Correction: Yesterday’s tea was from teahub, apparently.
Anyway, today I went back to an old reliable — the rougui I got when I first got to Beijing. Most of the 150g is gone now. I have probably less than 50g left at this point. Then I’ll break out the 2005 version of this tea and compare it with what I’ve been drinking so far.
To answer the question of how much tea I use:
For Wuyi I generally put between 60-70% full of dry leaves, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. With the yixing I’ve been using a little less. With gaiwans it’s almost entirely covered with tea. Then you brew very short and quick infusions.
This is how the tea looks — same as before 🙂
This time I noticed a bit of charcoal in the tea, just a hint. I hate it when a tea is so roasted (or rather, so poorly roasted) that the only thing you can taste is the charcoal. This one has a hint of that, but not very strong, and the tea taste still dominates.
It’s really quite pleasant to drink, and very relaxing. Wuyi teas really give me a lot of enjoyment these days, whereas in comparison even roasted dancongs are a bit more…. stressful, so to speak. I’m not sure why that is the case. I guess my taste is changing.
The leaves are a bit broken, as you can see. Bottom of the pile… or close to it.
4 responses so far ↓
HobbesOxon // November 24, 2006 at 6:53 am |
MarshalN,
Thanks very much for taking the time to illustrate the quantity of leaves that you use, it’s very useful. It’s much greater than I’ve been used to using in the past, quite significantly so. I’ll try making it with this larger quantity and see what happens!
I usually use 2 scoops of a “normal size” tea scoop, which comes to around 30-50% in the pot, or lower – assuming that the tea isn’t fisted (which of course expand dramatically).
I’m amazed that using so much leaf doesn’t result in overwhelmingly bitter tea. I’ve never experimented with using so much leaf, and so look forward to trying it out – though I’ll probably stick to the shorter 15/10/15/20/25/etc. times for infusions.
Thanks again for the post, always a pleasure to read.
Toodlepip,
Hobbes
MarshalN // November 24, 2006 at 7:19 am |
Hmmm, I don’t know if it was crystal clear in my post, but I put this much tea ONLY for Wuyi teas. Nothing else gets this much…. except Chaozhou gongfu tea. I wouldn’t recommend attempting this with any other kinds of oolong, as it will make a pretty nasty brew.
I think 15/10/15/20/25 might still be too long. It’ll get bitter.
HobbesOxon // November 24, 2006 at 10:38 am |
Gotcha.
Actually, you’re right about those infusion times – I’ve been playing around with some relatively underpowered baozhongs recently that really need some tough love to get the (admittedly pretty decent) flavour out of them: longer brews, more leaves.
Would you recommend those high leaf amounts for anything from Wuyi? Yancha especially?
MarshalN // November 24, 2006 at 10:41 am |
Oh, when I say Wuyi I mean yancha.
What else do you have in mind? The only thing that comes to mind is Zhengshan Xiaozhong.