Da Fo Longjing - Spring 2011 from World Of Tea

Tea: Da Fo Long Jing from World Of Tea

Origin: Zhejiang, China

Harvest: Spring 2011

First off, I should point out that long jing (and, in fact, greens in general) is a genre of tea I know little about. When it was sold to me a couple of months ago by a seriously jet lagged Jean (one of the small shop's co-owners) just back from this year's Asiatic trek to buy a fresh supply of teas, I was told that this particular long jing was pretty good, but not the best. Never having tried a long jing before, this suited me just fine. What with this genre's reputation for being tricky to brew gongfu-style, I thought I'd give it a few practice sessions before posting some tasting notes and in the meantime keep it as fresh as I could by not opening it too often and storing it in the fridge.

As I sit down to start the session that will form the basis of this post I crack open the airtight seal on the bag of leaves and inhale deeply as is my custom. Because the leaves still cold from their refrigerated storage I can't smell much at first, but as the leaves warm up a little and especially with the aid of the heat from my gaiwan a thick, oily, leguminous scent is released; it's the kind of thick scent that reaches into the back of your mouth and tickles your salivary glands. I don't often feel like drinking greens, but when I do and I open up this package the need becomes strong.

I prepare the first infusion and the first thing that's apparent is the colour of the liquor: light translucent green. A top quality long jing should be more or less clear; this one isn't, but then it isn't a top quality long jing. To my unpracticed eyes, however, it still looks as though it's hardly been steeped.

Rolling the liquor around in my mouth, the initial pan-fried oily smoothness rapidly gives way to a semi-floral, semi-leguminous sweet character. The aftertaste is cooling and fresh.

I push the second infusion a bit farther, and in tasting it the results are obvious. A new sharp bitter note immediately surfaces and subsides just as quickly into a pleasant coolness. This tea feels great on a warm summer day, the cooling feeling in the mouth leads up to cooling chaqi flowing throughout the body and I notice that the air pushed over me by the ceiling fan on my back porch now feels a perfectly pleasant temperature. At the same time the yang qi trapped within the arrested growth of the buds blossoms inside of me, leaving me feeling fresh and awake.

This tea doesn't have the same endurance as the oolongs with which I am more familiar, taking a dive after about the fourth infusion, but considering that this is a green tea and not an oolong, I'm quite happy with its stamina and move on to inspecting the spent leaves. They're a little bit broken and there's the odd leaf floating around on its own, but in general this tea is made up of downy sets of two leaves and bud. Every time I scoop the tea out of its bag, the scoop comes back covered in thousands of tiny trichomes. That, to me, is a good sign.

In the end, I am most taken with this tea's vivacity. From the moment I open the bag to the last cup washing down my throat its qi is apparent. Though it lacks the subtlety or gentle qualities of other teas in this regard, I always end my sessions with this tea feeling calm, energized, and ready to start my day.

Trichomes

Oriental Beauty - Summer 2010 from World Of Tea

Tea: Oriental Beauty (Bai Hao Oolong, Dong Fang Mei Ren, etc.) from World Of Tea

Origin: Northern Taiwan

Harvest: Summer 2010

For those of you who haven't already heard of Oriental Beauty, it's high time you did. Known by many different names, Oriental Beauty is often touted as Taiwan's most famous tea, and certainly ranks among its most special. Summer harvest oolongs are generally low quality, not being very fresh or floral by nature, but this tea somehow escapes the mediocrity it seems fated to. There are many different versions of just how Oriental Beauty acquires its unique set of characteristics, but I believe the most accurate (and certainly the most plausible) is that the leaves are repeatedly bitten by swarms of insects which resemble a small grasshopper. The tiny chunks taken out of the leaves stimulate the plant to send more tasty juices that way in order to heal. Because insect bites are an intrinsic part of making Oriental Beauty, the plantations that produce this tea are organic as a matter of course. These traits, along with the unusually high level of oxidation involved in post-harvest processing (putting it right on the upper limit of oxidation while still being considered an oolong rather than a red tea), are what give Oriental Beauty its unique character.

Oriental Beauty captures the warmth of the season in which it is produced, and as such is a highly satisfying warming tea with a good caffeine punch. Intuitively, this is a great tea for a cold, damp winter day, but it also works quite well in the sweltering heat my region has suffered from recently. This principle applies to warming teas in general; cooling teas should be drunk when it's warm, warming teas should be drunk when it's hot. The following exerpt from a recent entry on  五行雲 offers a great explanation of this principle:

Why take a hot herb at the most yang time of year I hear you say? Because in summer, all your yang is at the surface of the body, so logically it is not at your centre. You may feel warm (British summers withstanding) because your warmth is exactly where you can perceive it but inside you are stone cold.

I took advantage of temperatures in the thirties (nineties, if you use Fahrenheit) in the shade of my back porch to test this out for myself recently; what follows is from my notes on that session which took place on the seventeenth.

I scrape out some tea from the bottom of what was originally a 50g bag some months ago, and since there's hardly any left and I'm in the mood for strong tea I use a bit more than I normally would. Being from the bottom of the bag, the leaves are a bit more broken up than the ones I remember from a few months ago, but on the whole they're whole (pardon the pun). A good Oriental Beauty should have plenty of downy white buds, and this one does. While heating up the leaves in my gaiwan the ripe fruit smells characteristic of an oxidised oolong are evident but not alone in the complex aroma; dried apricots and faint citrus notes are also present.

After the first infusion passes, my nose detects a sweet floral aroma under the lid of the gaiwan. This sweetness intensifies and becomes almost like caramel in the aroma cup, a characteristic not entirely absent from the liquor. The tea itself is smooth both in taste and texture. In the following infusions I push the tea, and it maintains its sweetness as well as a pleasant roundness and full body while developing a slight cooling bitterness. At this point the tea is largely devoid of unpleasant qualities, with only a little bit of astringency marring the liquid.

Usually when I describe a tea as "silky smooth", I use silky as a descriptor to loosely qualify the extent of the smoothness, drawing more on the fabric's reputation for high quality rather than any particular characteristics of the actual product. In the case of this Oriental Beauty, I will again use the descriptor "silky smooth", but in a rather different way, distinguishing type of smoothness and not degree.

I can best liken the smoothness of a long jing or a really green baozhong to a kind of oily feeling. Thick, smooth, and pleasant, but still wet lubricant. To continue this metaphor, Oriental Beauty, being on the other end of the scale, is drier and thinner, yet somehow no less full, pleasant, and (you guessed it) smooth: Teflon. An odd comparison this may be, but it's the best I've got.

As it turns out my trial was a success. Though the warming energy of this summer oolong was obvious, it left me feeling far more comfortable in the sweltering heat outside, and with a substantial caffeine buzz to boot.

Gu Zao Wei - Spring 2010 from World Of Tea

Tea: Gu Zao Wei oolong from World Of Tea

Origin: Taiwan

Harvest: Spring 2010

I've often read about the profound effect the nature of the water used to brew tea has on the final beverage, and today I have a prime example. Gu Zao Wei is a tea that I used to think of as a pretty good example of a mid-roast, mid-oxidation oolong. A good all rounder to drink on a day-to-day basis, but nothing really special. This afternoon's was my first session with this tea using my new ceramic kettle, and it was a wholly new experience. The water coming out of the unglazed ceramic spout of my kettle made the tea come alive in a way I had never experienced with this tea before! This may be incentive to revisit some teas from The Before Time...

On to today's tea. The smells trapped by the airtight seal on the bag in which the leaves are stored are abundantly smooth and fruity-floral without too much evidence of roast; that particular character makes itself evident once the leaves are heated up.

The first short infusion doesn't release much in the way of aroma from this tea, but what little there is is pleasant. This may seem a strange thing to say, but the tea feels wet in the mouth. It's not the oily thickness of a very green oolong, but just a refreshing feeling which coats the palate. This makes for a very interesting overall textural profile as this tea has a tendency towards being very mildly astringent. When I say very mildly astringent, I mean that it isn't quite enough to actually register as astringency unless you're really looking for a word to describe that nice, slightly cooling feeling on the tongue and across the rest of the mouth.

To me, this is an all-weather tea: slightly cooling on the days which are a bit too hot, and slightly warming on the days which are a bit too cold. The roasted character starts to emerge on its own as an undertone in the second infusion but never really comes to the forefront, leaving flavours of ripe fruit to occupy the limelight. On some level this tea is slightly sweet, a characteristic which comes out more in the aroma from the liquor itsself and even more so from the aroma cup. Whereas this set of leaves is mostly all about fruit, the aroma cup gives up notes which are distinctively floral as it cools.

 Brewing with water kept hot only by the residual heat in the kettle walls this tea has good endurance, with a more herbaceous flavour only starting to creep in as I approach the tenth infusion. This seems a little surprising as the liquor seems to have a fairly green tint right from the get go, albeit as a shade of bright yellow. Perhaps it's just my eyes.

Inspecting the leaves after my session there are few examples of stems at all, let alone stems with leaves attached. The leaves vary in size but are of a uniform dark green, and are fairly stiff and wrinkled in texture.

All in all, this is a good tea I've enjoyed for quite some time given new life by new water. If I'm honest, it's not a tea I'm passionnate about, but its vivacity made my day (which was mostly filled by two final exams) a better one, and surely that's why we all drink so much tea.

Alishan 1 - Spring 2011 from World Of Tea

Tea: Alishan Oolong from World Of Tea
Origin: Alishan (1,400m), Taiwan
Harvest: Spring 2011

Today I sat down with Director's Cut to try a couple of different teas, the first being this fresh gaoshan oolong from World Of Tea, a relatively new brick and mortar shop located in the national capital's Westboro village.

As this tea has a very low oxidation level I brewed it quite cool (and a bit too light in the first cautious infusion), and as a result very little in the way of aroma greeted us from the sniffing cups. The mouthfeel, however, was instantly smooth and coated the whole inside of the mouth just as a drop of soap diffuses across a layer of water covering it completely. Having been gently woken by the first infusion aromas of mango and papaya reached us revealing what little oxidation this tea had undergone during processing. Looking at the leaves in the empty gaiwan this was very apparent; they were of an incredible rich green!



Someone left emeralds in my gaiwan...

This tea really seems to be all about mouthfeel rather than the intense fruity and floral qualities for which more oxidised and roasted oolongs are known, and in this respect it really excelled. The mouthfeel was consistently smooth and had a pleasant cool and minty huigan which only lasted longer as we progressed through the infusions. However, this is not to say that the flowers and fruit of other oolongs are completely absent. After the third infusion very clear and distinct floral notes bloomed beneath the lid of the gaiwan letting us know that this was indeed an oolong. In later infusions the tea developped a light sweet note which DC described as being closer to the sweetness of caramelized onions than the honey-sweetness of the senchas with which he is familiar. This sweetness continued to evolve throughout the subsequent infusions eventually concluding with a note most like some sort of candied fruit.

One subtle but at the same time powerful characteristic of this gaoshan tea was it's trademark high-mountain chaqi. While the cooling properties were duly noted early on during the tasting, it was only towards the end of the session that a remarkable calmness became more obvious. The qi was never overpowering or in your face as it can sometimes be with other genres, but rather has a more subtle centering effect on the drinker. As this tea was provided courtesy of DC's personal stash, he was able to relate previous experience with this tea illustrating this effect: at the end of a hectic day the tea left him with a feeling of calmness, providing an interesting contrast to today's lazy Sunday session which managed to dispell a feeling of lethargy stemming from not doing anything all day up until then. However, this is not to be mistaken for an energizing, early morning tea as it clearly did not have this effect on us.

Looking into my tea strainer the quality of the leaves that make up this tea is obvious: barely anything's been filtered out. The tightly rolled leaves are whole almost without exception, about two thirds of them being three leaves to a stem (rather than lone leaves). As World of Tea's mid-range (or better yet, mid-mountain) Alishan Oolong, at about $20 for 50g it is a thoroughly enjoyable and economical way of exploring gaoshan as a genre.

Co-authored by Eugenius and Director's Cut