Spring 2019 Harvest Jingmai Tea Tasting

So we're now back in Phu Quoc city and it's time for us to try the teas that we've just harmonized in Chiang Mai. So we've met a couple of different blends I could say, from different tea gardens and different harvests. So today I'd like to brew three of those. They all come from a specific garden and they are a blend of the first and the second flush of that specific garden. So here this tea comes from a garden called Ho Huan, which is in Ta Tinh Giang. This is from Nguong Boc. This is on the upper slopes of the village, just right below Ta Tinh Giang, right below the Ta Tinh Giang plateau. And this is from Ai Ban. This is also on Ta Tinh Giang, just you could say on the other side of Ho Huan. So Ho Huan would be the northeast of Ta Tinh Giang and Ai Ban would be the southeast. So let's first have a look at the tea leaves. What we can see is that, I would say the tea from Nguong Boc, it looks a little bit more yellow than both teas that come from Ta Tinh Giang. And this one looks especially green, the Ho Huan, because the leaves are dark. So when you brew it, it will turn up probably dark green. But anyway, let's brew that. So I'm going to preheat the gaiwan because we're going to try to do things well. So let me just preheat the gaiwans a little bit. Now if you preheat the gaiwan, the good thing is when your gaiwan is hot and a bit wet, and then you put the leaves in, then you can get a really good fragrance, really nice fragrance. So that's one of the pluses of preheating the gaiwans. So we can put the leaves in. So I have weighed eight grams for each of those teas. When you compare tea, it's quite important to weigh your tea because of course the amount of leaves you put has a big impact on the taste of tea. Okay, and so I like to shake them. I love to do that with oolong tea, especially those boiled oolong teas. You just shake it a bit and then you open the lid. Definitely very different fragrances in each of those gaiwans. It's always hard to describe. I'm not very good at describing, putting names on fragrances. But I like to compare them. Okay, so let's do a rinse and smell the leaves again. Have a look at the tea soup. So when you have very young tea like this, you might want to have a look at the tea soup, the tea rinse. I can see there are lots of bubbles, a lot of bubbles that are on the surface. And usually that's a good sign. It means that the tea has a lot of fat in it. And this fat makes the bubbles just a bit like so. Okay, so let me smell them. They're all quite nutty and I think this is because I like quite a strong shaqing. And we haven't sorted the huangqian, so we haven't sorted the yellow flakes. So that will also impact a little bit the taste of tea. So then you can smell in the empty pitcher. Just let it evaporate a bit. This is a very sweet smell, he huan. Oh, that one is interesting too. Oh, I'd say this one has the more powerful smell. And this one is also very different but complex as well. A bit less powerful. And this one is also quite similar to that one but less powerful too. Yeah, we get a glimpse of that lanhuaxiang, that orchid fragrance that is so famous in Mai. Then when I check new tea, I want to just have a quick look at the rinsed leaves. So I can already see tiny differences in color. I would say like that that tea from Hongbok is definitely a bit lighter in color. It has a more yellowish feel. Not as yellow as shanghai, not as yellow as tea from plantations. Well, although the difference is not that obvious at this time. But this difference in color, you can really see it when you're frying the tea. Actually, when you're doing the shaqing, the difference between gusu and plantation tea is very obvious. Well, it's quite obvious in the fresh leaves when you're used to it. But then when the leaves shrink in the wok, then you get a very different color and different feel. Okay, I'm trying to do some kind of delayed infusions to try to get the same time for each of them. I could also brew them one after the other. The problem is, I might have differences in temperature. Then, you know, if I start brewing this one, wait, then brew that, that. And then when I'm going to drink this one, it's going to be colder than that one. And actually, drinking at the same temperature is very important for fair comparison. You can do that test, you know, you can let the brew cool down and keep one warm and you'll see that the feel is very different. Especially the mouthfeel, the way the bitterness comes out, things like that. Oh yeah, and I said, let's comment a bit the soup. So, all of them, I would say, yeah, all of them are quite muddy. The tea soup is a bit turbid. And, oh, I had this discussion with friends a lot during that spring season. They said like their tea were muddy and that's a big problem for their customers. But for me, it's not a problem. It's quite normal that early spring tea has a slightly muddy rinse or first brew. It should go away at the second brew, that slight turbidity in the soup. And it's not a big problem. It's really due to the steaming. If you steam the tea, the more you steam the tea, you can say, the more you steam the tea, the more turbid the soup will be. And I like to steam tea a little bit. I think it gives a better mouthfeel and a more homogeneous Cha Ching. But it's a matter of taste. Some people don't steam the tea at all, but in this case, they tend to be a bit undercooked, even though the tea soup is very bright. So for me, the brightness of the tea soup is not a very important quality criteria. But for people who do mostly wholesale, you know, they get to meet all kinds of customers. And some of those tea buyers require a clear soup. But anyway, after pressing, the soup will be clear. Pressing gives another steaming to the leaves and it actually clears the soup. And this is valid for all kinds of teas, including for soup war and black tea. If you press it, you're going to get a slightly clearer soup. I would say this one from Ai Ban has slightly more thickness than the one from He Huan. But the lightest of the threes would be Ong Bok. I feel like Ong Bok has a more aggressive profile. Yeah, it has a very straightforward bitterness. All three teas have bitterness, but Ong Bok definitely has more. When it comes to fragrance, I like all three of them. I would tend to think this one has a better fragrance maybe, the one from He Huan. But if you compare it to the two others, it seems a little bit lighter. Well, it has a medium body. It has a medium body, but it's a bit lighter than the one from Ai Ban, I would say. Yeah, the one from Ong Bok has a very distinctive profile. It's very different. Those two from Ai Ban and He Huan are more similar, and that makes sense because they both grow on Da Qing Zhang, so you could expect a relatively similar environment. Okay, let's go straight to the second brew. I need to add a bit of water here. So, this season was very short. We made a lot of tea. We got busy for about two weeks, really. I would say from maybe March 25th to April 5th or April 10th. So, on April 7th, a heavy rain fell on Jing Mai, so we were very busy and we had really good material, and a rain fell on Jing Mai, and on the next day, suddenly, all the leaves had turned old. They had matured quickly, so it might only require a couple of hours, you know. If you have rain coming, the leaves will just get more sturdy, a bit thicker, and they will be harder to process, and then when you process them into Pu'er tea, they will give you much more yellow flakes than if the leaves are tender. Basically, if the leaves are too thick and too old, they will turn into Huang Ken. And of course, this Huang Ken, we have to sort them, and generally, this is also associated with a more diluted profile. Like these three teas, they all taste quite powerful, I would say. They were made during the dry season. We had a very dry early spring, and actually, it's still pretty dry. The rain has only fallen once, and maybe the next flush might be okay, we'll see. But anyway, we weren't really looking to make a lot of tea this year. We just wanted to have a small production, but make the best tea, really. So this year, we really didn't have any production targets. We just selected the leaves we thought were best. So from different tea gardens, we sourced tea from the Gu Shu. We sourced from five or six different tea gardens, all from our extended family, or our own tea gardens. And I think we're quite happy with the result. It seems to have been a good year, a good early spring at least, a good early spring season this year. Then, of course, we need to wait a little bit more to portray a more accurate picture of how the season has gone, you know, let the teas age a little bit. It's always hard and quite unfair to judge tea when it's young, because you know that it's going to change a lot. But of course, with some experience, you can get a glimpse of what it's going to taste like. But yeah, you can still be surprised, you know, sometimes the tea turns in unexpected ways. Okay, here I'm just trying to delay the infusion so that I have time to brew the tea out like this. And here we should have about the same strength. So you can see now on the second brew, the tea soup has cleared up. It's not a hundred percent bright, but it's okay. And once we'll press the cakes, it will be even brighter. Anyway, I don't think it's a huge like... I don't think it matters that much that the tea is a little muddy. Sometimes it can be a sign of bad quality. For example, if it's summer tea and your tea soup is muddy, typically you just don't even want to drink it, because it's tea that has turned moldy and maybe rotten, you know, with bacteria. It's tea that didn't dry in time. So in summer, if you have your... if you want to sun-dry your tea and it's raining and your tea is not dry after... if it doesn't dry on the second day, you can be sure on the third day it's gonna... there's gonna be too much bacterial growth and it will impact the taste of tea. And basically that tea is unsellable. So that's interesting, because now the teas are much more powerful. And I think that's a characteristic of the teas of this year. I found that they are more powerful than the teas we've made in the past years. And this is probably due to the weather. And now this tea from Rojuan seems to be more aggressive. Also more aggressive than the tea from Aiban. Not as aggressive as the tea from Hongbo. So this one has a good bitterness. It's more punchy, but it's a little bit less thick. So you know, like, by... and this one is the thickest of the three. It really has a good mineral tone. So, by order of bitterness, I would say this is the most bitter, than Rojuan, than Aiban. By order of sweetness, or like, mouthfeel, I'd say Aiban is the best mouthfeel, the thickest one. Then second, Rojuan, and third, Hongbo. Fragrance, I don't really want to judge, because you know that kind of fragrance is very ephemeral here. It's gonna change very quickly. Yeah, I'd say fragrance, this one is better. You have a good, very good orchid, orchid fragrance. But it's not very useful to judge the tea by the fragrance, no. And so when we make our products, so we have a couple of these gardens, you know. This year we separated by gardens, and when we make our products, we will either showcase like one garden, or we will blend, like our Jinmai Gulan is a blend of different gardens. And so we make the blend according to the taste. And then of course we have wholesale orders in China, so we also have to make blends for our wholesale customers in China. But in any way, I can feel the Huigan now. All of those teas are quite powerful. I also feel some astringency building up. This kind of astringency, that is still pleasant. Well, maybe because I'm used to drinking Jinmai tea, I don't know. But to me, astringency is not so disturbing. I know some people don't like it. Oh yeah, this one really has a nice, that typical Tapingzhang Jinmai fragrance, you know, when they say that Jinmai tea has an orchid fragrance. This is very characteristic of this tea. So what's the difference between Tapingzhang and the other areas? I would say the most noticeable one is temperature. If you ride your motorbike through Jinmai, when you enter Tapingzhang, you will really feel the temperature drops back, like maybe five degrees, five degrees Celsius or more. It's really impressive. Either in the morning or in the evening, you can feel a really big temperature difference. And so if you have colder temperatures, then it probably means that the development of the tea leaves is slowed down. And since you have a heavy forest cover in Tapingzhang, it also means that photosynthesis is a bit slower, so growth is slower. So you have slower growth and slower development. So that leads to a lower yield and probably that explains why this tea is so good. Now, I haven't really compared the yield in Tapingzhang, in the Gu Shu, compared to the yield you'd get on the upper and lower slopes. Generally, the tea trees on the lower slopes sprout first, maybe one week earlier than the tea trees on the upper slopes. And again, these trees on the upper slopes are maybe a couple of days earlier than the trees in Tapingzhang. And this is probably due to changes, differences in temperature that are both due to altitude and topography. I really like the mouthfeel in Aiban, that Aiban tea. Now again, it's hard to draw conclusions because, you know, like Aiban, Hongbo, Hehuan, they are, you could say, groups of tea gardens. They are more like a tea area. In that area, there are different owners. And of course, these differences might come out also, might vary over the years, over the seasons, depending on the picking grade. So it takes a lot of time to get reliable data before you're able to say, like, Hongbo tea is more aggressive than Hehuan tea. Now here you, well, we made about 50 kilos of each of those, so that's quite a lot of batches. So there is some variation, there is some diversity within each of those single garden batches. So the tea from Hongbo comes from our own gardens and our grandfather's gardens. So yeah, you have two different tea gardens there, which are connected. I mean, it's all the upper slopes of Jingmai, so they are basically next to each other, just above the village. And you have two harvests, some of them we processed it around March 20th, and then we processed some again around April the 5th. So you have two flushes in that. Now a garden is not necessarily harvested in one day. Like, for example, if there are a few tea pickers, or if the owners pick the tea themselves, maybe there'll be only two or three people, and they have a big garden. Well, maybe it's going to take three or four days for them to finish picking the garden. Over that period of time, the tea leaves are growing. So what they'll do is they will start harvesting when the leaves are very tender, maybe at one but two leaves. And then as the days go, as the days pass by, the tea will get older and older, so the material you'll get every day will be different. And so towards the end of the harvest, you'll have more yellow flakes because it's older material. And this year we chose to blend this material together, blend it according to the gardens. So you can say that all the teas are blended, you know. Now you could do that blend in many different ways. A lot of big factories, they do that blend by tenderness, you know. Like, they can sort different grades, and maybe they would consider that tea from He Huan, from Wang Bo, is the same as long as they have the same amount ratio of bud to leaves. For example, that would be a sorting by tenderness. Or you could decide to sort it by flush. For example, all the first flush that you made at some point in time, you put them together, and then the second flush will be a different tea. And you will notice some differences between first and second flush. Or you could do like what we've done this year, sort it by different tea gardens, and you will also have different profiles. Now, of course, you could keep each batch separate, and each batch will taste a bit different. But then, well, you won't be able to sell it in a satisfying manner, because you'll just have too many products. And when you have wholesale customers, typically they just want 100 kilo of one type of tea. So they want a homogeneous batch. But if you put a bit of thinking into how you will blend the tea, well, I think you can make a better tea, or at least you can decide on what kind of tea you want. And I think that's quite interesting to separate them by area of production, because then you can bring out the geography aspect, the terroir aspect of the tea. So I like this. So the next step is to sort the yellow flakes. We do that with a machine. A couple of years ago, this kind of machine sorting was criticized, because people said it would break the leaves more. But I think since then, they have really refined their setup, and now we don't have that problem anymore. I think mechanical sorting, like machine sorting, is objectively better, I would say, than handmade sorting. Well, because people will always leave some leaves anyway, they get tired, maybe there are too many yellow flakes, they just don't sort them, just go through the material like this. And, well, the machine will also sort well the tiny bits and pieces, maybe some insects or hair that just fell in the mortar. When you sort with a machine, in the end you get a very clean mortar. So nowadays, you know, like Puerh is infamous for having a lot of foreign objects in the cakes, but if you have recent tea, it shouldn't happen that much. It should be very rare, because nowadays the tea is sorted quite thoroughly. So again, we have the same observation, I would say, this one has better fragrance, this one has more bitterness, and this one has a better mouthfeel. Now, if we look at the leaves, this one is really dark green, this one is a bit yellower, and if we compare, this one is even darker, I would say, or about the same. So, yeah, it's darker, I would say, because of shading, because there's a heavier forest cover in Daqingjiang than on the upper slopes, even if those are forested gardens as well. Or maybe that difference in color could be explained by other factors, such as temperature. So the next step is to sort the yellow flakes, then we will create our products by blending these different teas, or maybe by selling some unique garden products, then we will press that material into cake, and we will release it on our website. So you will be able to find these teas on our website in about two weeks, so I hope you will enjoy them. I'm quite happy with the quality this year, I think we're gonna have pretty good tea. Well, let's see anyway. So thank you for watching, and see you next time. Goodbye.