Reading the Tea Leaves

I don’t buy many books about tea.  There are a few volumes in the office that I consult, and happily, there are our suppliers to whom I can always address my queries.  If I happen to be at a bookstore, I will browse through the food and beverage section; in most instances tea books tend to be lavish with photographs and recipes (for afternoon teas).

Recently I bought “The Story of Tea: A Cultural HIstory & Drinking Guide” by Mary Lou Heiss and Robert Heiss for a friend’s daughter, a recent college graduate with her first job and first apartment, who had expressed an interest in teas.  (Full disclosure: the authors acknowledge me in the book.)  Not long after my purchase I saw a suggestion on amazon.com for another tea book, “The Way of Tea,” by Kam Chuen Lam.*  (I think my boss met him once in Hong Kong.)

Even though it was published in the U. S. in 2002 I had not seen this title before and so ordered it.  The glossy photographs are lovely, each cup showing a brew clear enough to appreciate the leaves laying at the bottom of the cup.  There is also a handy brief recipe section at the end, not for afternoon tea foods but for traditional Chinese healing tonics in which tea may or may not be an ingredient.

For anyone interested in the stories of how certain teas acquired their names, this book makes an entertaining read.  That said, I ought to note that Lam’s section on Monkey Picked teas reads more literal than apocryphal.

To be honest, I skimmed over those parts on tea lore.  What caught my eye as I flipped the pages was a category named Light Green Teas, and even more intriguing was spotting “Oolong” and “T’ieh Kuan-yin” described under that heading.  (I have been using “Ti Kwan Yin” and have seen another spelling, “Tie Gwan Yin.”)

Based on photos of brewed teas, one might well see some sense behind Lam’s classification, but it turns out that brew color is not the determining criterion.  As I sat down to read in earnest, I realized that Lam bases his categories on another set of factors.  To my knowledge teas are grouped according to the method by which they are processed.  Here is what Lam states on the subject:

“Tea plants…in China are subdivided into six different types: white, yellow, light green, green, red and black…In the West, green tea and light green tea are not distinguished: both are classified as green tea…A common misunderstanding is to equate fermented tea with black tea, unfermented tea with green tea, and semi-fermented tea with Oolong tea.  Chinese tea culture does not categorize tea in this way, rather in terms of the kind of tea leaf and the way in which the tea is prepared” (p. 40).

The category Light Green was new to me, and after reading about the the teas Lam places in this grouping — what are usually called lightly oxidized Oolongs – the claim above (that Green and Light Green teas being lumped together as Green here in the West) is startling.

But first, Lam seems to use varietals and processing method for classification purposes — not very startling.  As I have written in other posts, however, one varietal may be used to produce a White tea and also a Green tea, and I have tasted a Green, an Oolong, and a Black tea all made from the same tea strain.  Lam’s view is narrower: “depending on the variety, the leaves are processed to be unfermented, semi-fermented, or fermented” (p. 47).  Yet recent experiments (the results of at least a few seem very successful) have shown this framework too restricted.

As far as processing methods go, Lam proceeds to describe them in the following order: how semi-fermented teas are made, the Stir-frying method [using heat to de-enzyme the leaves], the shaping and drying of the leaves.  I was struck by this sequence: he calls Stir-frying the leaves “the next stage” after having explained the semi-fermented processing method.  In fact, from what I’ve seen at processing plants, the application of heat (either steam or dry heat) and the stir-frying motions (I prefer pan-firing) come very early in the sequence of steps in making Green teas; these steps come later only for Oolong and Black teas.

More importantly it was difficult for me to gain an understanding of how Stir-frying is associated with Green, Light Green or Black teas, or even with White teas for that matter, if at all.  There is a suitable appreciation of the skills involved, of having to watch and control the temperatures.  Since Lam opens this chapter eschewing the reference point of “fermentation” (I’ve been using “oxidation”) relative to different tea categories, I can see why there is no mention of the degree of fermentation when he gets around to discussing each category of tea.

Earlier I wrote that rigid divisions among teas might not be helpful in understanding and appreciating teas, and made a plea instead for viewing the extent of oxidation and de-enzyming of tea leaves along a continuum.  But once Lam begins his brief treatises on his six groups, any sense of the role that “fermentation” does or does not play in a particular tea group is nowhere to be found.

The sentence that opens Lam’s White Teas section could well generate lengthy debate: “White teas are slightly fermented” (p. 53).  This claim would surely surprise those who value White teas for their minimal processing, i.e., no “fermentation.”  The remainder of the section is devoted to the stories accounting for how certain White teas got their names.  Lam describes in some detail the brew color of White teas (no distinct color tone, although it may have a touch of yellow, green, or red) and the taste: “When you drink white tea it seems quite tasteless – as if you were drinking hot water with a slightly milder and more subtle taste than normal” (p. 53).  With this to recommend it, one might pity White tea growers.

Specifics about the processing of Yellow teas are also missing.  Lam writes that “Yellow teas…get their name from the color of the brew that they make.  The leaves are …deliberately encouraged to become yellow as a by-product of the Stir-frying stage of the tea-making process” (p. 56).  The first response to this would be that most Green teas brew up a yellow color as well, rather than a true green, say, as a Gyokuro would.  As for “deliberately encouraged to become yellow,” is Lam being deliberately mysterious or coy here about how this is actually done?  (See my post on Yellow Teas.) Again, Lam deserves credit for detailed descriptions of mouth-feel and tea legends.

The category Light Green teas is next and even after a couple of readings I am still not sure I understand why these teas bear this anme of Light Green.  As I’ve come to expect, his characterization of astringency and palate sensations is nicely rendered.  The reader discovers that leaves of wild Ti Kuan Yin are sometimes plucked by [those not apocryphal] monkeys.  This observation might be forgiven if only for entertainment value but it is curious that Lam makes no reference to the semi-fermented tea making method outlined earlier when he is on this group of teas.  Even more amazing than finding Ti Kuan Yin in this Light Green teas group is to read further and find that Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe) is also placed here.  “Another famous, highly regarded light green tea is Ta Hung P’ao” (p. 60).  No wonder he says at the outset about this group of teas, “They are a greenish color with a touch of red, although the tone of red depends on the choice of tea” (p. 58).  Anyone who has tasted a heavily fired Ti Kuan Yin or seen a robust Da Hong Pao will remember deep amber color in the cup.  How these medium oxidized teas came to be known under the Light Green umbrella still escapes me.

Green teas, we are told, are “greenish in color with a touch of yellow” (p. 62).  If this were the differentiating criterion, I for one would be hard put to distinguish Green teas from White teas and some Oolongs.  And since there is no mention of “unfermented-ness” I am left wondering what other criteria I might use to identify Green teas in Lam’s scheme.   Some attention is given to Dragonwell with its own pithy story about pious personages rewarded with good tea.  And Lam does not fail to surprise yet again:  Polee [a Cantonese version of Puer, which may also appear as Bonay] is “actually a green tea” (p. 64).  This is accurate enough if what he has in mind are the Puer cakes and bricks made with unoxidized leaves, although as they age, they do oxidize naturally.  (See my post on The Raw and the Cooked.)  The majority of Puer/Polee teas, whether in loose leaf or in the form of compressed tea, however, are made from oxidized teas, or in Lam’s usage, “fermented” leaves.  With the exception of raw Puer, the combination of “fermented” with green in tea usage is oxymoronic.

As for the flavors and aromas of Green teas, while they have a “fresh, outdoors smell like the scent of early morning mist…[they] have a weak, grassy kind of taste that is quite persistent in your mouth and leaves a roughness on oyur tongue” (p. 62), hardly a recommendation to make someone run out and buy some.

Having been warned at the outset that we should not equate certain tea categories with varying states of fermentedness, I suppose I can understand why there is still no mention of oxidation in the section about Red teas.  And yet having read a detailed account of semi-fermented teas, the reader is left rudderless, without any anchoring context within which to consider various teas.  Red teas might seem named for brew color, as Yellow teas are in Lam’s framework, but this feature is not the defining one in the overall scheme.

And even if the reader can’t help but guess that Red teas are fully fermented, there is no confirmation of this to be found in the pages here, nor is there any information about what a full fermentation of leaves involves.

Most people with even a bit of interest in tea are probably aware that what we call Black teas (finished leaf color) here are known as Red teas (brew color) in China.  There isn’t too much potential for confusion here.  However, Lam’s Black tea grouping is a different class altogether:  they “are not black at all, but make a yellow brew with a touch of green, as opposed to green teas, which are green with a hint of yellow” (p. 68).  Lam obviously possesses a highly developed ability to discriminate among colors.  We learn that Black teas tend to have a “dirty appearance…[and are] extremely bitter” and that “the distinctive feature of black tea is that the taste changes from mouthful to mouthful” (p. 68).  From the photographs the teas certainly look black, and the one that I’ve tasted, Ku Ding, was in fact very bitter (as “ku” means bitter), although I understood it to be an herbal rather than a true tea.  As a tea specialist with training in Chinese herbs, it is not surprising that Lam includes such “teas,” but I have to admit that I cannot recall when I have heard, in Chinese, the term “black tea” (as opposed to bitter teas).

So instead of the edification I hoped for, I got obfuscation.  On a lighter note, the material in the book has equipped me well if ever I wished to be a raconteur of tea legends, but I would not be well equipped to explain the differences among the six categories of tea set forth.  Why should this matter?

As noted above, I have devoted an entire post to the notion that it’s more useful to consider teas on a continuum of oxidation, considering what is done to the leaves as they are prepared on their way to becoming finished tea.  In following this line of thinking, I am in agreement with Lam when he cautions against sticking with a rigid division of unfermented, semi-fermented, and fully fermented teas.  By why should anyone interested in teas bother to learn a bit about the differences in rocessing methods?

I broached this topic in one of my earliest posts (White Tea or Green?) and my answer is much the same.  Aside from gaining a better appreciation of the aesthetics of tea crafting, some awareness of the processing steps for various teas makes one a more astute buyer.  Just because a tea bears a label saying it is White tea does not guarantee that it is 100% White tea, a good thing to know if you care about that sort of thing.  A tea labeled as a Ti Kuan Yin will likely have a loftier price tag than an ordinary Oolong; are you able to judge the leaves to tell if it is likely a genuine Ti Kuan Yin?  Beautifully uniform green leaves of a high grade Dragonwell are a visual treat, but are those top grades with astronomial prices good values as well?

As someone who presents himself as a tea master, my bet is that in pitching and serving tea, especially if using gongfu sets, Lam’s comportment and movements would be impressive.  And he would probably offer timely insights about the medicinal properties of various teas.  The title of his book, The Way of Tea, of course, was chosen with thought and care: “the way” readily brings to mind the concept of “tao,” loaded with inferences to the individual’s relationship to nature.  But I will set aside for now his strange categorization.  Better to try his recipes for red date tea and eight-treasures tea instead.

*U. S. edition published 2002, Barron’s Educational Services, Inc., Hauppauge, NY 11788.