A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘skills’

New thoughts on gaiwan vs yixing

April 24, 2008 · 9 Comments

As many of you have probably noticed, I almost never use gaiwans anymore. In fact, last time I touched any of them was when I sold one of them in my teaware firesale. Before that…. I don’t remember when the last time I used a gaiwan was.

I’ve found that there’s really no good reason to use gaiwan when one can use a yixing. I used to think that it is better, for the purpose of testing a tea, to use a yixing rather than a gaiwan, because, so the thinking goes, the yixing might change the way the tea taste in a way that a gaiwan would not. So, gaiwan is thus more accurate as a way to assess a tea.

I think that is still true if and when I am trying to test out a larger number of teas all in one go using the same parameters, as in a multiple sample tasting using, say, 5 minutes brewing. However, I almost never do that. Instead, I brew them normally and form my opinions based on that. If that’s the case, why should I use a gaiwan? After all, if, say, I were making a purchase decision, ultimately after I do buy the tea, I’ll be using my yixing to make it anyway. It would be foolish to use a gaiwan to test it and then never use the gaiwan again to brew it for drinking. As anybody who has used multiple pots for the same tea would probably know, teas behave differently in different pots. Shouldn’t I be testing the tea based on how I would normally drink it, rather than how I never drink it?

Of course, the other thing is that one realizes that there are so many other variables involved, one thing (i.e. vessel) doesn’t really make that much of a difference. Once I saw past that…. I’ve never used a gaiwan since, basically.

Besides, using more teas in pots season them faster. That’s always a plus.

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How to wrap a tea cake

April 20, 2008 · 10 Comments

Ok, this is by no means professional or anything, but I tried.

I guess this is self-explanatory enough. One thing I didn’t mention is that you need to make sure when you are doing the little folds, you’re doing them tightly so that they pull in all the excess paper, but not so tight that you tear the paper. Some wrappers are especially fragile and easy to tear.

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Making tea lazily

March 14, 2008 · 6 Comments

I had two teas today, since I was rather busy and made tea in a cup, grandfather style, instead of doing my normal routine. The first I had was a Yunnan black of some sort — no labels, as is my bad habit. It’s one of those where there are a number of golden tips in the leaves, but they do not consist of the majority of the leaves. Most of the dry leaves are more blackish. Nice, mellow, a little sweet, robust…. a bit of that caramel Yunnan taste, and not a bad tea.

Then, later, I had an Assam. It looks quite similar to the Yunnan, with some golden flecks among the black leaves. Smells like Assam. I brewed it also in the same mug. Nice, mellow, a little sweet, robust…. not a bad tea.

Then I started wondering if it’s possible for me to identify these teas using the parameters I did (maybe 2-3g of tea in a 250ml? mug) without knowing beforehand what they are. I’m not entirely sure. The Assam certainly was a little more bitter, perhaps, but I think the difference is slight. I could detect Yunnan notes in the Yunnan black, but only just.

Which leads me to think that in some ways, all our gongfu brewing puts us in a very different mindset with regards to the teas we drink. Of course, the amount of leaves I put in my cup today was small, and so the nuances were subdued. Even after many minutes of brewing, however, their differences are not all that great, and will probably be even less if I didn’t know beforehand what they were.

That is of course a great argument for using gongfu style brewing — it gets the most out of your teas, and what might seem like quite similar stuff when brewed with two teaspoons of leaves for five minutes are probably going to be very different beasts when stuffed into a pot 1/5 full of leaves and brewed for five seconds. The great problem with gongfu brewing, as we all know, is space and time. Space, because it eats up a lot of real estate on a table. Instead of just a mug, you need at least a cup, a brewing vessel, and a water dispenser of some sort. Time, because it takes more attention to repeatedly add water than just adding it every once in a while.

There are, I think, ways of making that easier to do. One is to simply drink multiple infusions together. Instead of downing one cup and then adding water and repeating this process, which takes quite a bit of attention and time, it is possible, I think, to use a pot that is of largish size (say 300ml) and make two infusions of the tea drained into a largish mug that will then be consumed over the next 5, 10, or whatever minutes. When another cup of tea is desired, the process can be repeated. Still takes time, yes, and perhaps a walk to the water heater in the office, but I think it does cut down on the amount of attention it requires (and the strange stares from co-workers) significantly. That’s sort of what I do when I’m on the road traveling with a pot in a hotel room. Drinking infusion by infusion just takes too much effort in a sub-optimal space. Doing that, though, still gives some of the same benefits of gongfu brewing, and if you use the right kind of tea, it will last all day.

How do my dear readers make compromises in the office?

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Stretching a tea

March 7, 2008 · 4 Comments

One question I sometimes get is — how do you drink 15 or 20 infusions of a tea?

On one level, that’s a volume question. How do I fit that much tea in my stomach?

If I give the impression that I drink them all in one go, I suppose I must revise that impression and point out that no, for the most part, anything after 6 or 7 infusions would normally be consumed over the course of a few, if not many, hours.

The other, bigger, problem, is that of the tea itself. I think in those cases, the first thing to note is that when I say 15 infusions, the last cup is usually much weaker than the first cup. Sometimes, the last cup is not much more than sweet water. However, even sweet water are not all created equal. Some are flavourful, full of character sweet water, sometimes even giving you some reaction along the throat when swalloing. Other times, it’s just flat, boring, sweet water. In some ways, I think these last cups tell you a lot about the tea you’re drinking — it puts certain information on display that might not be obvious early on. What separates a good tea from a great tea is partly its ability to be pushed very hard for very long — invariably, teas that will still come out with a meaningful cup 15 infusions later is likely to be the better one. In aged teas, those are the ones that are more prized because of their changing character throughout a session.

What I think sometimes is missing in many reviews I’ve seen is an indication of how far the tea was pushed. The 7th or 8th or 9th infusion can be 5, 10, 20 minutes, or half an hour…. or two hours, even. Whatever works for that particular tea in that particular volume/tea ratio. I think over time, one gets a better sense of what is appropriate. I’m not sure if people simply give up, or don’t want to talk about it anymore because it’s less interesting, or anything else. It helps that some forms of tea (such as the aged oolongs I drink these days) are devoid of any bitterness and so easier to experiment than others, but just like today in my session with DH here drinking some tea, when a tea is pushed hard with a long steep in boiling water, even after 10+ infusions, it can come back to life with something else, something that you never noticed was there in any of the earlier cups. Those are always good moments.

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Teabag gongfu

March 4, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Brewing with a teabag can actually be a little tricky, and I’m by no means good at it. I think what it requires is a certain sense of timing — knowing when to pull it out. Too many times I leave my tea in the cup too long. What happens, I think, is that I sort of want a cup of strong tea. Yet… that usually means nasty bitter tea that really isn’t very good to drink. What I need to do is to resist the temptation to make a strong cup, and instead let the teabag out of the cup quite soon — definitely sooner than the usual five minutes prescription. Today I went to Peet’s to get my caffeine fix, and got a (not very good) Lapsang Souchong. I took it out around to 3 minutes mark…. and thankfully, the person who did the teabag didn’t over stuff the bag with leaves, so it actually worked out pretty well, despite the not-so-great tea….

I should, however, just bring some leaves with me tomorrow and make a real cup….

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Brewing parameters

February 23, 2008 · 6 Comments

This question comes up again and again in the course of talking tea over the internet…. what’s your brewing parameters?

The same question, I find, is much less common in the Chinese online scene for tea. Either people all know it and don’t need to ask, or people don’t care.

I think the reason people keep asking this question is because of the belief that there’s an optimal brewing parameter for a particular tea, where the extraction of soluable things from the tea will be optimal (just right, not too bitter, etc). It might be 5/5/10/20/30/60, or it might be 5/5/5/5/5/5/5/10. I don’t know. Whatever it is, there’s a certain sense that there’s a “right” answer.

As my readers generally know, I am against timing infusions. I think if we start timing infusions, then one must also time the number of elapsed seconds between infusions — whether that is 10 seconds, a minute, or five. Leaves that have been infused three or four times will continue to cook in your pot/gaiwan until the next time you pour water in. As Dogma said to me, the water that you pour in does basically two things — bring the temperature up a little (it’s likely still very hot in the pot/gaiwan without the water) and it carries all the dissolved stuff out with it when you pour. The actual amount of time it spends in the pot/gaiwan isn’t that important.

For example, today when I made a rather commonplace wet stored loose puerh, I think my infusion parameters, as judged by time spent with water in the pot, runs something like 3/3/5/5/5/5/10/10/20. I guess I should tell you how big (in ml) my pot is, but I have no clue. Nor do I use a scale. I can tell you that my pot was about 1/3 full of dry leaves when I poured the wash in.

But that’s not the whole story. I spent considerably more time (proportionately) drinking the tea earlier than later. There was probably a minute or two of rest time in between infusions 4 and 5 (or was it 5 and 6?). Some infusions come out weaker than others. How do I account for all of these things?

I don’t, however, think I brewed this the “optimal” way, nor do I think there is an optimal way. I like my teas this way, because …. I find they come out just fine. I use similar parameters for almost all teas, unless they happen to be green or white, which I almost never drink these days anyway. So, the short answer is…. that’s how I brew my tea, and it applies to almost everything I post about here, which, oddly enough, seems to work remarkably well.

Scary thought, isn’t it?

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Aesthetics and tea

February 18, 2008 · 5 Comments

I think the first thing one should make clear when talking about Chinese tea is that there is no real ceremony involved. I don’t think of gongfu drinking as a ceremony. It’s more like a particular way of preparing the tea, much like, say, drinking espresso is not a ceremony, it’s a kind of coffee. It bothers me to no end when people say yixing pots are part of the Chinese tea ceremony, because I don’t know what that is.

What about those tea brewing performances? Yes, well, those are, of course, some sort of “ceremony”, but I find those things generally very stale and boring, and entirely contrary to the whole purpose of Chinese tea making, which is very singularly focused on the extraction of the best drink possible out of the leaves. Of all the stuff that were written in the past (in Chinese) about tea, I have seen very, very little that has anything really to do with the form of tea making. Rather, it all has to do with the purpose and the result of tea making — how do you get a better cup out of the leaves you’ve got (and in many cases, how do you get better leaves in the first place).

This, I think, is in quite a sharp contrast with the Japanese Chado, which is quite concerned with the aesthetics as well as the actual tea itself. In some ways, I sometimes even feel like Chado has things backwards — sometimes the form and the aesthetics pleasures of performing/participating in the ceremony is much more important than the actual cup that you’re drinking. A lot of attention is paid to the space, the setting, the equipment… all sort of things.

Now, I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying that’s different. I do think that if one is too concerned about form, the actual tea being made suffers a little. It’s most obvious when I see those tea “performers” making tea with that twist of the elbow or the little “presentation” they do with the pot…. all the while I’m just thinking “if I want to look, I’ll go to a chashitsu and get a lot more out of it”. I just can’t handle the overly stylized Chinese “ceremony”.

That’s not to say, of course, that we should ditch all sorts of aesthetic concerns either. There’s I think a fine balance between form and function, and in the case of Chinese tea, form should follow function (call me Modernist). I believe that one should make one’s tea making space as comfortable and beautiful as one would allow, but the beauty or decorations or whatever should not get in the way (not too much anyway) of the tea making.

I’m currently debating whether or not to ditch the tea tray I use to collect waste water, and switch instead to a wooden tray with a bowl to hold any runoff for the pot. The downside is, I need to have another place to dump the water, eventually — basically after every infusion, but it does also mean that there will be water sitting under the pot while I’m brewing, which might not be a bad thing. The upside, of course, is that it’ll be prettier, and I’ll also have more room to do things, instead of feeling constrained by the tray right now. Which leads me to an entirely opposite position — the environment we make our tea in greatly affects us, as the Japanese have obviously figured out. If the place is right, the tea will feel better, even if, objectively, it’s not. I still think form should follow function, but maybe if something is too function, it loses its magic.

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Seasoning pots

February 17, 2008 · 13 Comments

So yixing pots are supposed to be seasoned over time as you use it… but how exactly does that happen?

I’ve been more than puzzled by the exact process. Supposedly, the pots will slowly gain a shine as you use them. You’re supposed to use a wet cloth to sort of buff the pot, basically, after using them and while they’re still hot, ideally. But there are many, many theories out there about the way you raise a pot. Some say you should just leave leaves in them. Some say you should clean them out right away. Some say it’s good to polish them often. Some say it’s good to not do it very often. Some say it’s important to use only one tea in them. Some say it doesn’t really matter how many kinds of teas you use in your pot.

The information has been, on the whole, contradictory. I cannot help but feel though that much of it is magic, and not really true.

What I can say is this — that over time, at least for the pots that I have raised myself, they do slowly gain a shine. I usually pour the wash over the pot while I am brewing my first infusion. Otherwise, I just pour hot water over them. I rarely rub them with a towel — maybe once a month, if even. I don’t usually leave leaves in them over night. I clean them out after using them. The most obvious change happened to my young puerh pot, which was fresh from the kiln when I got it. Now it’s actually got quite a sheen to it after about a year’s use.

There is also the matter of the clay’s quality. I am currently running an experiment on a cheap pot that broke on its way from Taiwan to here. Basically, I’m soaking it in my spent tea leaves every night before I go to bed. I have noticed that it started doing what they call “spitting black”, basically, black spots that show up on the pot. They don’t go away. Supposedly, from what I’ve read online, they are the result of under-firing of the pot. The pores are too big, and the iron ions of the tea (supposedly one of the things in it) will infiltrate these pores and somehow a reaction happen and it turns black. All pots eventually do this, but really underfired ones are more likely to do this, and at a faster rate.

This is only what I’ve read. I don’t know if it’s true. It’ll be pretty interesting if it were true. The black spots, I should add, are quite numerous. Maybe I’ll show you all a picture when I get better lighting. The thing though is that before I used it, the pot doesn’t look that different from many other ones. I could sort of tell it was slightly on the low density side of things, but it was not obviously so.

Anybody got pot-raising stories to share?

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How fast do you drink your tea?

February 5, 2008 · 4 Comments

I brewed up the tieguanyin that Toki sent me a while back again. It’s a nice tea, a bit roasty, but soft and mellow and not really bitter at all. These days, I’m using mostly my black teapot, but today I pulled out my old (and small) tieguanyin pot. It’s a smaller pot that really only pours out one cup, and it works fairly well for teas like this

It’s a joy to see pots season over time and gaining a sheen that it didn’t use to have.

But something came to mind today while I was making this tea — how fast do you drink your tea?

The reason I ask is because there’s always this constant concern with brewing parameters, specifically how long each infusion lasts. I think readers of my blog probably know that I generally don’t pay a lot of attention to exactly how long I use for each infusion, and instead I just brew as they come. Yet….. how long you take to drink your tea matters. Why? Because while you’re drinking your cup, the tea is still brewing, sort of. The leaves are wet, and they are stewing in that little bit of water that you have left in the pot/gaiwan. Today, for example, in between a few infusions I took a little longer because I was a little occupied with other things… and the infusions after those are inevitably a little sour with a little more tartness.

So what does this mean? If you’re really serious about keeping time, then you ought to keep time you spend drinking your cups (i.e. time between infusions) as well. Otherwise… my parameters of 5, 5, 5, 10, 10, 15 might work for me because I am only brewing one small cup and drinking them, but not for you because you take longer to drink your two cups… something like that.

Which is again why I think it’s better if you just experiment with various times and figure out what works for your style and what doesn’t

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Coffee maker tea

January 22, 2008 · 1 Comment

I am on the road again. I brought my survival kit pot, but…. no hot water.

Hot water in this hotel, unfortunately, only comes through the coffee machine. They won’t bring up hot water for me, and even if they do, I know that they will bring it up in a carafe that doubles as a coffee carafe. What that means is that I will be drinking watered down coffee — not ideal for making tea, I think.

So…. I will have to use the coffee machine. One run of cold water through the coffee machine, though, is not enough. The water’s not very hot coming out, and not good for teas like the oldish dahongpao that I want to drink (in my mug). So…. you have to run the cold water from the tap through the coffee maker TWICE (the frontdesk person suggested using hot tap water — I think that’s lunacy). I find that the water comes out hot enough that way.

There are two problems using a drip coffee maker for just water — one is that you have to open the drip part so that water doesn’t actually go through it. If it does, you will, again, be drinking watered down coffee. The second is that the water, when going through the coffee maker the second time, will spray all over — there’s a warning about not using hot water in the coffee maker after all. It will make everything wet and burn your hand, should your hand be nearby. User beware.

It’s a lot of trouble, and the tea that comes out is far from ideal… but I’ll manage. It beats going downstairs to get Tazo teabags from the lobby Starbucks.

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