Mo Li Long Zhu

Gongfu!

Last weekend a friend and I went to a Nerikiri (https://foodinjapan.org/kanto/nerikiri/) sculpting class at a tea shop in Montreal. Both Kotoan (the Wagashi company) and the tea company (Loongese) were at the MTL Tea Festival – I ended up buying some of Kotoan’s Wagashi and it was excellent, so I was excited to get to learn a bit more from them! It was also my first time at this tea shop, since it’s on the exact opposite side of the city from me. In fact, it was over an hour long metro ride (one way) just to get to the class…

In addition to the Nerikiri portion of the class, we were also served tea and led through an intro to gongfu brewing. I didn’t really need the intro to gongfu as, well, that’s something I do almost daily. However, it came free with the class and I definitely wasn’t going to turn down tea – and my friend seemed to be having a great time with it as he’s a large tea drinker but had never actually brewed gongfu himself before despite being served during sessions many times.

This was tea one that was served to us – just a couple small little tasting cups to wet our palates during the Nerikiri sculpting. Very simple and very classic jasmine pearls. Because we only got the first few infusions (split among the ten or so class participants) they leaned especially jasmine heavy in taste and were very sweet.