How To Brew Gyokuro Green Tea - A Decisive Guide To Brewing Delicious Gyokuro.

Hello everyone, welcome to the Tea Crane. I'm going to be brewing Gyokudo and I'll walk you through the steps of how to do this. This is just a very quick brewing video. Do you like Gyokudo? Have you ever tried it? Have you brewed it? What is your approach? Let me know in the comments below. I'd be happy to hear about it and I'll share with you now my approach to brewing Gyokudo. First of all the Gyokudo is always shaded for three to four weeks and shading the tea trees before harvesting means that the sunlight, the amount of sunlight that reaches to the tea is blocked out and that makes the tea grow wider and more thinner and it makes it more fragile. So the leaf that eventually is obtained and the tea is made from is going to be more fragile. So that's one reason why you want to cool down your water to a lower temperature of about 50 to 60 degrees Celsius because doing that will affect the leaf in a more positive way and it will also release more sweetness. Cooling down the water until a temperature below 80 degrees makes sure that the bitterness, the catechin components are not released. It's been scientifically proven that catechin components do not release under 80 degrees Celsius. They need to be steeped in a water temperature above 80 degrees Celsius in order to come out of the leaf. So what that does is it restricts it from coming out and it releases all the amino acids and the amino acids are the components that are responsible for an umami sweet flavor and that is what we're looking for in a Gyokudo. So the best approach to brewing this tea is by cooling down the water and I'm going to do that in several steps. First what I'll do is I'll pour my hot water directly from my kettle which has been boiling here besides me into my teapot, my Kyusu, and transferring it into a cold vessel each time reduces the water temperature for about 10 degrees. So that means if it was boiling at 90 to 98 degrees here it'll be around 90 degrees, 80 degrees, 90 degrees in my teapot and especially if I let it sit here the teapot will absorb some of the heat. And then next I will transfer it to my little cruet pitcher and this again will also cool down the water about 10 degrees again. So taking these steps will eventually cool down the water to around 60 degrees and the Gyokudo that I like to brew is usually organically grown or naturally grown and it's somewhat different from the conventional Gyokudo that you can find which is often way too sweet and immensely thick and cloying and the ones that I like to brew are more on the fresh, the natural side. So I like to maintain a higher temperature as well so that we can release more of its flavors and aroma and I think for organic these aromas are very important. So after having let the water sit in your teapot for a little then you transfer it again to the following vessel and so doing that again will further start to cool down the water. And now having had hot water in your teapot means that your teapot, your Kyusu, has warmed up and that's also a nice feature if you next want to start enjoying the tea that you're going to have. So first I'm going to insert the tea leaf that I have for the Gyokudo into my Kyusu and because my Kyusu is hot now when I put the lid on and I let it sit for a little bit then next time when I open the lid and I sniff it I really get the nice delicious sweet aromas of the Gyokudo because the Kyusu has warmed up the tea leaf that is now in here. So it already starts warming up and preparing the leaf for the brewing while the water here is still cooling down. If you're committed to cooling down further you might want to line up the amount of cups that you are going to use for the amount of persons you're going to serve and you divide the hot water over those cups once more. I keep it at this temperature because I like that 60 to 70 degree temperature and I also should say something about the Kyusu that I'm using. You can see the Kyusu that I'm using is a flat bottom one. A lot of Kyusu have a more rounded shape on the narrower bottom. This one has a wide shape and the bottom is flat and that helps the Gyokudo the tea leaf actually to spread out over the surface in width more than when well it affects the tea when you're brewing it and when it starts to unfurl. Now the tea leaf has been rolled very tightly and when you put the water in it is going to start to unfurl and to absorb the water and the leaf becomes bigger it becomes its original shape and when it's all on top of each other in a narrow teapot then the top leaf is going to suppress the leaf that is on the bottom and that is going to affect of course the the way that that leaf can come open and the amount of flavor it can give off. With a flat bottom one the leaf is going to line up next to each other more and when it opens up it's got more space and so it's going to give off more delicious flavor. So the next thing that we do is now that the water has cooled down we're going to gently insert that into the teapot over the tea leaf and now we're going to let it steep for two to three minutes. It's a longer steeping because the cooler your water the longer you want to steep your tea and if you use hotter water you want to shorten that amount of time. So for some of the senchas that I brew I like to use 90 degrees or 98 degrees very hot water and then I would extract the tea already at 20 to 40 seconds of steeping and with this Gyokuro I have cooled down the water quite a bit so with that cooler water I'm going to extract the sweet and umami flavor components and that is why I let it sit also for about two minutes to three minutes so that it can really produce a thick and nice flavor. All right so the tea has steeped our Gyokuro is ready so I'm going to extract it now back into my pitcher here and I'm of course going to extract all the liquor until the last drop so that there is no moisture well there is going to be moisture but there's no liquid remaining in the teapot which will also allow for a beautiful and delicious second steeping. The leaf has not unfurled that very much it's just started to come open and once we make a second brew or third brew especially with the second brew it's going to unfurl further and going to release more flavor and that's also a feature of Gyokuro having several steepings is what we of course like to enjoy so I'm going to have a taste for this beautiful Gyokuro look at the color it's very amazing thick color I can smell the sweetness too I don't even have to bring the cup to my nose the sweetness is just omnipresent here wow it's very sweet you got a strong aroma strong flavors no bitterness whatsoever this tea is grown in Kagoshima by the way and it's grown by a farmer who makes very delicious tea just right by a very idyllic beautiful pond and a small volcanic mountain and the tea here is really absolutely natural absolutely organic and it's nurtured by the dew from the pond that then in the morning attaches to the tea leaf and the tea leaf absorbs that nourishment as well all right so let's have a second steeping of the same leaf you see that the Gyokuro is the leaf is still very curled up very tight with the second brewing we're going to use a little bit hotter water and so gradually with each steeping we're going to increase the temperature of the water so I just took some water hot water in my pitcher and I'm going to transfer that onto the leaf now and I'll let it steep again for about two minutes this time now because the leaf has already been with the first steeping the tea leaf was dry and so when you put in the water it first has to absorb the water before it can start to open up now it's already absorbed the water and immediately as we put the water in the tea starts to further unfurl and so it starts to give a flavor immediately so it's going to give off more flavor than the first infusion and also because the water is hotter it is also going to enhance the flavor and the aroma of the tea that we're going to be enjoying in this second brew okay so the tea is ready we'll pour it out and also have a look at the color of the liquor it's going to be much darker and much more intense than the previous one again we're going to extract all the liquor until the last drop so we can also have a delicious third brew and then we can see that the leaf has increased in volume even more it has gained more form and also the beautiful greens of the color of the leaf they also come out so we're going to taste the second brew as well it's very delicious it's as if it's a different tea the the flavor has changed of course because with the first brew you have extracted a lot of sweetness umami components already and what you extract from the leaf is not going to come out twice so you won't get the same flavors as in the first brew and that's why this one is also a bit more um a bit more calm it's fresher you have less cloyingness you have more a little bit more of the bitterness as well because the temperature of the water was higher but it's not that it's producing a lot of bitterness because it's not a very bitter tea so overall you get a more refreshing experience as opposed to the the first one so i'll continue sipping this tea and then we're going to make a third brew as well so for the third brew what we're going to do different is this time i'm not going to start cooling the water anymore i like to do i like to drink gyokuro until the third brew you could do and gradually as with the first brew i brew at around 50 60 degrees then build it up to 70 80 and for the last brew i just go full on with um off the boil hot water so i pour direct from the kettle into the teapot straight onto the tea leaf as i've said earlier in the in in this video with cooler water you're going to let it steep longer with hotter water you want to brew it as soon as possible and this is basically how i brew gyokuro i hope this is a reference for you if you like to drink gyokuro if you enjoy gyokuro let me know in the comments if you learn something also let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this video don't forget to like subscribe and click the bell for future updates i really appreciate that i can share this with you and before we conclude this video i'm going to brew this tea pour it out and let's have a final look at the the color how this turns out it's very bright green and then i'm going to have a sip of it as well the taste will basically be slightly more on the bitter end more fragrant and because we brewed it shorter it is also going to be less intense in flavor but more intense in fragrance so even more refreshing than the second brew and it's nice to build up to this point so i hope you enjoyed this and looking forward to see you in next video