, the sun is radiant on the changing leaves, and tea people everywhere are enjoying a special taste of October. Come join us!