Official what Oolong are You Drinking Right Now?

[jayinhk]

My home roasted baozhong. It appears to have calmed down now. The dry leaf still smells a little grassy, but that doesn't carry over into the brew, at least not from my 100ml modern zhuni pot. Nice sweetness from the tea (breakdown of carbohdrates?) and a light orchid/dancong flavor. Definitely an improvement over the way it was before the roast. Maybe a higher temperature roast would improve it further. I'll give it a shot in a year if i still have some. For now, if I buy green baozhong in Taiwan, I'm only buying 75g at a time so it doesn't go off! Same deal with gaoshan. I hate losing the aroma from good quality greener teas. I suppose I could refrigerate it, but I'll just buy less and travel more.

[ethan]

Thanks for posting about how your roasting turned out. It encourages one to try to get some good use out of some tea that does not suit one's tastes.

I have some bale fruit (tea) that is better when the fruit is roasted before steeping it. I think I'll give some cheap green oolong a roast to remove extreme vegetal flavor simultaneously.

The dragon plate from Vietnam looks good in use.

[jayinhk]

Ethan, with a greener oolong I might bump up the temp to 105-110 Celsius since it can handle more heat because of the rolling.

Bael is good stuff. I had no idea what it was when I tried it in Phuket for the first time. It was brought over from India thousands of years ago and was used as an offering for Lord Shiva. It's not that commonly consumed in modern India, but it is far more common in Thailand. I bet Thailand has lots of interesting remnants of ancient Indian culture that I'd only discover by chance and research.

Bael slices do improve after a little toasting/roasting, as do many spices, as it brings the aroma out. In traditional Chaozhou gongfu cha, I believe tea is lightly heated/roasted to bring the aroma out in the same manner, so awakening teas with a little heat doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. Still, this baozhong is a shadow of what it once was. I believe the processing of greener oolongs and baozhong brings all of that delicious aroma to the forefront, but it dissipates quickly with age. In China they stick vacuum-packed green TGY in the fridge for this reason.

[Bok]

In Taiwan as well, greener Oolongs are always in the fridge. I do the same and only have one pack open which I finish asap 2-3 weeks max. I can already notice the decrease once I reach the last portions on the bottom of the pack. That said immediately after opening the tea is usually also sub-standard, one or two days later it reaches a better potential.

In the freezer they can preserve their aroma up to a year, so definitely worth to do it. Especially with lots of tea, one pack easily gets forgotten…

[jayinhk]

I should really do that with my gaoshan from now on...I only have shincha in the fridge (2015 harvest, still in the unopened nitrogen-flushed packs). I've actually never seen a store in Taiwan that stored gaoshan in the fridge, but it is definitely the way to go with the good stuff! Maybe I'll put my Spring 2015 SLX in the fridge now. I do have a vacuum sealer, but it's in my warehouse. I guess I should bring it home and seal off the tea I want to refrigerate in 8g pouches (like they do on the mainland)!

[Bok]

They don’t bother with the stadard rubbish they sell to standard customers or the more oxidised or black teas, but you can be sure that they have a backroom warehouse with temperature control

Where I buy my tea, there are only one 150 pack of each their selection in a small wine fridge to brew for tastings for customers. Out in the open is only the cheap stuff.

[ethan]

Jay, The higher temperature is what we saw in Taiwan: Close to boiling. Nonetheless, I started much lower at 86C. Experimenting w/ the dayuling, I have worked my way up to 92 ,but next time I will start at 95C.

I don't know how you get over 100 which is boiling.

Bok & Jay, Cool storage has worked for me. I have not needed to freeze. Of course, I don't have Japanese green tea nor a lot of green oolong. W/ some superb teas recently, I have noticed loss of flavor in first & second infusions while later infusions are weaker as the tea in an opened pack gets older.

[jayinhk]

Bok, that is interesting stuff. Sounds like I need to find vendors that refrigerate their gaoshan!

Ethan, I was referring to roast temperature. As for boiling water, only pure water boils at 100C. Anything with dissolved solutes boils at a higher temperature (including spring and tap water). The harder your water, the hotter the boiling temperature!

[debunix]

From last weekend, saved while TeaChat was offline, and note rediscovered just now:

2007 Ba Xian Dan Cong from Tea Habitat, lovely, lovely, floral and fruity, brewed in a TH Chao Zhou pot and enjoyed from a Seong Il cup. Just right. Plums, berries, hints of spicy clove, nectar and honey and delight.

Should go drink more of it now.

[ethan]

dayuling

Jay, thanks for advice on temperature. In close to boiling water, 96 - 98 C, for quick infusions, this tea is wonderful.

2 tiny teapots acquired from Steanze are perfect for this tea. I'll just say in my ignorance these are yixing types of clay. Whatever, I found the match.

So many infusions for the experience I was looking for w/ green oolong.

[jayinhk]

Fook Ming Tong dancong in a 65ml hongni pot from EoT (Factory 1). This tea is incredible. Clean and strong flavor and aroma with good huigan in the first few infusions. Tastes and smells like orchids and lychees. Lovely!

[jayinhk]

Drinking what I believe is a low-grade Shuixian that was packaged for the Thai market. The tea came packed in cellophane inside a paper box....around 150g of it. The box is covered in Thai writing, but one side is in Chinese--not a word of English on it. I think I bought this tea five years ago, but it may have been six years ago. I remember buying it in Phuket.

When I first bought this tea, I had no idea how to brew it right and I was brewing it WAY too strong. Extremely unpleasant. I put it aside for quite a while. My last attempt with it was lovely and I really enjoyed the tea, and realized it was actually decent stuff. I have no idea what it cost.

Now, all these years later, it is a surprisingly mild, sweet, aged-tasting tea. There is something a touch unpleasant to the flavor, but I am brewing it in porcelain. In zisha, it should be even better. I'll give it a try in zisha the next time I feel like revisiting this tea. Most of the 150g is in a glazed clay caddy I picked up in Vietnam last week.

[debunix]

SeaDyke red label TKY, purchased off eBay when my usual brick & mortar store let me down. It's not a tea to give you a brilliant tea session, but if treated even remotely reasonably, it's always going to be pleasant, and I can't say that for most other versions of a traditional or deep roast TKY or TGY I've had. So glad to have it again.

I tried to combine the two that I've bought when this one was unavailable, this past week--the one sharp and rough, the other so overroasted that the black rolled leaves never unfurl and it tastes of nothing but roast, more charcoal than tea. Together, as well as apart, they don't equal the SeaDyke.

[jayinhk]

Perhaps experiment with blending the inferior TGYs with Sea Dyke? Here in Asia, vendors that supply restaurants do this to offer a lower cost, but still palatable, product.

[debunix]

Rather than diminish the Sea Dyke, I think I should put the others away for a while, to see if aging mellows and improves anything. The overroasted stuff is probably hopeless of improvement, but if the other smooths out a bit with age, a blend of the two might be acceptable for times when one needs a lot of tea in a short time without being too particular about it.