Reading the Tea Leaves

Last month (May) I gave a tea talk at UCLA along with a tasting that was part of the school’s annual “Asia in LA 2010″ day-long program.

Most of  the material I presented has been covered in various earlier posts, but I provide here the teas that I brought for the tasting and my reasoning for the selection and the sequence of the sampling.

The core of my brief presentation was about how to judge tea quality.  To do so, one has to have some understanding of tea processing. With this knowledge, even with only some general concepts, a consumer is then able to appreciate why teas end up looking the way they do, and thereby better able to gauge the standard of the teas s/he sees before buying.  With wider sampling, as one’s visual, olfactory, and tasting memories expand, the criteria for assessing the caliber of specific teas become more focused and refined, and I would hope that this learning process is a pleasurable experience rather than a task.

The session was limited to 30 attendees because I wanted participants to brew the teas themselves, using professional tasting mugs/bowls.

This way, each person would have a chance to see the dry leaves, and also to examine and smell the wet leaves and to note if any fragrance could be discerned in the emptied mug.  In terms of my preparation, it would have meant far less work to simply pour and serve my favorites to each person and then to say a little something about why those teas appealed.

I felt, however, that such an approach would have provided no context for comparison, which is basically what consumers are doing when they shop and sample new teas.

Here then are the teas I brought for the tasting and the order of the sampling.

Due to time limitations, some teas were presented as a group.  The first such set included a Chunmee Green, a Fragrant Three Cups Green, and a Curled Dragon Silver Tip Green.  Having spoken a while about tea processing before the actual tasting, I guessed that anticipation had been building, and so the first tea was likely to disappoint.

Just by looks, Chunmee (one of the family of “Eyebrow” Greens named for the leaf form) was probably familiar.  But the taste holds little vegetal sweetness; it is somewhat assertive, sometimes carrying a hint of smoke.  To me, this tea represents much of what is available on the market – a generic sort of China Green that is very affordable, but that is about its only virtue.  For a little more money, much better China Greens can be had.

The second tea (Fragrant 3 Cups Green) took our drinking in that direction.

This tea has been described in an previous post, so I will just say here that I introduced it to underscore what a modest but much better tasting Green is like.  Here, one finds the vegetal or herbaceous profile of better Greens with an underlying sweet note at the finish.  A few budsets can be seen, unlike the Chunmee which has a choppier appearance.

The third Green (Curled Dragon Silver Tip) has been described at length elsewhere.

I had just received a sample from this year’s spring crop, and while I was delighted to have a chance to share this tea, I was forced to share with a parsimonious hand.  As noted elsewhere, weather conditions this spring have presented harsh challenges to tea farmers in China, from drought to frost.  The Curled Dragon Silver Tip normally displays lavish silver downy hairs –giving the tea part of its name, but this season, the silver was less prominent.  But the tea was still tasty, exhibiting all the features of a deservedly distinguished tea: many budsets, sweet notes, a hint of chestnuts, an overall sense of freshness, all enhanced by the visual aspects of the tea too.

So for the Greens, the progression was quite clear and self-explanatory.  I began my introduction with the basic tea categories and then had asked my listeners to be willing to let those boundaries blur and soften.  I encouraged the audience to conceptualize teas along a spectrum based on extent of oxidation and leaf manipulation.  In this context, therefore, I wanted to present some lightly oxidized Oolongs next, to highlight the affinity some of these teas share with Green teas.  We ought not to conceive of Oolongs only as those darkish, sometimes bland, sometimes smoky teas one is served in Chinese restaurants.

The first Oolong was labeled Ti Kuan Yin; the green hues in the tightly rolled leaves spoke of brief oxidation and light roasting.

This particular tea, however, was not of very good quality — a fact that was not obvious from looking at the leaves.  The lesson here was to show that nicely packaged tea (and a high price) did not guarantee commensurate quality.  The tea looked right, but the flavor was watery and weak, especially disappointing for a TiKuanYin, a tea that holds so much promise for lingering flavor notes and many infusions.

The next Oolong was one that had also just arrived in my group of samples that vendors are still sending.  (This is a great time of year, one that I really savor ~ even though the varieties are not new to me, the samples from each season are packets I still open with some excitement.)

I also wanted the audience to be aware that this tea was far less costly than the previous Oolong, and yet the pop of floral aromas, the sweet taste, and an overall character that makes one want to sip and sip again were all in evidence from the start.  This was a “Yellow Gold Osmanthus” Oolong: no flowers are added to the tea whatsoever at any stage of the processing.  The tea is named precisely because this varietal does yield such wonderful floral aromas.

So while these two Oolongs were examples of two varietals, I intended the comparison to be a reminder about pricing and value too.

The third Oolong was a Phoenix Single Trunk Oolong.  (You would be correct in concluding that I seemed to be using my personal favorites as the last in each set, building up to those as it were.)  This tea had arrived only a few days before the event; in fact, I was anxiously watching each day for the delivery of this particular package, worrying that I wouldn’t have this tea to include.

Looking at the leaves, one would hardly associate this tea with spring.  The leaves are dark, long, straggly and uneven in length — making them a good illustration of my point that Oolong leaves are “hard to read” because the story of Oolong is “inside the leaves.”  And yet what the tasting reveals is a marvel, not only in itself, but as a dramatic contrast to the first Oolong, which was beguiling in its packaging and brief description on the tin and yet so disappointing in its lack of flavor.  Here in the Single Trunk Oolong was a robust, bold tea, and yet at the same time, focused with much finesse, with a finish that was long and complex, making one think of dried fruits and something more elusive, which of course, becomes the reason for taking more sips.

My next choice must have been predictable — Black teas.  Alas, time was short and I had to skip the two Blacks I had brought.  But here in a world of virtual sampling, I can explain my choices:  a 1st Flush Darjeeling not only because it is an early harbinger of spring but again, for its didactic value.  Having spoken about the full oxidation of leaves that get made into Black teas, we see here the curious feature of flecks of green leaves in the Darjeeling, and yet as everyone knows, Darjeelings are Black teas.   Why then are there still green, i.e., non-oxidized, leaves present?

I am fond of 1st Flush Darjeelings because they possess a high, fine floral quality.  I am not alone since market demand is such that these teas are not oxidized to the extent they once were.  But more interesting and enlightening, in my opinion, is the fact that at the high altitudes of these gardens, the temperature remains very low even in spring.  This results in an unevenness of the leaves insofar as the enzymes upon which oxidation works, leaving some leaves green even as others have developed to a point where oxidation can occur.

In any case, the beautiful orange color (not the standard deep red that we usually expect from a Black tea) was a nice illustration of my oft-repeated theme — to regard teas along a continuum, to allow some teas to move into this slot or that, rather than shoe-horning them immovable, fixed categories.   The second Black we were to have tasted was a 1st grade Keemun: this was meant to show what congou leaves look like: the terms refers to a labor intensive process, from the initial plucking and throughout the processing, with much hand-sorting at various stages, and the results are uniform, taut, wiry, beautifully made leaves.  The unique bouquet of a fine Keemun is easy to pick up, and I wanted to provide a tea very different from a Darjeeling.  A vast distance exists between the gardens (and tea cultures) of Darjeeling and Anhui, and here were two exemplary teas, each great tasting in its own way, each very much connected to its place of origin.

We then rushed to a White tea, a White Peony  (Bai Mudan), a special grade that, like the others, had arrived just days earlier.  The first thing I noted when I opened my sample was how green the leaves were.  One can become accustomed to the tan-brown-green hues of this tea, and it was good to be reminded of how this tea ought to look.

And just as an exercise in comparison, here is White Peony I bought from a tea shop in March.

Granted, this was from the previous year but setting aside the color difference for a moment, the leaf quality of the two teas is obvious even to an untutored eye.

Back to the tasting: I might have opted to bring out this White tea at the beginning.  After all, one could reason that if I were starting at one end of the continuum, White teas, as a non-oxidized group and one that is even more minimalist than Greens in terms of processing, might have made a more fitting choice.  But I wanted to show the similarity between this and the 1/F Darjeeling that we would have tasted had time allowed.  I think few would pair a Black and White tea, one after the other, but I wanted to underscore how in some instances two very disparate teas seem to share some traits.

I should acknowledge my audience who were very good sports in managing the brewing and pouring, sometimes brewing three teas at a time, all the while tasting, looking, listening to my comments, and assessing the teas.   So the last tea was one that I hoped would be as memorable to them as it is to me,  a traditional style Tung Ting.  I use “traditional” here in two senses: first, to mean that the tea was more oxidized than the lighter style that has become increasingly popular, and second because I brought gongfu sets for this round.

I do not consider myself a practiced user of gongfu sets, much less a stylish, agile one, but I was less concerned about the little rituals of brewing and pouring from this very small pot.  My main intent was to have the attendees experience the dynamic of fine Oolongs, to taste for themselves how these teas grow and develop over several infusions.  The tiny cups allowed each person to taste the series of five infusions without becoming water-logged.  The bloom has a quite literal sense too, and I asked participants to pay attention after each infusion to note how the leaves continued to unfurl a bit more after each pour, and thereby imparting a slight but noticeably different flavor from infusion to infusion.  (A lesser tea would not produce these results.)

I end here with thanks to the attendees for being an enthusiastic, receptive audience.  One member in the audience, in particular, posed a very insightful question — something along the lines of whether in teas, as in wines, there might be a path or direction that most people take as they drink more widely and delve more deeply into the subject.  As it happens, I have already drafted a rather long piece about what I call a “tea trajectory,” and I hope when that post is published, it will offer a fuller answer and also inspire more queries.