So people familiar with my blog spanning back a year or more, will know I am a major fan of Wuyi Yancha. Well this tea is from Wuyi, but its not an oolong, it is processed as a red tea, which leads to some of the excitement.
The rest of the excitement comes from the fact that it is offered at the Mandarins tea room, which as its owned by someone I would like to call a friend, who has played a rather helpful role in helping me develop into the world of Chinese Tea.
What makes this tea especially interesting, is the fact that it is one of these new styled red teas, which are made mainly of buds.
Hong cha, or red teas, I often find have two different overarching categories of scents, those that make me go oooo, and those that make me go ewww. This is definitely part of the former, with an intoxicating mix of malt and chocolate. The tea goes on to amaze me even more, the taste is incredibly mild, but the finish is a really nice and rich chocolate malt. But the mouth feel is so incredibly rich and creamy.
So I happened to ask the owner after a successful but rather difficult battle with this tea the first time. That being the fact that this consists of so many tiny little buds, which makes it incredibly hard to brew in a gaiwan, and get the pour speed I am used to.
He told me to brew granny/grandpa style in a chawan, something that worked absolutely wonderfully, though of course start with cooler water about the right temp for green tea and increase temp for future infusions never drinking the last 1/3 of the liquid until you are on your last infusion.
2 comments:
So this tea is kind of similar to, say, a "yunnan golden bud", but "wuyi golden bud."
Quite an interesting tea! The leaves look quite fantastic both dry and infused! Good quality processing!
William,
Honestly as I am rather new to Chinese Hong Cha, I admit it is a major gap in my still limited but ever growing tea knowledge. But it is in the category of Hong cha produced using only buds.
Post a Comment