The weather's been less than optimal lately, unless you happen to be a duck or a toad or a fungus. Last Thursday night, I attended my first Hawaii Island Tea Society meeting. The Tea Society is a non-profit organization recently formed to promote the cultivation and processing of tea as a crop on the Big Island. Tea grows well here and artisan tea masters are now beginning to understand how best to process theirs for high quality green, oolong or black teas. At this meeting, a grower in the Volcano area demonstrated his method for processing and drying oolong . We all tasted his finished product and, I must say, this was not my grandma's Lipton. This tea, completely unadorned, was flowery fragrant, smooth and mellow. It tasted naturally sweet. The difference between green, oolong and black teas are not the plants but the length of time the tea is oxidized and fermented before drying. For oolong , only the top three leaves of a new shoot are picked. For green, only the top two...