Although my house is a wreck (so many things in boxes intended for America, Baihe, or the trash) and all our schedules have been thrown by the holiday season, I have found some sanity in the carefulness of brewing tea. Now it is impossible, for the reasons I have just mentioned to do a full, deliberate tea brewing at home--what with a baby who can now with one swipe clear most of whats on the coffee table onto the floor--so it is no wonder that my most recent experience with tea took place away from home in the mountains of the Alishan region in a small tea farming town called Ruili, where I went to find a particular homestead after getting their name card at an event the weekend before. Luckily when I arrived not only was the family there but also they were in the midst of a day-long roasting and taste-testing of their oolong, which was to be entered into a national competition.
Many farms participate in national competitions, sending tea selections in quantities of 22 kilos. One of those kilos is a gift gratis to the organization that runs the testing, while another kilo is used for the actual taste testing. The remaining 20 kilos, if they make the cut, will receive a special grading and will be given a fixed price. A tea master will taste hundreds of teas every day, while at each pass the number of teas dwindle until there is just a handful left. The single top tea from an entry pool of over a thousand will received the highest honor and will be able to be sold at a premium price.
特等將 - the top honor - only one tea selected
頭等將 - second highest grade - only the top 4% make this cut (only 30 teas)
頭等將二 - third highest grade - only about 50 teas make this cut頭等將三 - ...
There are more grading levels but why worry about them (besides, I can't say this list is too accurate!). The teas in the top four percent can be sold for about 230 US dollars per kilo while the one entry that wins top slot is sold for multiple times that rate. Most tea roasters will say that there's a lot of luck involved, not only that you get a good crop of tea, but also that the judge specifically enjoys your tea. That said, everything about the brewing method contrives to make the process as precise as possible, trying as it were to counteract so much uncertainty.
Following is a video of Mr. Lin and his father as they compare two oolongs they are roasting side by side in different machines with their entry from last year, a tea that took the 頭等將 grade. As you can tell every slight aspect of the tea soup's color, initial scent, and taste is important. The brewing method is rigid: three grams of tea in 150ml of boiling water brewed for six minutes in a competition "cup" made of porcelain. Six minutes after the tea has been poured, when the leaves have cooled off, they also smell the leaves as well. Everything counts. The most of what I noticed under discussion (half was in Taiwanese) concerned the tea soup's, it's clarity and color. One looked greener and one looked more yellow they told me, but I could not for the life of me discern such slight differences. When they asked me which one I liked the best, I chose (unwittingly) the tea they had submitted from the previous year!
Around their rather large living room, that opened up onto a rather plain and concrete porch (surrounded though by flowers, and looking out over the gray and misty mountains) they had huge recognition placques from previous entries. 15 or 20 were hung showing that they had earned the 頭等將 status, and only one, placed prominently over the cheif brewing table, showed 特等將, which means one year at least they grew the golden egg!
I asked them how this competition tea was different than what I ended up buying--their common oolong. As far as I could tell, for the competition they sorted the tea to get the rolled leaves more uniform, and also plucked extraneous stems which apparently confuse the taste during roasting and then brewing, but I don't imagine that it's grown in a seperate field or under different conditions. I was also surprised that there was no initial "wash" for the tea leaves during the taste-testing. When you use a tea pot in the Chinese tradition of brewing, for those who don't know, one always washes the tea and dispenses with the water almost immediate. People usually emphasis the fact that it washes dirt or impurities from the leaves or that it wakes up the tea leaves and heats the tea ware to make the initial brew more pure.
So I might be under a false assumption that you can apply the "tea-tasting method" to any tea, that is brew 3 grams in a competition "cup" made of porcelain with 150ml of boiling water, but I've had a lot of fun doing that with all of my teas--what a delight! The usual method that I use, which requires you to brew the tea for breifer periods 6-7 times is like a fine dissection of the taste, a pagent of the teas flavor that evolves and is lived and is relished. Using the 6 minute method, however, really gives you a full taste of the tea. I've even used it for some tea packs of oolong someone gave me that I've otherwise been brewing red rose style in an open mug. Much better to drink directly from the competition cup after brewing it--rather more like drinking espresso out of a demitase. A quite different tea experience!
