A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘musings’

Variety is the spice of life

June 3, 2011 · 5 Comments

Many of us drink different teas every day, or even within each day, to keep it interesting.  Drinking the same tea, day in, day out, can get tedious, no matter how great the tea is.  I also find that tastebuds can sometimes go dull if drinking the same tea too many times.  Instead of just varying the leaves being brewed, however, there are many other things that you can do to change the way a tea tastes and how it appears to you.  Obviously, brewing method is a big one – a little leaf in a big bowl is going to taste very different from a lot of leaves in a little pot, but one that I think people tend to ignore is water.

I’ve talked about water many times before, and I think one of the key points I have tried to make over the years is that different water suit different teas, adjusted for different styles of brewing.  There are, I think, some general rules of what water is better for what kind of tea than others, but when it comes down to it, you have to find the right water for what you want from the tea.

Having said that, it is always interesting to change water sometimes just to give yourself a sense of what different water will do to a tea that you’re really familiar with, or for me yesterday, what the different water did to a tea that I was drinking earlier in the day.

My usual water here in Maine is from municipal sources, and from what I understand, water around here is pumped from underground.  The mineral content is high – the highest I’ve seen from municipal sources that I personally have experience with.  It’s the first water that leaves obvious, visible mineral deposits on everything I use from kettle to pots.  It is also heavy in taste, and when unfiltered, has a nasty sharpness to it that precludes enjoyable drinking.  There’s also a slight amount of saltiness in the water.

My tap water actually works rather well with most of the teas I drink – heavier teas, such as puerh and roasted or aged oolongs.  It’s really quite terrible for greens and light oolongs, but I rarely drink those anyway, so it’s not a real problem.  Yesterday, though, when I was shopping at our local organic food store, I saw that they had Iceland Spring on sale.  This is a water that I love – crisp, clean, refreshing, very tasty, and not too expensive.  So I got two bottles and intend to drink some tea with it.  It has low total dissolved solids, and you can taste the difference (note: I am not saying low total dissolved solids is good, but it’s different and it does what it does).

The tea I was having yesterday was a taobao purchase of a Yiwu cake from about 05 or 06.  It was one of many taobao lottery I purchased a while back.  I tried this cake once before, but wasn’t too impressed.  As I drank it yesterday first with the tap water, it seemed to have improved.  I came home with the Iceland Spring, and boiled the second kettle of water to use as a continuation of the initial brewing.  The tea changed – not just because it was weaker after a full kettle worth of tea, but also because the water changed.  You can think of a tea’s progression through infusions as being on a curve of sorts, and in this case, changing the water led to a break in that curve.  The tone of the tea lightened up, both in terms of the physical colour, and also the body, which is pretty consistent with my findings from previous experiments.  What’s gained though is a depth in fragrance that was rather muted with my tap water.  That took more of a center stage when I brewed it with the Iceland Spring, which gave it a nice, crispness that enhanced or at least brought attention to the fragrance of the tea.

This brings me back to my original point, which is that the water you should use depends on the tea you want.  A water that works for you is the best water for the tea.  It doesn’t really matter if it’s tap, spring, well, river, or rain – if it works for you, it works.  Now, on balance, I think some water types work better with some tea types, and I think there are generally broad agreements as to what water is better than others (distilled bad, spring good).  I also think that the only way of finding out, given all the variables there are in tea brewing, is to try it out yourself.  Using different sources, buying different kinds of bottled water, and comparing the results is really the only way you can find out if what you normally use is good or not for what you drink.  After all, water is the cheapest way to improve your tea.

Another thing that is very underrated but I think very important is to just try the water itself, in comparison with each other.  This is very easy and cheap to do.  Go find four or five different water sources, pour them into identical glasses, and drink.  Don’t just gulp, but drink like you’re drinking tea – taste it, feel it, and pay attention to it.  Water is actually quite interesting to drink on its own, and can taste great.  You don’t need abominations like this to make drinking water fun.

Categories: Information · Teas
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Graduation

May 31, 2011 · 13 Comments

In 2004 I bought myself a box of Dahongpao from the Best Tea House.  I told myself that this was going to be a tea that I will keep for the duration of my graduate studies, and that, when done, I’ll celebrate by opening it and drinking it.  The original plan was that I will leave it sealed until then, aging it for five or six years, and have something nice to drink at the end of it.  Since my school’s official colour is crimson, I thought it’s the most fitting tea, in many ways.  I ended up opening the box for MadameN‘s graduation two years ago, but finally, after many years of sweat and toil, I have a reason of my own to do so.

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Now, owing to administrative silliness, I actually got my degree in November last year, but since it’s rather impractical to have three occasions a year that has people dressed in large, crimson coloured bags, everyone does it in May.

Likewise, the actual tea drinking didn’t happen the day of the ceremony.  Rather, it took place two days later, when I was in New York visiting the Mandarin’s Tearoom and friends.  It’s been two years since I took this tea out, and even when I was opening it, I was quite aware that I no longer hold this tea in as high regard as I used to – I don’t think it is that great anymore, certainly not for the price.  Whereas many years ago, when I bought it, it was something that I thought was truly good, now the tea seems merely decent.  The brewing confirmed it.  The tea still has nice qi, I think, which warms, but the mouthfeel is a little flat, and the taste slightly muted.  While I didn’t pack the pot to the hilt, it was enough leaves to make a decent cup.  Yet what came out seemed a little flat.

This, then, is also a graduation of some sort.  We all have moments like this at some point in our tea drinking career.  Teas that, when we were younger, we thought were great, full, and flavourful will almost always appear less interesting, less full over the years.  Some of us got started drinking flavoured teas but have long since swore off such things.  Others may occasionally return to the qingxiang oolongs or green teas that got us into tea in the first place, but find far more pleasure drinking different types.  Still others will turn to cooked puerh from time to time, but would much prefer aged teas, even though cooked puerh may very well have been the “gateway drug.”  The same can be said of vendors too.  Vendors who, early on, seem to offer great selections would often, upon closer inspection and more experience, look like overpriced teas for mediocre quality.  Drinking this dahongpao this time, some of these thoughts definitely crossed my mind.

While I don’t think I will buy another box of this dahongpao from the Best Tea House anymore, it doesn’t mean I will toss this tea — certainly not.  It’s still good tea, just not great, and factoring in the price, there are better options.  There is one more calculation involved though.  Even though it may not be the best tea, it was what I wanted myself to have all those years ago as a graduation celebration.  I have kept it all these years, hauling it around with me while I moved from place to place, and that sentimental value is not something that a far better dahongpao can replace.  Perhaps I’m overly sentimental, but even if someone offers me some dahongpao from the original three trees in exchange of what’s left in this box, I don’t think I’ll take that trade.  This is why many of us, even when we already have shelves full of teas of dubious quality aging, still have a hard time parting with them.  They are pieces of personal history and memory that, once gone, can never truly be replaced.

Categories: Teas
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Portion sizing

May 8, 2011 · 7 Comments

Tea comes in many different sizes — you can buy them in bag form, in boxes, in tins, and compressed.  There are the easy to distinguish sizes that are pretty common for everything we buy — 100g, 50g, 3oz, 4 liang, a jin.  Then there are the ones that are less common, and is sometimes more troublesome when dealing with them – gram incrementals, 7g packs, 25g samples.  None, however, have ever come in this format before

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Yup — a minibing of extremely mini proportions.  These are 6g cakes of a certain tea whose producer I bought from through Taobao.  When I saw them thrown into my Taobao order, I was positively amused.  After all, it’s actually a pretty good idea, but one that has never occurred to me (and as far as I can tell, anyone else).  Usually, when you buy samples, the vendor chips a little block off the cake and send it to you.  Not here, no.  These vendors know you want a sample, and so they pre-pressed them into sample sizes.  They are so prepared, in fact, they even printed mini wrappers, with the date of production, 2009 March, stamped on the back.  Talk about thinking ahead.

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I think these cakes are definitely a nice idea in terms of getting your tea out and giving them some attention.  At the same time though, they are slightly annoying.  I generally don’t like pre-determined portion sizes when it comes to tea.  The reason is that the amount of leaves used in any particular session has a huge influence on how you perceive the tea, and you have no idea how much tea leaves you need until you know what vessel you’re using to brew it.  Brewing tea in a 300ml pot is very different from brewing it in a 60ml gaiwan, but both are equally appropriate for somebody out there who considers drinking from such a brewing vessel a proper tea session.

This mini-minicake, for example, is really too small for my taste.  I’d like a little more tea than 6g, but at the same time, not quite as much as 12g, for my usual young puerh pot.  This is where the trouble is – if I brew apart the second cake I have, I will be left with a completely useless sample of 2-3g of tea.  If I don’t, then I will drink an underpowered tea.  I could find a smaller brewing vessel, but I don’t really want to use a gaiwan.  I also happen to think that brewing too little tea in too small a vessel is not always going to produce good results.  I ended up opting for just one cake, and saving the next for something else (or just to keep around for novelty value).  The tea is pleasant, but a bit bland in the cup, mostly because it is not as concentrated as I like it.

This is why I hate seeing tieguanyin or other oolongs packed into little individual packets.  While they are quite convenient to carry around, they are a pain.  I don’t like 7g for my oolongs — it’s always too little, but two packs is also almost always too much.  There’s really no happy medium, and nobody seems to make any packets other than the standard 7g ones.  Why do it?

I think there are two reasons these are done.  One is the abovementioned convenience.  The other is really something to do with the conception that freshness is at stake.  I don’t think I really buy that — unless you plan on leaving your 100g bag of tieguanyin around for years, freshness is really not that big of an issue.  Convenience, on the other hand, is, and I find myself increasingly disliking the small packets of teas despite their sometimes convenient nature.

Sample size is another issue.  25g is roughly two sittings for me, although depending on the mood, the tea, and the setting, that may vary considerably.  Of course, there’s an amount at which it no longer makes any sense to call it a sample.  Leftover bits from samples is basically a fact of life — there’s no way to avoid it, really, no matter the amount given.  Like division that has a remainder, it is what it is, and nothing can be done about it to get rid of the remainder, short of mixing them together to brew.   Some vendors, however, have odd sizes — 15g, for example, or even 10g.  I find those to be utterly useless, and 10g is sometimes not enough for even one sitting, depending on the tea (and the quality of the tea in question — really ground up leaves counting towards 10g is not really 10g of tea at all).  At the same time though, buying by the gram is a little odd, and not something I’m used to or prefer.  Set sizes, like 100g or 3oz, still works best for me.

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Smoke gets in your tea

May 3, 2011 · 3 Comments

Smokiness is a common thing in younger puerh, especially teas that were made a few years ago or earlier.  In recent years, I’ve found that processing has generally been done more carefully to avoid smoke — for good reason, because intense smokiness tends to drive down the price of the tea.

Smoke is a by-product of the processing of puerh, generally attributed to older frying techniques with pans and not-so-careful management of smoke in the fire, etc.  I remember back in the day, friends with far more experience would tell me that the older teas that are now worth thousands, such as Yellow Label, were intensely smokey when new, in addition to being sour, bitter, and generally quite nasty.  Since those turned out well (partly thanks to traditional storage, I believe) smoke was sometimes seen as a good thing by these friends, because it’s another additional character that adds substance for the tea to change over time.  With the advent of dry storage, however, I’m not sure if that mantra holds true anymore.

I had a mix of two teas today, because they were samples running too low for an individual sitting.  The two teas are a 2006 Yongde Organic from YSLLC, and a 2002 CNNP Bingdao from Puerhshop (no longer available).  I remember trying them a long time ago, but I don’t remember much about them.  I’m pretty sure neither were earth shatteringly good.  One, though, was clearly quite smokey, because it still is as I drank it today.  Both teas I’ve had for a few years now, sitting in small plastic bags in my samples box.  As airing-out goes, these samples are pretty aired out.  Yet, when I brewed it, the smoke persists.  It’s not as strong as it must have been, once upon a time, but it is still there, very prominent, obvious, and distracting.

Smoke eventually goes away, in the right kind of environment, but until it does, the tea is rarely enjoyable.  Since only about 1/2 of the sample I drank today contained smokey tea (I’m pretty sure only one was smokey, not both) it is important to note how they do, in fact, linger for years.  One tea is from 06, the other 02, so five years in North American storage did very little to the smoke.  It is a good reminder of how this works.

The tea is otherwise quite good — and because they have been blended as two components, I think the mouthfeel is quite full and luscious.  The tea has strength, and given some more years, will probably turn out to be quite decent.  On the downside, they are still quite young tasting, and are only beginning to show some age.  Dry stored teas require a lot of patience, and even then, the right environment.  Only engage in it if you’re ready and willing to enter a long term relationship with the cakes you buy.

Categories: Teas
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What is sour?

April 23, 2011 · 33 Comments

Or, for that matter, sweet, bitter, astringent, citrus, or woody?

I had some teas with two tea friends today, and one of the first issues we dealt with was the question of sourness.  Apparently, even though I thought I was pretty clear, they were wondering what I mean when I say “sour” on my blog when using it to describe a tea – something I thought of as pretty obvious and self-explanatory is, apparently, anything but.  This, I think, speaks to the difficulty of writing about tastes.  Even something that I thought was universal, sourness, is not necessarily obvious or the same for everyone.  You can probably say the same thing about other tastes and sensations: bitterness, for one, is received very differently by different people, as anyone who’s had tea with friends would know.

So, as one of my friends suggested today, I’m going to ask you this — what is sourness to you, specifically in tea?  Do you know what I mean when I say a tea is “sour”?  If you do, can you describe it, and if you don’t, what do you think I might mean?

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How not to brew your tea

April 7, 2011 · 17 Comments

Those of you who frequent teachat have probably seen me post this up already, but in case you haven’t…

The guy, shall we say, takes his time.  The thing that really bothers me about this kind of brewing, and more specifically, this kind of video, is that they give people entirely the wrong impression of how tea is done in China.  Other than set performances at tea fairs, where they might hold tea brewing competition and the participants are expected to come up with elaborate (usually over-elaborate) ways of brewing tea that look artistic, you’ll never see people make tea like this guy does.

More importantly, the way he dresses and sits implies a certain sense of historical tradition, which of course is also entirely bogus.  This is what my friend DougH calls “ceremony envy”, stemming largely from the sense that “well, the Japanese have their elaborate and famous tea ceremony, so we should have one too”.  The need to invent a “ceremony” is, I think, the root cause of this kind of video.  Chinese, however, never brewed tea this way — certainly not like this.  For one, tea brewing was mostly done by servants.  Ever seen those paintings of literati men sitting in their courtyard drinking tea?  In the background there are always a few servant girls or young boys fanning the flame, preparing the tea.  You think they did any of this ceremonial stuff?

This is the other thing about calling this, or any type of gongfu brewing, a “ceremony”.  Ceremony implies a certain amount of performance, and at least in the modern usage of the word, a sense that you do them because you should, not because they’re useful.  This guy’s performance definitely fits the bill — he had a lot of useless movements that really didn’t enhance the tea he was brewing.  In fact, I’d hate to be on the receiving end of this tea — it’s probably nasty.

This is the other thing different about the Japanese tea ceremony versus the Chinese way of brewing tea.  The Japanese ceremony is methodical, slow, and elaborate, but making a good bowl of matcha is a primary goal as well.  The things you do in there — adding the cold water, warming the bowl, etc, all serve a purpose.  The way this guy brewed his tea is rather unique – he’s actually boiling the tea.  In most other videos, however, they brew it normally, except in the time it took them to do all their fancy things, the water, or the tea, has cooled.  I cannot imagine any of these people brewing anything resembling good tea.  I’m pretty sure this guy’s boiling his tea because he read it in some old tea text, except that it’s all out of context.

Chinese tea brewing has always been very practical, and has evolved over time to suit the needs of the way Chinese drink tea – which is to say, whole leaf tea, brewed in hot water.  Chaozhou style brewing, from which modern gongfu tea has evolved, works, because it is not concerned with looking good, but rather tasting good.  For those who want a spiritual experience, it doesn’t have to come in the form of elaborate rituals, dictated by some odd, nonsensical rules.  I think spiritual enlightenment can be found as well in the casual brewing on a day to day basis, but done in a way that concentrates the mind.  Refinement of one’s skill through practice does not require a dictated set of rules that one needs to follow.

And don’t even get me started on the narrator in this video.  She (or whoever wrote that script) needs to be shot.

Categories: Information · Videos
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Going lower and lower

March 24, 2011 · 7 Comments

One of the peculiar things about my tea shopping habits over the past few years is that I have been buying cheaper and cheaper teas.  I am quite literally paying less money overall for the tea I am buying, and on a per gram basis, I am definitely paying far less than I used to a few years ago.

I think tea shopping, in general, falls into two categories.  There are the teas that are for general consumption — stuff you drink regularly because they’re good, and then there’s the special stuff, teas that you bring out when you have tea friends coming over, or when you feel like you want a special treat.  What these things mean, however, depend on the person.  I find that the gap between my “daily” tea and my “treat” tea is quite slim, and I find very little difference between them.  I have a few things that are old and aged and expensive, but I find very few reasons to drink them.  I don’t even have much of an urge, for example, to dig into my cake of Traditional Character.  It just doesn’t excite me enough to do so.

There is, actually, a lot of tea out there — far more than anyone of us can consume in many lifetimes.  Whenever a vendor tells you something is “rare” or “exceptional” or what not, chances are whoever is reselling the tea (usually on the internet) bought it from someone who has a virtually unlimited supply of the tea.  I just had a great tieguanyin the other day that I thought was complex, deep, and well balanced, and it was quite cheap for the quality.  I’d be more than happy to drink it every day.  In fact, it has revived my interest in tieguanyin, because I can see that good ones still exist and they don’t all have to be nuclear green.  Yet, there’s no story to this tea, no “I got this from farmer X who did Y to get this tea”.  It’s a blended, roasted tieguanyin, made year after year by this teashop, sold to locals who got accustomed to the taste and will refill their jars when they run out.  For a lot of people who live far from a tea producing country, this is definitely a luxury, but the internet should make it easier to acquire such things.  Unfortunately, that is not the case.  Cheaper teas online tend to be very bad, and the expensive things are often not a lot better.  Things priced as “treat” are often just slightly higher grade “daily tea”, especially when it’s attached to some story, which is pretty unacceptable.  I’m pretty sure that the loose puerh that some of these stores sell can beat any loose puerh sold online these days, but alas, nobody can find them.

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Using yixing pots

March 5, 2011 · 12 Comments

I used to be a yixing skeptic.  I remember buying my first pot, mostly for fun, back when I was still in college.  I had no idea what I was doing then, and like many of us, paid some tuition along the way.  My first pot came from Tenren, of all places, and was far too large for anything decent.  Eventually, I forgot about some wet leaves in it one time (green tieguanyin) and the pot is now no more.

I remember that for the longest time I was a gaiwan user — I didn’t use pots because I thought they messed up the taste of the teas.  I want the pure, unadulterated taste of the tea itself, not whatever the pot is doing to it, so gaiwan it was.  There was also a practical aspect of it, since I was traveling a lot and carrying anything more than a gaiwan is absolutely insane.  So, for the longest time, there were very few pots in the picture.

Over time, however, I have come to appreciate them and have used them more and more.  Teas do taste different whether brewed with pots or gaiwans, and different pots do indeed do different things to the same tea.  I remember when I visited N in Paris, he remarked how his teas taste different — all because I was using a gaiwan instead of his usual pot for the tea.  I now rationalize my use of pots for testing new teas as this: if I normally use this pot for drinking this kind of tea, then I should use this pot to test it.  If it tastes terrible with my pot, then I am highly unlikely to enjoy the tea in the long run.

Recently though I have added gaiwan back into the mix of teaware I use with some regularity.  For example, I recently tried to drink a tea that I have a few cakes of.  It’s a Yiwu from about five or six years ago.  In the gaiwan, the tea was sour — enough so that it’s bothersome.  In my usual pot for it, the tea is not sour, and displays the characteristic “Yiwu” taste much more clearly.  Otherwise, they are similar in profile, but somehow, the tea is improved in the pot.

I’m still not quite sure how this is even possible.  I don’t really buy the theory that pots season significantly enough so that it affects the tea in question.  They do seem to soften the harsh flavours in a tea, for better or worse, and make the tea more enjoyable.  There are tangible benefits to using pots.

Then there are the more question benefits – for example, do older pots do better?  How much does clay quality actually matter?  Does a pot with bad clay do more or less the same thing as a pot with good clay?  How about clays from different places — tokoname, for example, rather than yixing, or shantou pots?  Thickness of the pot?  Pot collectors are, by and large, not really serious tea drinkers.  Like any type of collecting activity, they value the rare, the unusual, the famous, rather than the practical.  The best pots for brewing tea is often not the best pots for collecting (just witness the huge 400cc pots that these collectors love to buy).  I don’t know anyone who has actually tried to do this sort of study in any serious way.  It will be interesting to find out how these various factors play into the taste of the tea.  I have some ideas, but then, my ideas could very well be wrong.

Categories: Information · Objects
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It’s not about the flavours

February 25, 2011 · 10 Comments

Not really, anyway.

I think flavours in tea are the sort of thing that initially attract us.  The beany taste of Longjing, the high fragrance of a gaoshan oolong, or the camphor of a puerh are the sort of things that are immediate and satisfying.  Teas often have flavours that you can’t find anywhere else, or they can come in combinations that are unexpected, surprising, or fascinating.  A friend of mine tried one of my aged oolongs and commented that it tasted of ginseng-vanilla.  Perhaps that’s a new flavour for ginseng that health food makers should consider.

Having said that, I think focusing too much on the flavour of a tea is almost missing the point.  From observations and discussions with other tea drinkers, I think after a while, we all move, slowly, towards a deeper and more subtle appreciation of tea, and that means that we start moving away from just looking at what the tea taste like, and put more emphasis on what the tea feels like. Good (and usually expensive) teas invariably feel good in a way that inferior teas do not.  They don’t always taste all that different, however.

The best example I can think of is teas from a store in Hong Kong that specializes in aged puerh of various kinds.  They have their own storage unit, and the storage unit has a very distinctive and unmistakable smell that leaves a strong imprint on all their teas.  I can probably pick out teas from this particular store from a lineup of different traditionally stored teas, just because I’ve had a number of them over the years.  All of their teas, by and large, display a similar taste profile — a slightly ricey, musty taste that is short on camphor but long on medicine.  It’s a distinctive profile, and it’s there in every one of their own teas.  There are of course subtle variations, but they are not all that obvious.  Yet, these teas don’t all sell for the same price — some are quite expensive, others are quite cheap.

The chief difference among them is the feeling you get from the tea.  What I mean by that is not that it makes you high or your head spin or what not (although I suppose it could do that).  Rather, it is the physical sensations that you have in reaction to, first, having the tea in your mouth, down your throat, and then the reaction that your body has towards it that distinguishes the better from the not so good.  A nice one is full, thick, smooth, hits all corners of the mouth, leaves a strong, lasting aftertaste, stimulates the tongue and throat, and gives you a feeling of qi.  Bad ones are just a beverage — you taste it, it goes down, it’s over.

Vendors, though, are quite unhelpful in this regard.  This is especially true of mainstream vendors, who overwhelmingly talk about flavours, flavours, flavours.  It’s all about the raisin note or the ripe fruit or the earthy flavours.  It is almost never, ever about how the tea feels in your mouth — the most is some mention of astringency, perhaps, in some cases, of huigan, but that’s already getting into specialized territory.  I think this is due, partly, to other beverage cultures, especially the wine community, where (for most people reading those tasting notes anyway) it’s all about the blackcurrants and what not.  Tea, though, is not like that.  It really shouldn’t be just about the flavours, but rather how it activates and excites the sensory nodes in your mouth — not just the tongue, but the entire mouth, perhaps even your body.  I don’t know how we can change that, but I think we should at least try, in our own discussions, to incorporate these unique qualities of tea as much as we can.

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Thinking about oolongs, part two

February 16, 2011 · 3 Comments

Although the natural environment in which teas grow obviously affect how they taste, processing, for oolongs at least, is king.  The sheer number of variables is astounding, and the range of tastes that are possible, from the really light and floral baozhongs to the really dark and heavy wuyis are what make oolongs so much fun (and why so many people drink them).

I’ll try to proceed in the order in which these things happen in the production process: oxidation, rolling, roasting, aging.

Oxidation is the first step in oolong production that makes it distinct from green teas, and it really happens immediately after the tea leaves are plucked.  When leaves get harvested, they usually go through a withering stage, and then they are bruised so that the cell structure breaks down, so that the enzymes can get to work and oxidation can begin. How much bruising, how much time for oxidation, under what conditions, etc, are the kinds of things that create particular flavours in a tea and are also the domain of a master tea maker. I suspect, for example, that darjeeling oolongs have generally turned out to be similar to their first flush is because they haven’t quite gotten the hang of the oxidation process yet, so everything still taste sort of vaguely similar.  I have talked to folks who tell me that they have to control for everything from weather, to time of day, to moisture level in the air, etc, and they know when to stop the oxidation process and start the kill-green by the way the leaves look and smell.  That’s stuff that I think I will only be able to learn if I become a tea farmer and work on it for thirty years.

The kill-green stops the oxidation process, and then you have to roll the tea — literally rolling them in the old days, in cloth bags with the farmer’s feet doing the rolling.  These days, that’s more often than not done with a rolling machine.  The purpose of rolling here is more or less like the purpose of rolling for puerh — squeezing out liquids, and basically allowing a lot of the dissolvable materials to stick on the surface of the leaves rather than remaining inside.  The rolling process can take a while, and depending on the area in which this is happening, rolling will also determine, to a large extent, the final shape in which the tea takes.  Just look at any dancong and compare it to a Taiwanese gaoshan oolong and you’ll know what I mean.

The drying and roasting process is then the step in which tea becomes tea — drinkable, brewable leaves.  This can be done in different ways, but generally speaking, this is mostly done through machines again.  At what temperature and for how long is really a matter of the craft of the teamaker again, because the retained moisture at the end of this process affects how the tea will taste by the time it gets to you.  Even though leaves look dry, there’s always some moisture in them, and the amount of drying/roasting that it goes through affects this value, which then changes the way it keeps and the way it ages through time.  That’s why, for example, vacuum sealed packs of somewhat wet leaves don’t keep too long and need to be left alone in the fridge — they go bad, fast.

Generally speaking, the drier the leaves, the longer/better they keep.  Roasting is a process through which moisture gets taken out of the leaves, and re-roasting, which was done often, was something that tea merchants would routinely do themselves in order to refresh a stock of leaves — reigniting (and changing) the aromas of a tea, and to take out excess moisture that usually ends up imparting a sour flavour on the leaves.  Oolongs can go from virtually no roasting to really heavy, pitch black roasting, and the skill of the roaster in handling this again has a direct and immediate effect on the way the teas come out.  There is also a regional preference here, with Wuyi teas generally being of higher roast, for example, and modern day tieguanyin from the mainland are increasingly little to no roast — nuclear green, in other words, which I personally find terrible to drink. There’s literally something for everyone here, depending on one’s likes and dislikes.

Then there’s the question of aging, which I have written plenty about before.  I don’t think all oolongs will age well — only a select few do.  Badly aged oolongs are usually sour and pretty disgusting, and sometimes re-roasting them will fix the problem.  However, there are lots of fake aged oolongs out there that are simply heavily roasted teas pretending to be aged teas.  They can be nice, but they’re not necessarily very old.  I personally find aged teas to be most fascinating, and since I don’t drink nearly as fast as I buy tea, I end up having some teas that I age myself without really having intended to do so — such as the cup of 2006 Beidou that I’m drinking right now.  Over time, a properly aged oolong should have a reddish appearance in both the leaves and especially the liquor, and the taste should be sweet and aromatic.  Then they eventually acquire the type of taste that all aged teas get — hard to explain, but you know one when you see one.

The interesting thing here is that the permutations of various factors – location, processing, aging – combine to form all types of flavours and aromas that you can get from oolongs.  I can safely say that almost no two oolongs are the same, and every time I go to a store in China that specialize in some type of oolong or another, each batch that I try are going to be different in some way or another.  Because so much of it also depends on post-processing and storage, even after the same batch of tea left the factory, the ultimate result in your cup may still differ.  I suppose that’s what makes it fun.

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