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Different teas taste better if they are made with the correct water temperature. Many black teas, Puerh teas and Oolong teas taste great if you use near boiling water. But Green tea, White tea and Yellow teas definitely taste better with water that is 70-80°C. But don’t let this worry you. Here are the modern and traditional ways to know what temperature your water is.
Should the water boil?
Water which is fully boiled becomes flat and stale, like food which is reheated many times. Boiling water de-oxygenates it. The higher the level of oxygen the more taste you will get.
If you ever eat in China or Japan you will notice that slurping food not only acceptable but encouraged. These ‘delicious noises’ as they are called, bring more oxygen into the nose and mouth, allowing you to taste the food more fully. It is the same when you drink tea, the more oxygen in the water, (and the more you slurp) the more fully you will taste the flavour.
The Modern Way
If you are drinking a Black, Puerh or Oolong tea, boiling water can be used but we recommend that you take your kettle away from its power source before it comes to a rolling boil. This prevents the water becoming deoxygenated or flat.
The Traditional Way
Have you noticed that as your kettle boils the sound changes and the way the steam rises becomes faster an more intense?
As the water gets hotter tiny bubbles the size of a pin head start to rise to the surface and pop – these are called ’shrimp eyes’ in Chinese. Lazy, slow moving wisps of steam arise and the kettle makes its first low humming sounds. This temperature (60-70 degrees) is perfect for the finest green teas.
As the water gets hotter, the bubbles grow to ‘crab eyes,’ which are half the size of marbles. Wisps of steam begin to rise vertically in a steady stream and the kettle starts to make popping sounds. This temperature is perfect for white tea, jasmine tea and green oolong teas as it is around 80 degrees.
When the bubbles become the size of marbles (fish eyes), the kettle makes stronger sounds and the steam rises in thick fast-moving columns the water has reached a temperature of 90-95°C and is perfect for oolong, puerh and black teas.
The final stage, which is not considered to be suitable for tea making, the kettle makes the sound of a raging torrent and the bubbles roll and swirl. This is traditionally called ‘old man water’ and is stale and de-oxygenated.
A number of customers have asked us where they can get a good quality temperature variable kettle to enjoy our teas with so we have done some research and found a couple that have the necessary features.
Philips HD4687 Temperature Control Kettle
First is a Phillips model, which we’re currently using in the office. This kettle gives you a choice of heating water to 40, 60, 80 or 100°C. It’s well built and has a modern and pretty stylish look. We’ve been using this kettle in the office for 2 months now and have so far had no problems at all with this kettle.
Breville Variable-Temperature Kettle
At the slightly higher end of the market is the below example from Breville. It’s not a kettle we have used ourself but from the maufacturer’s website, it seems to have all the functions we would look for in a kettle, including a keep warm function, useful for multiple infusions over a short period of time.
Following on from our recent post on Puerh tea tasting and the struggling puerh industry in Menghai county. Some of the Puerh we sell at JING comes in the form of Tuo Cha, small round cakes of compressed tea.
The tuo was originally created in Ching Gu County, Yunnan Province, in the Ming Dynasty period between A.D. 1573 – 1620. From 1620 0nwards, the production region expanded to include Xia Guan where the majority of today’s tuo production takes place.
MINI PUERH - 1998 MENGHAI SHU PUERH XIAO TUO
There are two varieties of Tuo Cha. One is made of cooked puerh leaves, and the other is made of raw puerh leaves.
Cooked puerh tuo cha fully consists of puerh tea which is steamed and then pressed into shape. This tea is general known as Yunnan Puerh Tuo Cha. Red, outstandingly earthy and flavoured, Puerh Tuo Cha often has an amazingly sweet finish. It’s popular throughout Asia and other continents has been researched for its health benefits. In particular, a French medical researcher concluded that drinking three portions of this tea each day significantly reduces cholesterol in the blood.
2008 RAW PUERH MINI TUO (XIAGUAN FACTORY)
Raw puerh tuo cha is made from fine and young raw puerh leaves which are then steamed and pressed into shape. This is called Yunnan Tuo Cha. With the best examples of this, it’s possible to see the if tiny hairs on the tea leaves still in tct. ‘Te Ji (superior grade) Tuo Cha’, is generally consider the best crop. It offers a rich flavour and wonderful taste. The colour of the infusion should be orange-yellow, bright and translucent.
Today we look at the stories behind one of our Fujian Oolong teas, Yellow Gold Oolong Tea.
The Mandarin name for Yellow Gold Oolong is “Huang Jin Gui”. Huang Jin means Yellow Gold in Mandarin and Gui refers to the Osmanthus flower. The name originated from the appearance and the flavour of this tea, as it produces a golden infusion and the nose is similar to the smell of Osmanthus flowers.
Yellow Gold Oolong Tea
Huang Jin Gui is picked from Huang Dan, a specific species of oolong trees. There are two schools of thought on where this tea originated:
Some believe that this tea was originally invented around A.D. 1860 by a tea farmer who found the Huang Dan plant and took a branch back to his farm to plant. The unique flavour of the tea leaves that sprouted from this original tree attracted the attention ofthe farmers’ neighbours and the tea soon developed a wide following.
Others believe that the Huang Dan plant came to be cultivated in a slightly more romantic fashion. In the region where Huang Dan grew naturally, An Xi county in Fujian province, it is a traditional custom that a newly wed bride brings “green” to her husband’s house. The “green” which the bride brings to her new home is seen as a good omen for fertility, wealth and the future.
The “green” is usually brought in the form of sprouts or shoots of plants. So in a marriage in the spring of 1960, a young bride, Wang An Dan brought a wild young tree bush to her husband’s house and planted it on a hill nearby. She looked after the tea tree bush carefully day after day, until she had a farm of them. It is said that the tea tree was still alive until 1967, and produced 5 to 8 kilos of fresh tea leaves annually.
Today, the picking season for Huang Jin Gui is slightly earlier compared to other oolong teas’. Normally picking takes place in mid-April; 7 to 10 days earlier than , and 12 to 18 days earlier than the picking of Tieguanyin Oolong tea. When the tea leaves sprouts, tea farmers pick the shoots from the top leaves of the bush as they are just beginning to open. The timing of the picking is very important, as the youngest leaves tend to make bitter infusions and the older leaves produce a weaker flavour.
The picked leaves are then hand processed and rolled. The resulting tea combines the full-bodied flavour typical of oolongs with the wild mountain grass freshness and sweetness found in young green teas.
Posted by: Wendy
Our new stock of Big Red Robe Oolong tea recently arrived so we thought we would share a few of our photos of the terroir from our last trip there and the story behind one of China’s most famous Oolong teas.
Wuyi Mountains
The Wuyi Mountain terrior (placeness) in China, is historically speaking, the world’s first tea terrior for oolong and black teas and no tea from Wuyi is more celebrated than the Big Red Robe (Da Hong Pao in Chinese). The scenery is breath-taking with mountain gorges, red mountains rising steeply into the sky and incredibly varied and lush plant life.
The first Big Red Robe tea trees are now more than 400 years old. Big Red Robe is a unique cultivar of tea tree; its leaves are almost always used to produce a moderate to high fired oolong tea. Its rich, complex and deliciously warming, nourishing flavour is extremely well liked in China.
Acer tree in Da Hong Pao gorge
The original Big Red Robe trees found their name after a Ming dynasty mandarin attributed his survival of a serious illness to their curative powers. He was travelling to Beijing via the Wuyi Mountains and fell ill. He rested in a small hut and was tended to by a Buddhist monk living in another hut a few feet away. The monk picked leaves from three tea trees growing above them on a cliff. He made tea from the leaves and the mandarin drank the restorative liquor daily and made what was considered to be a miraculous recovery. The Mandarin then returned to Beijing and related his experience to the Emperor.
The original Da Hong Pao trees
The Emperor deeply loved and respected the Mandarin, and sent his imperial scarlet robe to be draped over the bushes. These same three trees still survive today. Leaves are picked from them every year and made into tea – perhaps only a few kilos depending on the weather conditions. Many consider these trees to be too old to produce good quality oolong tea but it is still amazing to visit these trees as a living part of history. The setting is stunning and countless Chinese tourists visit the trees and the local area every day.
Big Red Robe makes a great autumn or winter tea, with one of the most distinctive and accessible flavours of any Oolong tea. Our new stock is a great example of this famous tea, which if you haven’t yet tried, we would highly recommend.
We thought we would point out a couple of new JING pages that you may want to check out to keep up with the latest happening at JING Tea.
To make the most of all the photos we have of sourcing trips, the gardens we use and our growers, we’ve launched a Flickr photo gallery. After hearing your feedback and appreciation of the photos on the main JING site, we thought it was a good idea to have one main gallery in which you can find more images than there is space on the website to hold
This gallery will be updated whenever we have new photos of sourcing trips, new teas or new teaware and tastings. We’ll also add the best of our past trips from various regions of China and Taiwan.
Lao Xie
You can also follow JING Tea on Twitter for all the latest updates from us, from launches of new teas to articles we find which might be of interest and personal tea thoughts from the team here at JING.
Edward Eisler Tasting Puerh
Tasting Cups and Samples
Tasting Spoon Close-up
Last week, we tasted a fantastic range of 21 new Puerh teas. Of these 21, we’ll soon be selecting the best to be sold through our website. We’ll notify you when these are available.
We saw an article in the New York Times last week about how the economic crisis is affecting producers of Puerh in Menghai in Yunnan province in China. Just as shares in banks are falling, so prices of some puerh, which had grown to great heights over the last decade, have fallen.
If our most recent batch is anything to go by, then the quality of tea being produced in this area is still fantastic and you can rest assured that we’ll sell these great puerh teas at prices that aren’t inflated.
There is no direct equivalent in English for the French word terroir. Perhaps the closest translation is ‘placeness’ as it refers to the effect that a particular place’s soil, aspect, climate and cultural uniqueness has on the flavour of a food or drink. The term is almost always used in reference to wine but it is equally valid for tea, cheese and ham – in fact any products that derive their uniqueness of taste from the place where they are made.
Wine producers and drinkers have noticed that vineyards positioned only a few yards from one another can produce wine of strikingly different quality and flavour due to the aspect of each field to the sun and differences in soil composition.
This effect is well noted in tea. For this reason, the names of the great teas of China are synonymous with the place in which they are grown and processed – ‘West Lake’ Dragon Well; ‘Anxi’ Tieguanyin; ‘Anji’ Bai Cha; ‘Wuyi’ Da Hong Pao; Keemun tea from ‘Qimen country
A Tea Garden in Zhejiang Province
‘;’Yi Wu’ puerh tea etc. Some of these areas are split into sub regions – for example the West Lake consists of Lions Peak, the Mei Family Slope (Mei Jia Wu) and Tiger Spring. Each of these small areas which produce varied tastes.
Take the outstandingly unique-tasting Bohea from Tingmo Village in the Wuyi Mountains. Compare this to regular Lapsang, and the character of the tea, the flavour, aroma and singularly pale gold liquor demonstrates some of the ‘placesness’ which is never found in the multi-region conventional Lapsang. I believe that anyone could clearly taste this difference, even if they feel that they do not have a good pallet.
Anji Bai Cha trees growing next to a stream in Zhejiang province
Traditionally speaking, West Lake is the place where your Dragon Well should come from. Apart from having an excellent climate, soil and aspect it also houses the most accomplished Dragon Well processing experts. This is not to say that every person you see hand-firing tea near the city of Hangzhou is an accomplished master. However, the area has been a place where knowledge and experience have come together to support the cultivation of this great tea.
I feel that we should not be too attached to the traditionally celebrated terroirs. I have found that fantastic Dragon Well is produced in a small village, which is located a short distance from the West Lake at high altitude. The region is far from any city and many of the tea mountains are organic and foster growth of wild-seeded tea trees. Abundant and varied fauna and floral contribute to a very healthy ecosystem. In terms of taste, the altitude makes the tea more rarefied, mineral and sweet and a little less rich and robust that the West Lake Dragon Well.
Picking a Jiuken Tree in Zhejiang Province
There are other benefits that emerge from seeking tea terroirs other than the most celebrated and well known. Nearly all of the tea produced in the West Lake area is made for the Chinese domestic market. The use of pesticides and fertilisers is nearly always not to European standard. Jiande tea is nearly all organic or at the very least compliant with the strictest European standards. This makes it the only choice for my customers.
Posted by: Edward
