For years, I was a green-tea snob who would drink only the freshest Dragon Well or Azure Conch Spring. Even worse, as a longtime Sinophile living in Beijing I aped Asian cultural practices, and when it came to tea, that meant fanatically seeking out the tender shoots harvested right after the first flush, usually in early April. Everything else was taboo. Black teas, especially, never crossed my tongue.

Then I met Albrecht Ude, a German who had studied Sinology. His apartment in Berlin was an homage to tea, full of manuals on tea plantations, tea import ledgers and rare works on tea botany. I was excited to meet another tea aficionado in Berlin, my adopted hometown since studying there years ago, and went over to visit.

When I first went to see him, he was studying sado, the Japanese tea ceremony, but our drink that afternoon was something else: a thick, dark, malty tea served in espresso-size porcelain cups, a piece of rock sugar in the bottom and heavy cream carefully poured down the side from a flat, shell-like spoon. Stirring was taboo. The cream hit the bottom and mushroomed up, creating a “tea cloud,” as Mr. Ude put it.

“East Frisian tea,” he said with pride. It was blended by a tea seller in the region where he grew up. “It is special.”