Oolong and yi xing pots?

[Bubba_tea]

Do you use yi xing pots with good wu longs? I find the yi xing mutes the flavors (or 'absorbs' as some call it). I bought another round of the charcoal dong ding from teance and they recommend using an yi xing for it. However, I found that it mutes the delicate honey flavors of the tea.

I'm wondering if I brewed incorrectly or if good quality wu longs are just better brewed in a gaiwan.

[wyardley]

Do you use yi xing pots with good wu longs? I find the yi xing mutes the flavors (or 'absorbs' as some call it). I bought another round of the charcoal dong ding from teance and they recommend using an yi xing for it. However, I found that it mutes the delicate honey flavors of the tea.

I'm wondering if I brewed incorrectly or if good quality wu longs are just better brewed in a gaiwan.

Well wulong describes a very broad spectrum of teas, from no roasting, low oxidation, to high fire roasting, low oxidation, to high oxidation and no roasting, etc. etc. So it's hard to come up with a hard and fast rule for all of them. But I think most will benefit from a yixing pot, and to answer your last question, I think many, many people would argue that a yixing pot is the best thing to brew wulong tea in.

I think you just need the right pot for the tea. There are a lot of theories on matching pots to tea, and I won't say a lot on that other than to link you to this thread:
http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?t=3480

I have personally never noticed a tea tasting worse in a yixing pot -- usually the tea tastes either roughly the same as when made in porcelain, or better. Rarely or never worse, to my taste.

Especially if the teas you're talking about are greener / lighter / less roasted, you may want a pot using a less porous clay, usually a red one, like a zhuni or hong ni pot, or some sort of modern "zhuni" approximation, which will be much cheaper / easier to find.

There are not too many hard and fast rules in tea... do some further experiments of your own, trying to control for other factors as much as possible, and do what tastes best to you.

[hop_goblin]

Do you use yi xing pots with good wu longs? I find the yi xing mutes the flavors (or 'absorbs' as some call it). I bought another round of the charcoal dong ding from teance and they recommend using an yi xing for it. However, I found that it mutes the delicate honey flavors of the tea.

I'm wondering if I brewed incorrectly or if good quality wu longs are just better brewed in a gaiwan.

That is an interesting take Bubba. Frankly, most feel that YiXing and Oolong were made for one another.

Taking into consideration that YiXing retains heat more than probably any other type of brewing vessel, I would check the temp of your water. Typcially, if water is to hot, flavors and aroma dissipate. This of course is exacerbated with the heat retention nature of the zisha clay. I would recommend 1. Check your water temp and make sure it is not too hot 2. Try tilting the lid over the mouth of the YiXing and poor water directly over the lid at an elevation letting the water trickle down from the lid into the vessel. This cools the water to some extent and secondly prevents the leaves from being scolded by the hot water. Scolding water is disasterous as it shocks the leaves.

Hopes this helps.

[ABx]

I would think that a dong ding, particularly a heavily roasted one, would actually benefit from hotter water. Though I've not encountered it, I'll grant that very hot water might be bad for some of the greener Chinese oolongs, but the higher fire and Taiwanese oolongs tend to do better with more heat.

Some pots are just going to absorb more aroma. It is possible that it's changing your brewing parameters for the worse, but it really just seems that some of the more porous ones seem to absorb more of the volatiles that create the aroma. Seasoning the pot my help with this.

[stanthegoomba]

Muted? I call it "rounded!"

My experience is that the more delicate flavours are exactly what a yixing brings out. The excess charcoal in roasted yancha and the bright harshness in lighter oolongs are subdued and tastes are prolonged. The only oolongs that have come out worse for me in a yixing are the occasional lighter ones which get cooked. (The culprit leaves smell like spinach after a hit of boiling water.)

For instance, I'm earnestly trying to acquaint Adagio's alishan with my eager clay pot; but so far it's really only taken to the IngenuiTEA! That hussy.

[chrl42]

Do you use yi xing pots with good wu longs? I find the yi xing mutes the flavors (or 'absorbs' as some call it). I bought another round of the charcoal dong ding from teance and they recommend using an yi xing for it. However, I found that it mutes the delicate honey flavors of the tea.

I'm wondering if I brewed incorrectly or if good quality wu longs are just better brewed in a gaiwan.

Sounds like you have a sensitive palate But that's what we all tea drinkers wish to have, don't we?
In fact, many new pots coming out are from none-Huang Long mt. And they tend to show with more grits, less shrinkage that could as well make one feel muting.

Anyway there's a quote from Chaozhou Gongfu Cha script.

茗必武夷 壺必孟臣 杯必若深 - Translated as
"Tea must be Wuyi, Teapot must be Mengchen (Zhuni master, Ming dynasty), Cup must be Ruo Xin".

TGY wasn't popular as Wuyi back then, but it's just one example of how Oolong drinking southern Chinese prefered little Zhuni pots during Gongfu ceremony. Little size of Zhuni(Zhuni can't make big) and highest heat-retaining functionality might have been what they and Gongfu was seeking I guess.

Of course it's not like 'Zhuni is best for Oolong'. I personally like my Luni pot best for my Wuyi, I'm just surmising best pot might depend on each one's palate.

[hop_goblin]

I would think that a dong ding, particularly a heavily roasted one, would actually benefit from hotter water. Though I've not encountered it, I'll grant that very hot water might be bad for some of the greener Chinese oolongs, but the higher fire and Taiwanese oolongs tend to do better with more heat.

Some pots are just going to absorb more aroma. It is possible that it's changing your brewing parameters for the worse, but it really just seems that some of the more porous ones seem to absorb more of the volatiles that create the aroma. Seasoning the pot my help with this.

I can certainly see your point. However, most oolongs brew best IMHO between 190-195F. A tad lower for greener as you had stated. I was just assuming that a tea that still had honey aroma was not as heavily fired as Yan Cha.

[taitea]

I've been noticing the same thing lately with baozhongs. I've been doing them in a yixing pot for a while, and recently tried it in a gaiwan. I found it came out much lighter and fresher in the gaiwan. Kind of frustrating considering the costs of some of these pots!

[Salsero]

I found these thoughts of Tenuki's useful.

http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?p= ... gong#36957

[hop_goblin]

I've been noticing the same thing lately with baozhongs. I've been doing them in a yixing pot for a while, and recently tried it in a gaiwan. I found it came out much lighter and fresher in the gaiwan. Kind of frustrating considering the costs of some of these pots!

Ok guys you really have to start checking to see if it is water temp. This should not be happening.

[ABx]

I would think that a dong ding, particularly a heavily roasted one, would actually benefit from hotter water. Though I've not encountered it, I'll grant that very hot water might be bad for some of the greener Chinese oolongs, but the higher fire and Taiwanese oolongs tend to do better with more heat.

Some pots are just going to absorb more aroma. It is possible that it's changing your brewing parameters for the worse, but it really just seems that some of the more porous ones seem to absorb more of the volatiles that create the aroma. Seasoning the pot my help with this.

I can certainly see your point. However, most oolongs brew best IMHO between 190-195F. A tad lower for greener as you had stated. I was just assuming that a tea that still had honey aroma was not as heavily fired as Yan Cha.

Taiwanese leaf is thick enough that it can usually benefit from the higher temp. I actually had an experience just this last week with a "traditional" (amber, honey) roast Dong Ding.

I had been brewing it in a (lined) yixing gaiwan or porcelain pot all along, and could never really understand what was so great about these traditional Dong Dings. It just tasted like any other amber oolong I had tried - honey, a tiny bit floral, but mostly just a very light roast taste. Good, but nothing special.

Then this last week I tried paying much closer attention to preheating. I realized that with the first pre-heat, the gaiwan is going to absorb a lot of the heat, probably dropping it down quite a bit. So when I brew with water at 208, the net result was probably around 205 (keeping in mind that I was being a little lazy with my first and only preheat anyway). So I preheated a couple times, making sure to minimize the time that it sits empty to try to keep the temp as high as possible.

...and what do you know - I get a whole new layer of taste and aroma that I had never experienced before. It had a kind of complex aromatic wood and maybe berry note that I had never gotten before.

Lately I've also gotten some pretty picky oolongs, all along the scale from light to heavy roasted, and the trick for all of them has just been to maximize the heat. The fact that this year's teas also seem to be very poor on aroma, I've been finding that maximizing the heat has been the only way that I could get an even semi-interesting infusion with these unroasted Taiwanese high mountain teas (my baozhong has been a bit easier, but I got the spendy ones this time).

Granted, thin and fragile leaf can sometimes cook. I'm also finding that some do better with a quick rinse of slightly cooler water, say around 205. I don't usually encounter this from good quality leaf, but I did remember one. The thicker the leaf and heavier the roast (or aging), the more it's going to need those high temps to really unlock all of the flavors. Aged oolong and dancong seem to be exterme examples - I have a few now that are difficult to brew because of the heat requirements.

Of course this is also gongfu style brewing where the steeps are very short.

[ABx]

I've been noticing the same thing lately with baozhongs. I've been doing them in a yixing pot for a while, and recently tried it in a gaiwan. I found it came out much lighter and fresher in the gaiwan. Kind of frustrating considering the costs of some of these pots!

It could indeed be the pot absorbing too much; particularly if it's an unseasoned pot.

I probably wouldn't use a yixing pot for baozhong, but brewing baozhong side-by-side in a thin gaiwan and a yixing gaiwan, I have found the yixing gaiwan to produce a fuller, rounder, and brighter infusion.

[Bubba_tea]

Interesting... this is from a stable heat source water supply - so that's fixed in my case, but it is possible that the preheating was the variable. I will go back and check again.

But.... have you tasted the water out of your yi xing without using tea? I found one of my little spun pots has a clayish flavor which is going to color the tea in the end. I did season the pot first, but maybe I should go back and try again.

I will also try Hop's suggestion about temp - I thought green should be cooler and more oxidized should be hotter - but Kam's funalliance website said to brew his tky with hot as possible water - so I need to play around with it a little more.

[hop_goblin]

In all honesty, I think you guys are giving way too much credit to the porus nature of contemporary zisha. Most tender zisha is already depleted and a result, most contemporary pots are not efficient at promoting the 'seasoning' process in terms of aroma. Frankly, I have some very high quality pots that I have used for years and not one has absorbed any tea essence - and this includes high fired oolongs up to shupu. This is not to say that your can't season a pot because it indeed does get to a certain degree a luster from tea oils. But this is generally as a result of pouring the tea over the pot during gongfu. But aroma.. MMM I think the jury is out on this one. I know I might be stepping on some toes when I state this but To be frank, I think it is a vendor's marketing tool just MHO.

[wyardley]

But.... have you tasted the water out of your yi xing without using tea? I found one of my little spun pots has a clayish flavor which is going to color the tea in the end. I did season the pot first, but maybe I should go back and try again.

I would just try using alternating cool and boiling water (leaving enough time for the pot to come back to normal temp in between that it doesn't run the risk of cracking) for 3-4 times, and then just keep brewing tea in the pot. I don't think you need to do any special seasoning besides making tea in the pot.