Logan Strohl has some great blog posts on chocolate tasting. Partly inspired by that, partly some great tea I’ve drank through my life, partly living in a house of voracious interesting-tea-drinkers, I’m trying to get into tea a little more.
I got some fancy1 loose leaf oolong tea (thanks mum!), and I’m trying it out today. Apparently you can infuse it 6 times, which feels wild.
Some things I’ve learnt:
- Japanese and Chinese green tea are different. Japanese tea is steamed, apparently, which makes it more delicate (so you brew it at a lower temperature). Chinese green tea is often roasted or pan fired, and so it can be brewed longer and handle multiple steeps. I assume this is because the roasting means more flavours need a higher temperature or longer time to be extracted? Now I write this all out, I’m realising I don’t really understand how brewing tea works, beyond “add hot water to leaf, different flavours depending on how much water/leaf, how much time, how much temperature”.
- Here’s a naive lesson: green and oolong and black tea are all made from the same plant! (This might be obvious to everyone else). It’s a matter of oxidisation, apparently — green teas have much less oxidisation (because the roasting/pan frying/steaming stops the oxidisation by breaking down the enzymes, oolong teas have some, black teas have much more.
- Tea oxidisation is a defence mechanism. The products of oxidisation, quinones and polymers, taste bad to herbivores and help heal wounds. (I guess then that humans are weird in having evolved to like some oxidisation?)
- One heuristic for understanding what teas can tolerate resteeping is surface area:volume ratio (an old heuristic friend). (Plus, like, how rolled-up the tea is, and how intact the cell structure is, but I like this other heuristic better).
- Green teas are generally unrolled/intact (to prevent oxidisation, remember?), and have been quickly pan fired (if Chinese) or steamed (if Japanese). Pan frying cooks the leaf fast, and creates all kinds of fun Maillard reactions that makes the leaf more robust. This means, on my simplified model, that the first steep gets the “surface stuff” out, but that subsequent steeps can pull flavours (like, molecules and stuff) from deeper inside the tea leaf.
- Japanese green tea is steamed, and steaming more evenly penetrates the tea leaf. This means more of the leaf’s cell structure is weakened, and so Japanese tea holds up less well to resteeps — you get more of the flavours out on the first steep.
- Oolong teas are compressed physically (all rolled up), and partly oxidised. The rolling-up means it takes longer for the tea to unfurl, and on initial steeps the surface area:volume ratio is low.
- Most of the black tea I’ve drank has been very broken-up, and all black tea is very oxidised. So you get most flavours out on the first steep.
- Oxidisation, it seems, mostly affects the flavour and the extraction rate. Again, my oversimplified understanding is that more oxidisation -> more bigger molecules –> need more energy to extract them (so, higher temperature). Also, because these molecules are bigger, it takes more time for them to diffuse, which is why you steep more oxidised teas for longer.
And on my oolong, some thoughts:
- It’s very exciting that you can rebrew it many times, it feels like an event or ritual rather than just a tea.
- I washed the tea as instructed, used 1-1.5tsp for around 250ml, and brewed in an infuser in a mug, for around 20 seconds. On my first infusion, I probably didn’t steep long enough. It tasted very clean and bright and smooth, a bit floral.
- On my second infusion, it tasted more buttery and orchid-y. (I increased the time slightly, to about ~30-40s.)
- My third infusion was my favourite: it smelled almost malty but also floral or orchid-y (I need better words to describe this). Then, it tasted initially very clean and bright, then an interesting roasted flavour came through with some buttery warmth, and then it was almost bitter on the finish. (Here I threw caution to the wind and steeped for ~2-3 minutes, right off the boil.)
- My fourth infusion (a 40second steep, a minute or two off the boil) now has this interesting smell, part something roasted, part cut grass. It would make a great perfume. Tasting it, it feels “fuller” or thicker somehow, and more straightforward: no floral note, just light astringency, that roasted taste. It’s now noticably bitter on the finish, and leaves that taste on the bottom of my tongue and back sides of my mouth that I associate with e.g. strong english breakfast tea.
- On my fifth infusion, I smelt and tasted it around 30 seconds. It now smells roasty — it kind of reminds me of wheat fields, weirdly? — and tastes like it too, though with less body (which makes sense, I had to use ~300ml water to fully submerge the leaves). It’s still fairly astringent at the end. I then continued steeping for 2 more minutes. This was good! It felt a bit less bitter, though had less body, and still tasted smooth, for want of a better word. The smell reminded me of clean grass and hay and maybe roasted nuts. The aftertaste remained bitter.
I have some things to get to, so I can’t sit around all day resteeping my tea, unfortunately. But so far I’m enjoying this dipping-my-toes into tea!
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to me! ↩