Hah! I KNEW you’d read it anyway!!

It all started innocently enough. I’d had a long day brewing tea at the 2008 Expo (there’ll be a separate post on that later). When I got home, I thought I’d unwind, do some calligraphy, and have some organic black tea from Master Tsai. I set up my brushes, inkwell, and paper while the water was boiling. 

There was just a bit of tea left in the bag (so I thought), so instead of measuring it into my bamboo scoop I just dumped it all into my small gaiwan (that was my first mistake). Turns out there was enough dry black tea to pretty much fill my gaiwan! I considered taking half the tea out, but I lose points for that, so I decided to soldier on (that was my second mistake).

Oh, I quick side note – the picture at left shows how I set up. Most of my tea trays are with Aliang for the Tea Expo, so I just used 2 thick tea towels as a base, and poured my ‘waste water’ into the red pot shown (that pot is part of a full set I have for more formal tea sessions – any large bowl or vase works just as well). It’s a quick easy layout, and about as cheap as you can get really.

Knowing the brew was going to be extremely strong, I did 3 very quick steeps (average of about 3 seconds, which was how long it took to set the lid and lift the gaiwan over my pitcher). Let’s just say, I’m not a coffee drinker, but I now know what the word ‘espresso’ means! It was the kind of drink that, as my father would say, ‘puts hair on your chest.’ To make matters worse, I’m also a Leo, which means I’m stubborn and proud, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let a mere cup of tea get the better of me (will I never learn? – this was my 3rd mistake).

It actually tasted much scarier than this photo shows, but by the time I got around to taking this shot I was having difficulty keeping my hand steady!! Here’s a shot of the gaiwan. You’d think I was pouring baojong from the amount of leaf I’ve got in there. You can also see lots of small particles and ‘grit’ from the bottom of the bag (you can see how much excess ended up in the slop bowl – I’m not a big fan of filters or screens!).  All in all, a pretty nasty brew.

It took about 10 very quick steeps before the brew was down to ‘stronger than usual’, and I didn’t waste any of it! Master Tsai always says that a good thing about quality organic teas is they are more ‘patient’, which means you can re-steep the leaves many more times. This means you get twice as much actual tea from the leaf, which helps justify the higher price. I guess you could say that I’ve had too much of a good thing, and it’s a safe bet I won’t be hankerin’ for black tea for awhile! I ended up not going to bed until 2am (I get up for work about 6). How did I get through my Monday morning, you may wonder? By drinking lots of tea, of course! Duh!

The lesson to keep in mind is to always check your tea carefully before just dumping it into your pot. Especially at the end of a bag, there is lots of ‘dust’ and smaller particles which can make the tea very strong and bitter. It’s better to mix these ‘fannings’ in the last 2-3 pots you brew so that they don’t all end up in one pot. If, (like me) you don’t generally use a filter, you end up picking grit out of your teeth for the next few days.

Also, if you find you’ve got much more leaf than you should have and it’s not practical to remove it from your teapot, a better method than the one described above is to brew 1 or 2 strong pots of tea (say a minute or more in this case) and then throw it out and start from there. Some people will suggest just adding hot water to the tea and thinning it down, but my experience with that is it pretty much ruins the tea, and I would end up throwing it out anyway.

Also, the general rule with loose black tea is to use a very small amount – maybe 1/5th of a pot or less, depending on your tastes. I hope you made it through to the end of this post – thanks for sticking with me, and I hope you never have to go through what I did!!! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go shave my chest!

 UPDATE!! UPDATE!!

WIth some good quality organic teas, it can be OK to let the leaf sit overnight in the pot and re-steep it the next day. Since I had so much of the black tea, I decided to try it again today. First, I transferred it into my largest gaiwan, which I should have done yesterday! I let the first steep sit for about 10 seconds to warm up the leaf & gaiwan, then poured it out. This also removed any ‘sludge water’ that had been soaking overnight.

THE LEAF

Most Oolong is usually easily identified by it’s semi-spherical, tightly-wrapped kernels, as shown below left. As the tea ages, however, the leaves slowly open up, exposing more surface to air and further oxidizing the tea, as shown below right.

The leaf color also darkens,  giving the tea a roasted look. In fact, aging and roasting produce a similar effect; the flavor becomes richer and mellower, developing an earthy, (almost Pu-er-esque) quality.

THE SOUP

No, that’s not a typo! ‘Soup’ is a Chinese word used to describe the tea liquid. This Oolong has developed a deep, brownish hue. It’s very nice for cool/rainy day drinking, or as a morning tea as well. As mentioned above, the flavor is very similar to medium roast oolongs, but is much smoother and more pleasant to drink.

THE BREW

We used a gaiwan (again), partly because I really prefer it for study purposes, and partly because I don’t have a dedicated pot for aged oolongs (yet). We don’t need very much leaf - about 1/5 or so, and we were able to get 8-9 very good rounds. I’m not sure if that’s just due to the quality of this tea, but it seems that aged teas in general are very patient (meaning they can steep more times) in relation to similar quality oolongs. 

Here you can see how the leaves expand out. This photo is the 2nd or  3rd round. By the 4th round, the leaves have pretty much filled the gaiwan. After our session, we had a look at the leaves. They have a fresh appearance, but are darker than ‘fresh’ oolong. Some of the leaves haven’t yet fully opened, indicating that they probably still have a few more rounds of good flavor left in them.

We made the baojong in my wife’s white porcelain teapot. As you can see from the photo above, the leaves are rolled long, and are only slightly twisted. This creates a lot of volume (air space), and so the pot should be filled to around 2/3 full. When the leaves get wet, they compress down, but after several steeps when they are fully opened the pot should be almost full (see photo below).

This particular oolong was a gift from a student’s parents, so I don’t have too much background on it except that it comes from a guy in Pin Lin (a small town in southeastern Taipei county famous for baojong tea and a very nice tea museum), is certified organic, and was very expensive. It has a very light and smooth taste, and was less astringent than most baojongs I’ve tried. I’m not sure how long it has been aged, but it didn’t have a strong ’bite’, and I didn’t detect any earthy, loamy (‘fermented’?) taste like pu-ers get as they age, so I’m guessing it is only a few years old at most.  I’m wishing I had a bit more of it to enjoy.

This photo shows the 2nd steep. The tea is green with a slight orange tint. Although I’m under-steeping the tea by 10-15 seconds, the flavor still comes through very clearly. We were able to get 9 or 10 rounds on this pot, so I’d say that this tea would be a pretty good value, and if I can track down the producer I’d likely buy it myself.

Here you can see the used leaf. We really didn’t use very much at all, maybe 4 grams or so. You can tell by the uniform leaf color that the picking and processing was handled very well, and that this wasn’t ‘blended’ with a cheaper tea to bulk it up. The leaves were very strong and relatively thick for the Pin Lin area, which also indicates a high quality harvest. All in all, it was an excellent choice for our opening round.

Success!!

The Jin Hsuen came out very nice – less astringent than light-roasted oolong normally is, but very refreshing. It wasn’t as cold as it should have been because I wasn’t able to keep in a cooler, but I’m planning to experiment with a few other teas and do a comparison test to see how they turn out. And yes, this is a different bottle from the ‘Part I’ post – I poured the tea off into this bottle so it wouldn’t be steeping in the tea leaves all day (more on that later).

As you can see from the picture, the tea has a light yellowish-green color. I had a bit less tea than I should have used, and A-Liang gave me some guidelines of his to use in the future. I’ll add his suggestions in a future post after translating them.

Our basic formula for brewing large amounts of tea is 1.5g of tea per 50cc of (hot) water.  For today, I’m going to cut that amount by 2/3. First I pour the water out of the bottle into a large pitcher. Then I add the tea leaves (2000 cc / 50 = 60 (grams of tea for standard hot-water brewing method) / 3 = 20g of tea). The rule of thumb is to use enough leaves to just cover the bottom of the bottle (see photos). Then I pour the water back into the bottle, screw the lid on, and return the bottle to the refrigerator for 8 hours of steeping. I’m told to keep the tea cold for best results, and to drink it within a couple of days at most. I’ll be taking this bottle on an outing with my son’s kindergarten class so it won’t stay iced, but we’ll see how it turns out. Stay tuned!                                                                          

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                                   

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.

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!

Traditional Oolong (left) and Tan-Pei Oolong (right)

I stopped in to see Master Tsai last week, and we got to discussing oolongs and their different processing methods. High mountain oolongs are very popular right now in Taiwan, and a lot of people I speak with seem to think that anything grown below 1,000m isn’t worth drinking. I asked Master Tsai what non-high mountain oolong teas he would recommend. Well, one thing led to another, and before I knew it he was getting out a couple of teas to sample. Both of them are from the same farm (in Nantou county), and the leaves are from the same fields. The difference is in the processing methods.

 Traditional Oolong 

The first tea we drank was a traditional organic ooong. It’s considered ‘traditional’ because it is harvested and processed using methods from before the high mountain tea style became popular in the 1980s. The leaves are a little older when picked, and they are oxidized and roasted more than the popular ‘green’ oolongs (most high mountain oolong falls into this category) on the market now. This gives the tea a richer, more mature flavor than its light roasted cousins, with slight fruity notes. The liquid is medium green with an orange tint. It’s smooth on the tongue, with a mildly astringent and slightly sour (in a good way) aftertaste. Under the watchful eye of Master Tsai (and with the aid of a carbon steel tetsubin heated over charcoal) it really impressed me. Even going ‘light’ on the leaf (about 1/6th of the small I-Hsing pot we were using), the flavor was consistent after 7 rounds. It leaves a pleasant dry feeling on the lips, and was an excellent choice for our afternoon tea session, and I couldn’t help but think it would be great for washing down wedges of gouda (or dark chocolate)! 

 Tan Pei Oolong

After a brief break to reset the table and rest our palates, we opened the other organic oolong. This second tea was a medium-roast oolong. It was more robust and full-bodied than the first tea, with a brownish-orange color. The mouthfeel was also smooth, but it had a stronger ‘presence’ in the mouth.  This is a great tea for a slow, prolonged drinking session, and we lingered between each cup to enjoy the dry aftertaste that intensifies deliciously in the back of the throat. I was reluctant to take the next cup at times! Another great thing about this tea is how forgiving it is. I got distracted on the second round (long story!) and ended up with a 2-3 minute steep – ouch! I asked Master Tsai if I should dump it, or dilute it out by adding a quick ‘rinse’ round to it (don’t cringe – that’s a legal maneuver!). He reassured me with a smile, and told me to serve up two cups. While the color was much darker than the first round, and I expected a cup of tea that would ‘put hair on my chest’ (my dad says that a lot), it turned out to be quite acceptable. The flavor was strong, and some of the subtleties were lost, but there was no bitterness at all. More importantly, the subsequent rounds were only mildly affected. Although I had to lengthen each steep by 10-15 seconds, we still managed 8 very good rounds of tea.

Two very nice ‘low mountain’ oolongs

All in all, it was an excellent tea session, and the highlight of my week. I’m not sure I’d prefer either of these over high mountain in general, but on that particular day, they were the right choice for the occasion. I’m hoping to duplicate the experience at my home tea studio one of these weekends, and I’ll let you know how it works out. If I can work out the ‘technical difficulties’ with the video camera, I’ll see about putting up some video of it.

Remember to drink more tea!