Before I get skinned alive by the high fire Yancha and TGY crowd that love to turn 60ml or smaller pots into veritable clown cars by packing in 10 or more grams of tea. I am not talking about that. I am actually talking about other teas, especially when brewing them Grandpa style.
For some reason in the tea world, and perhaps even the coffee world, its not uncommon to want to push the limits when brewing. As such, more and more leaf/ bean gets added trying to get something so incredibly flavor packed and delicious. Well I have found that when brewing Grandpa style, that I have been adding more and more and more leaves. On a few bad occasions ( often with more dense dry leaves), after they got wet the would be nearly up to the top of the bowl when swimming in water. Not only when brewing Grandpa style can that produce something akin to battery acid, but you actually get more of the battery acid effect because it is rather hard to sip effectively when there are that many leaves.
So I am making a very conscious effort to use three-quarters, if not half the leaves I would normally use. So far it has been working to great effect. The flavor is more subtle, but it is often far more enjoyable. It may lead me to re-evaluate certain other brewing procedures I have for various teas to find out where I can actually improve by cutting back.
2 comments:
Well said and love your clown car analogy--I think size of the cup and how that affects the psychology of how much you need to drink total, how much you can appreciate each sip before the next one, also plays into this.
nice post,
I've recently been on a "less is more" bowl tea (what you're calling grandpa style) binge as well. I often belong to the camp of yixing packers you referred to, but I find that using less than my normal amount of leaves for bowl tea really lets me get a clearer idea of the character of the leaves and lets a lot of the leaves subtlety shine through!
-Pat Penny
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