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@canucktea, I am sorry I forgot to respond on this. What people call ginseng oolong or ginseng infused oolong contains NO ginseng at all. Ginseng and tea are contradictory and should not be mixed together. Ginseng oolong, even if it’s safe from overdose of pesticides and microbe contamination, is not a suitable tea for your father. If your father wants tea, give him baked versions of the oolongs of Phoenix, Wuyi or Dongding. Ginseng oolongs are made of cheap green style oolongs and industrial grade liquorice root, if not with other additives.
@Betty, I am sorry for late response. The main reason for this person’s need to cut down on tea is because his condition is very complicated. Other than the risk of contradiction between tea and the many medications that he may be using, there is also the risk of further weakening of yin energy.
Let me explain. In usual circumstances, a 45 to 60 min separation between tea and medicine is amply safe. However, when there is the concern of emotional elements in the condition, it is better to run safe.In TCM terms, tea helps to pacify redundant yang energy and encourage its storage. In this particular case, the patient’s yin energy is depleted because of over drawn of yang energy. That means there really is no more yang energy to subdue. I worry about further lowering go the remaining yin energy when administered with an over balance of tea.That is why I recommend the use of very general tonic for the weak yin and over draft of yang. However, this person needs to reconstitute his yin in the faculty of kidney functions with a complex herbal formula tailored for his actual conditions. This is beyond me and beyond what the few words of description can do.@canucktea, this sounds really serious. Outside of the regular medical attention he must be be receiving now, which I think would be medications that deal with each individual symptom, I think it would be a good idea to seek out some fundamental remedial advice from an aptly capable TCM doctor. That’s because I think you are right in pointing out perhaps the renal deficiency issue is core to all that. However, it is quite key that you do not give him anything that suggests to be a supplement for it. Each person’s energy balance is unique and as such a supplement that works for one maybe bad for another. A TCM professional’s careful diagnosis is needed to build a solution upon.
As Hokusai has guessed, it is a yin deficiency issue, but the condition sounds very deep and serious. There are a few things you can do meanwhile that are only general help:- Cut down on tea, esp green and black teas, also green style and ginseng oolongs
- Stay away from coffee, decaf or not
- Stay away from cold drinks
- Stay away from liquors
- Stay away from deep fried foods
- If when he is not having a flu or a cold, give him concoction of wild American ginseng.
- If that is too pricy for you, use ordinary American ginseng with any or all of these: fresh ginger, aged dried Mandarin orange peel, or a little bit of cinnamon. Use only raw sugar or honey if he needs to sweeten it.
Other times, these are some safe and easily available tea alternatives for him:- hot water with lemon
- infusion of rose flower buds, whole
- broths of chicken, fish, pork or vegetables (not beef or mutton)
- concoction of pear with rock sugar and Chinese almond ( a smaller, heart shape version available in your local Chinese herbal shop)
- Hot drinks with pure powder of almond, sesame, or walnut, add milk and raw sugar if preferred
These are other things you can do with/for him regularly:- Walk about in the park or even in the street; if he can’t walk, even an outing on the wheelchair is important
- Very moderate exercises if he has not been active (exercising with the elderly needs some basic concepts, pls research on that)
- Hot baths
- Massages
- Light, but good music
I hope you can find a good TCM practitioner where you live. Best of lucks!@sofie1212, I am sorry for this late response, and hope you totally recovered already. Here is my answer in case similar situation happens to someone you know:
After you have taken medicine, wait about one hour before you have tea. Tea gets in the system more readily than most things, so the reverse is about 30 minutes. Longer for people whose absorption is weak, say one hour for older people.If you normally are vibrant and lively and strong in the stomach, bouquet style Phoenix oolongs infused in the gaiwan gongfu style works the best to kick start your own system to fight that accidental cold invasion. If you are only so-so normally in terms of digestion and briskness, matured classic style Phoenixes and Wuyi infused also in the gongfu style works well. The use of ginger and black sugar (not brown sugar as in coffee sugar) is for warming up your stomach, where a cold could be attacking most fiercely. This is good for most people. In such case, infuse the tea strongly using a long duration.In any case, avoid teas that are cold or very cool in TCM nature, that is ANY tea turned cold (temperature cold), green style Minnan and Taiwan oolongs, steamed or lightly fired (either baked or roasted) green teas, premature shengcha pu’ers, and light style white teas, such as silver needles. They are good when you are healthy to fortify your own protective strength.Yes, that’s right, in Qimen and the vicinity that is Huangshan, they process their leaves according to the conditions and demand. The same raw material can become either a green tea or a black tea. The green tea version is collectively known as Huangshan Maofeng, but there are many product names to help the seller to differentiate their products from others. The black one has been known in the West as Keemun, which is an older style of romanisation of the original Chinese name of the origin, which is now “Qimen” in the contemporary “pinyin” romanization. I won’t go into details of this detail.
To differentiate from the mass market productions that aim mostly for export, which are collectively still refer to as Keemun and are machine processed, traditional quality whole leaf ones are often referred to as “Qimen Hong Maofeng”, i.e. Maofeng Black Tea from Qimen.The term Maofeng refers to the shape of the finished product. It can be translated as “downy peaks”, suggesting shoot buds covered with downy hairs. In another word, it maybe borrowed for use in teas outside of the green tea category, as long as the finished product has that feature.That is to say the shop you refer to is not wrong in using that term if the goods is right.Accessing the right quality is difficult not only for people living in Europe like yourself, many in other countries have their share of issues, even those in China or India. I think this is not right and that is why I started to be involved in the beginning.You are correct that I do not carry Nilgiri at the moment in my own shop, but I am growing my collection to include things from regions outside of China. There are a few principals I abide by when taking in a new offer and that makes the collection grow only slowly. We do not have an investor to back us so we have to be very conservative in expansion and that s another reason.Thank you for your patience with us and I am working hard to give more choices. There already are some very fine ones from Taiwan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. I hope you will enjoy them and see more coming.@Bogdan, please accept my apologies for blocking access to your country before. We have decided to open it but need time to create the postage schedule for it. I hope we can finish doing that soon enough so you don’t get too angry at us.
I am happy that you posted the products here for opinions and I’d like to share mine here. You are correct that not a lot can be judged from the few pictures alone in the first place, but I hope my experience in dealing with tea may lend perspectives that maybe of reference values.I agree with Hokusai that the only seeming potential one is the Baihao Silver Needle tuocha. I am not sure if the leaves are really from indigenous Yunnan cultivars, which belong to the assamica sub variety, or if they came from Fujian. They taste very differently. There are people collecting leaves from Fujian to blend into Yunnan productions to give the shiny light colour look. Real quality silvery hair plucks of indigenous cultivars have been high in cost. Good ones that taste good are even more expensive. That price seems exceedingly affordable for a genuine one.Of the four, the one I discourage the most will be the mini-puer-cakes. All things, including the label, do not seem right.The Anji Baicha maybe authentic, but is of a quality much lower than those that I have experienced. Here is what a real one look like:
The one posted in that link, if genuine, maybe of a later pluck and machine roasted, that is why the look. However, even if it is not a genuine Anji Baicha (or Baipian), it seems to be a respectable quality green tea, if the taste is right.The kind of loose leaf Silver Needle is exactly what a lot of internet shops are selling: imitations. A real one from Fuding or Zhenghe, from the proper cultivars, should have longer downs. Properly withered ones through the white tea process should have not been so green. The slight oxidation (or fermentation), since it happens so gradually, would cause the overall colour to be duller and not spotty reds as in the photos of the link. I have a photo of a green version, a short slightly oxidised version, and a traditional genuine quality below (in respective order), all from Fuding and from the genuine plant: @ICE, apologies for having been absent here for some time.
Manila’s remark reflects what a lot of TCM doctors say about tea. If you go back in history, tea was despised by a number of scholars as weakening of health, in particular a person’s stamina. That was millenniums ago. When the product was still not too popular country wide, and when understanding of it was restricted to only certain people. And when its cultivation and production was still very much primitive.Over consumption of tea of any kind does weaken certain functionality, in particular the kidney, for over working the vital organs, but so does almost every other beverages.To answer your question shortly: some teas causes dampness more easily than others. Proper use of tea drives dampness. Improper use causes dampness. Here I have it a bit more in details, as a way to redeem myself for not responding more timely:Dampness caused through tea consumption happens in the following circumstances:When the tea is cold, or not warm enough. This was observed long ago by different people knowledgeable about tea and had administered tea as a medicine. They had all asked their patients to drink the liquid when it is still quite hot. Of course you don’t drink your tea while it is scorching, but comfortably hot.When the tea itself is of cold TCM inclination and your are already weak in the fire energy, or worst yet in the yin energy. That is why I have always recommend people who do not do a lot of exercises and who stay in the office most of the time not to use regularly such teas. People whose water retention is disrupted and whose digestive system is still healthy should drink such tea; they include people who have to sweat a lot under the sun, who smoke, who drink or who eat a lot of firely food.A lot of the readers are still confused with the feeling of a tea infusion effect that is ‘dry’ in terms of taste, or the effect of diuretic as teas that are not causing dampness. All teas, coffees, and beers etc etc cause you to pee, but most also cause you dampness. Dampness in the TCM sense is not simply excess water in your body. It is a toxin, or evil if you will, in TCM definition. While it is true that getting rid of dampness a person needs to pee or sweat it off, but the reverse is not true: peeing or sweating does not mean that you are less dampness evil ridden.The best way to rid mild dampness toxin using tea is to prepare tea moderately strong, using gongfu infusion, drinking while hot in small dosages, but repeatedly. A few teas do it better than others:Moderately aged bouquet style Phoenix oolongs (not the very green ones)Moderately baked Wuyi oolongs (better of slightly matured)Matured traditional Wuyi oolongsMatured shengcha puer (well blanched)Classic Phoenix oolongsThis list is in order of effectiveness and defined empirically. Hope it help.
