Tie Kuan Yin Roasting
Last week, I showed up at A-Liang’s shop for my weekly tea lesson. I knew I was in trouble when I saw him putting out sets of testing mugs (10 mugs in all), and he said, “I’m preparing your lesson for today.” Fortunately, he’s not a strict taskmaster, and he was partly kidding anyway. He’s preparing some Tie Kuan Yin tea for an upcoming competition, and felt I could learn something from observing and assisting him in the process.
While he was pulling samples from his upstairs roasting room, he had me unload the downstairs roaster and bag the tea. Then we set up the cups and prepared water. He had two different sources of Tie Kuan Yin. He was roasting them for varying lengths of time, and we needed to see how they were coming along to determine how to arrange the next (3rd) round of roasting.
Fresh roasted tea 
Ready to test
Each testing mug holds 150 cc (5 oz.) of water. After warming and rinsing them, we added 3 g (1/10th of an oz.) of tea to each one. Then we filled each mug completely with hot water, and steeped the samples for 6 minutes. This is the standard formula used at competitions here, so it’s a good yardstick for comparing teas.
After 6 minutes, we poured off the teas into the bowls. The first stage of the examination was to smell the tea leaves in each mug, and make notes about the aroma.
Pouring the samples
Prepared samples
The Master at work
A-Liang is quite amazing – he can go through all ten samples in less than 1 minute, then sit down and write notes for each one. Then we examine the tea liquid for color and smell. We test the smell by dipping a ceramic spoon into the bowl, swirling it slightly, then smelling the back of the spoon. It’s important to rinse the spoon between each test to not corrupt the samples.
The Master at work 
Taste test
The last test (my favorite part) is to taste each sample. For this, we put 1 spoonful of tea in our cups, slurp it (the added air helps to distinguish flavor subtleties). A-Liang usually dumps out most of his, as he only needs a quick sip to confirm what he already knows, while I generally need the whole spoonful to make up my mind.
Some of the samples seemed identical (to me anyway) while others were obviously different. The picture below shows two cups of the same tea leaves. The one on the left (#8) has been roasted a total of 1 hour longer than the one on the right (#7). You can see how the roasting darkens the color, and the difference in taste is also easy to discern. They will likely go through 4 – 5 more roasts before they are ready for drinking.
Time will tell
Got Tea?
After testing & re-testing, A-Liang finally decided which teas are doing better and how he wants to adjust the next round of roasting. Then we were ready for the best part of the procedure: snack time!
The Master at work!