by Oni » Feb 21st, '09, 01:56
I am also always experimenting, this is one of the best part in tea drinking, that not only the work of the tea farmer that counts, or mother nature, but also the masters that made our teapot, or even the miner who mined the clay for it, and every little detail, in your tea setting changes the flavour of your tea, there are still new frontiers that wait to be reached, for example a water container, because now I store my soft water in a 5 liter plastic container in wich it is sold, I would like to store it in a porcelain or glass container, I do not yet own a pottery kettle, nor a tetsubin, nor a silver kettle, there is much to improve in the setting.
This tea was like a very mild fruit acid, a liitle bit of sour taste could be felt on the back of my tongue, some would call it minty, I used 7 grams to 120 ml gaiwan, and after washing 5 sec, 25 seconds infusion, 25, 35, 50, 1 min, 1 min 30, 2 min, but I usually wing these as I go, as the flavour changes during subsecvent infusion.
Last year I got obsessed with gyokuro, I started buying better and better gyokuros, and the price of the tea just raised above the level that I could afford, I could not afford to buy teas that participated in the all japan tea contest, let alone the winners, this would be the same for TGY but even harder, one could navigate easyer on the japanese market than in the chinese, fewer shops sell japanese tea, that chinese, usually japan based shops are honest, if you pay 60 $ for a gyokuro, you can expect to get very good quality, but with chinese shops you risk getting fooled, they might sell you anything.