How to Brew Oolong: Chaozhou Style | Don Mei

Hey teaheads! This is Don from Mei Leaf, and in this video I'm going to be showing you how to brew your tea Chao Zhou style, and giving you some of the context and thinking around this very historic style of brewing. You can skip directly to the step-by-step guide to brewing Chao Zhou style, but I strongly advise you to learn the reason and rhyme behind Chao Zhou style brewing, to get the most out of it, and to brew the best possible tea. Chao Zhou is a beautiful city in Guang Dong province in the south of China, and in the Qing dynasty, around the beginning of the 18th century. While most of China was brewing tea in the big-pot, Pao Cha style, which is essentially similar to what we now know as Western style, with larger pots, lower leaf-to-water ratio, and longer steeping times, in Chao Zhou a local style of brewing emerged which became known as Gong Fu style. Now, you have certainly heard me going on about Gong Fu style brewing, and throughout China you will hear people talk about Gong Fu tea. But nowadays, this term can be sort of loosely applied to quite different styles of tea preparation. Gong Fu basically means any practice which incorporates skill and discipline, and so it has been adopted to describe brewing of fine teas when you pay care and attention to maximize the experience of the tea. But this Chao Zhou method of brewing is the original Gong Fu style invented in the 1700s in south China, before spreading to neighboring Fujian, and its prefecture at the time, Taiwan. In the 1990s the term Gong Fu brewing was reinvigorated during a renaissance of Chinese tea culture at that time, and began to be used to describe any brewing method which used smaller teaware, and shorter infusion times, and has since been used as a way of describing Chinese tea brewing methods in general. But let's get back to the origins of Gong Fu style brewing, and dive deeper into Chao Zhou Gong Fu. It's important to note from the outset that this style of brewing was never intended to be ceremonial, but instead is a simple, minimal, and social way of brewing with quite an informal appeal. And yet, like all things in tea, the simplicity of the practice gives space for an incredible amount of complexity that we will be looking into today. The Chao Zhou style of brewing was born out of the environment of south China, and if you are ever fortunate enough to visit south China you will notice a lot of practice of Tai Chi, Qi Gong, martial arts, as well as a lot more focus on local rites, rituals, and history in Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. And so Gong Fu tea comes from a culture rich in symbolism, learning, and self-cultivation. I think that while Chao Zhou style brewing may seem informal and everyday in comparison to maybe more elaborate Gong Fu setups, or ceremonial styles, it is important to realize that the Chao Zhou tea brewing, and drinking, is inspired by a cultural focus and importance on harmony, social cohesion, self-cultivation, skill, and symbolism. So what prompted the advent of Chao Zhou style brewing? Well, there are two main factors which are often talked about. The first was the advent of a new tea type during this time, Oolong tea. As you may or may not know, Oolong tea requires a great amount of skill and work to produce, going through many more processes than any other tea type. The result is a tea which is more crafted than other tea types. That's not to say it's better or worse, but more crafted. And the aim of Oolong tea, or the producers, is to create a very potent tea which carefully balances, on one hand, aroma and initial, like, fleeting taste, and on the other hand, flavor, body, texture, finish, and body sensation. So a brewing method had to be devised to continue this aim of the producers, to brew teas which are brimming with aromatics, and like rising, lifting transients, while producing teas which are rich in body, flavor, and finish. The second factor, which is often talked about relating to the birth of Chao Zhou style brewing, relates to the relative wealth of the people in south China during the Qing dynasty. This was a poorer area of China, and so a brewing method was developed motivated around frugality and skill. How could you maximize the enjoyment of coarser grades of tea, and gram-for-gram make the best brews out of the teas in your stash? So this Chao Zhou style of brewing was developed, and you will see that this style is used in literally every shop and household in Chao Zhou. So much so that it almost appears utilitarian and everyday, yet scratch beneath the surface and you will see that it is a world of skill, learning, and artistry. So what are the fundamentals of Chao Zhou style brewing? Well, first of all, it's minimal teaware. You essentially need a pot, or Gai Wan, cups, and a waste bowl. There is no need for a Gong Dao Bei, because we are pouring directly into the serving cups. You can put the pot, or Gai Wan, and the cups directly on a towel, or on a tray, or on a large, flat bowl, and just have another bowl on the side which you're using to pour away your rinse. In this case, we've got our Gong Fu vessel, to combine the tray with the rinse bowl into one unit to make things even more minimal. You want to be brewing in very small teaware, to be faithful to the Chao Zhou frugality, but also to get the right balance of taste and aroma, which we'll talk about shortly. We recommend teaware between sort of 50 mil to 80 mil capacity. It is very which will accommodate all of the liquor in your pot, or Gai Wan. You don't want any liquor remaining in the Gai Wan, as this will make the next infusion very bitter, and you don't want to have to waste tea by pouring it away in the rinse bowl. That's precious, precious tea. So you want to be making sure that when you empty your pot, or Gai Wan, into the cups you are putting the right amount of tea in the cups, sort of around three-quarters full. If it's too little then it looks stingy. If it's too much then it's very awkward and cumbersome for your guests to pick up overfilled cups. The number of cups is traditionally three, no matter if you're brewing solo or for two people. This is supposedly because the three cups mimic the character Pin, which is used in the verb to savor flavor, to savor taste. Honestly, I like the balance of three cups, but if I'm brewing by myself then I tend to use one larger cup, and just pour directly into that. It's less enjoyable, because the larger cup means that the tea stays hotter for longer, and it's nice to taste at temperature which is a little bit lower, but it just makes for a more simple setup. If you have more than three people then I would recommend keeping the same size cups, but just increasing your pot, or Gai Wan, to like between 80 and 120 ml. The second key factor in Chao Zhou is the type of tea. I really recommend that when you dive into Chao Zhou style brewing you start brewing with strip Oolongs, like Dan Cong or Yan Cha, because this is the type of tea that this brewing style was originally devised for. Of course, you can experiment with other teas afterwards. The third characteristic of Chao Zhou style is strength. The goal of Chao Zhou style brewing is to make super-rich and strong shots of tea. When you first try Chao Zhou style brewed tea it may be too strong and bitter for you, and you can certainly adapt the parameters to your taste. However, as you become accustomed to this stronger, more physical tea, I think that you will really appreciate the rich, long finish, and rhyme, or yun, of the tea, and you will find yourself preferring this profile. So please, persist and push the boundaries a little. We achieve this extra strength by using very hot water boiling point, and a very high leaf-to-water ratio, something in the region of about 7 to 9 grams per 100 ml. So usually we recommend for this type of tea around 5 grams per 100 ml, pot or Gai Wan, but for these strip Oolongs and Chao Zhou style brewing we're adding like about 40 to 80 percent more leaf. Here I have 4 grams of tea, which is going to be going into my 50 ml Gai Wan. You can see here. I've also got 5 grams of tea here for my Nafu Chao Zhou clay teapot. So I'm going to be showing you brewing in both of these vessels. So if you don't want to weigh the leaf you can sort of look at it visually, and you want to achieve around 70 to 80 percent visually, in terms of capacity. So you can see this is sort of filled up 70 to 80 percent. But bear in mind that there is a lot of air in between these leaves, because it's a strip Oolong. So if you're using like ball-rolled Oolongs, or smaller leaf tea, or broken-up cakes, then it would be visually much lower in volume. So let's look at this Gai Wan. It is busting out with leaves, so much so that when these leaves hydrate they are not going to be able to fully open in this size vessel. Why is this a good thing? Haven't you always heard that giving leaves lots of space for brewing, and for the leaves to open, is important to make good tea? Well, this is one of the key aspects of Chao Zhou-style brewing. Over-stuffing the pot, and it makes it especially suited for brewing strip Oolongs. Remember before I said that the joy of Oolongs was to achieve a rich balance between, on the one hand, aroma and transience, and on the other hand, finish and texture? Well, it is broadly true that the very powerful aromatics are on the surface of the leaves, in the form of juices which have dried on the leaf during the rolling phase of the production, and that the texture, aftertaste, and bitterness, and astringency of the brew are more dependent on dissolving and extracting the compounds from inside the leaf. So by intentionally not leaving enough space in the pot for the leaves to fully expand, we are controlling the rate of extraction of the inner leaf compounds, and therefore we can manipulate the level of bitterness, astringency, body, and aftertaste to be in balance with a very rich aroma. So, by having a very high leaf-to-water ratio, with very short brewing times, we can maximize the aromatics of the Oolong, coming from the dried juices on the outside of the leaf, and we can control the texture, astringency, and yun, or rhyme, to be in harmony with these aromatics. But what about those early infusions? They're going to have the most amount of aroma, since this is easily extracted from the surface of the leaves, but the least amount of texture and aftertaste, as it does take some time for the water to penetrate and enter the leaves. This is why you often hear that with Oolong teas the best infusion is around infusion three or four, because at this point a good balance has been reached, as the inner leaf material is starting to be extracted in balance with the aromatics. Now, I don't know about you, but I would prefer to get that delicious balance from a brew number one, as opposed to brew number three. And the Chao Zhou style has got you covered, with a really nifty trick of breaking some leaves. I've done a video about this before, but I'll repeat it in this video. So what you're trying to do is create what's called a tea gall, so a tea ball of broken leaves. So if you crush some of the leaves in your pot, or Gai Wan, from the very first infusion these broken leaves will extract the inner leaf compounds very readily, because we've broken the outer membranes and there's more surface area for extraction. So infusion number one will have lots of aroma coming from the dried leaf juice on the outside of the leaf, and the broken leaf will be doing the work to provide all of that aftertaste, body, and texture. By the time you reach infusion number three or four the whole leaves in your Gai Wan, or pot, will be providing the bulk of this inner leaf compound to contribute to texture, body, and finish, albeit in a controlled way, since we are restricting the ability for the leaves to swell fully. And the broken leaves will have done their work, essentially. They'll be providing very little. This method allows you to get a better-balanced tea from infusion one, and essentially extends the sweet spot of the tea through more infusions. As an added benefit it means that the steeping times can be kept very short, and that means that you can preserve the aromatics, and it means that you can get more infusions out of your tea. Frugal and clever, huh? I told you that there was a lot more complexity in this seemingly simple brewing style. Right. Now that you know a lot more about the history and theory of Chao Zhou brewing let's show you, step-by-step, how it's done. Right. To recap, let's just disassemble this a little bit. In order for you to have a Chao Zhou style setup you basically need to have either a towel, or a tray, or a flat bowl, which you're going to put your brewing vessel and your cups, and a rinse bowl on the side. Or, in this case, you can use the Gong Fu vessel. There are other similar products out there that allow you to have the tray on top of the Gong Fu bowl, the rinse bowl. I've also got some tools here. Not absolutely essential. You can do away with all of this and just have a towel, the Gai Wan pot and cups, and a bowl, or the Gong Fu vessel, or a similar piece of teaware, and a towel, preferably just to soak up any spills. What I have here are three small cups. This here, this small Gai Wan and cups, we sell as a set. So this is our sort of Chao Zhou style brewing setup that we have. But I've also got a Master Wu Na Fu pot here. Love, love this pot. Again, the size on it, I think it's about 70 ml, and so that's perfect for Chao Zhou style brewing. Okay, so one step at a time. I don't want to miss out any steps here. I've got 4 grams of leaf for this Gai Wan here, and I've got about 5 grams of leaf for this slightly larger capacity. Okay, so the first thing that you want to do, make sure you've got boiling hot water. So if I rush through this a little bit then don't copy me. Make sure you always bring your water to temperature, and you're going to heat up your teaware. So in this case we're heating up the Gai Wan, and usually I'd pour the water into the cups, but you can also just let everything get warmed up. I'm also going to warm up my Na Fu pot here just by putting some boiling water in there. So we want everything warmed up. This is going to contribute to more even brewing, and it's also going to mean that you're going to get more of an impactful aroma when leaves hit the hot vessel. Okay, so I'm going to use these tweezers just to empty out this water. So these are thin porcelain, so they're going to get warm very easily. I'm going to give the elephant a little dousing, because he's here, and you can use that to count infusions. Okay, so lid off, and... Ooh! Did I mix these up? That looks like the lesser amount of leaf here. So this is 4 grams going in. Right. Now the crushing method. If you don't know what I mean, because you skipped, go back a little bit and you'll understand why I'm doing this. I'm just going to take my finger, and I'm going to go right into the middle of the Gai Wan here, and I'm going to crush. Believe me, I know that this is a bizarre thing for people, or for a lot of people who are sort of relatively new to this style of brewing, but this is a very common practice. Let me ASMR this a bit, just so you get the full pleasure and horror of hearing leaves being cracked. So I'm just cracking leaves, crushing maybe 10 percent, 15 percent, in the middle, and I'm not moving it around. Okay? Lid goes on. So I'm going to allow that to just warm up the leaves and give me some aroma. In the meantime, I'm going to pour this Nafu out. So obviously, you would do one or the other. So I'm a little bit cramped here, but you would do one or the other. Now, with a pot, if you're brewing with a pot, then what I recommend is you take 10 percent or so of your leaf, something like this, and I'm going to move this out of the way so you can see. I'm going to crush this here. I should say I'm drinking Ba Xian Eight Immortals Dan Chong. Okay, you can see. I'm not being frightened to crush it, because this is all about helping those first infusions to have good balance of texture. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this, very important, towards the back of the pot. So I'm going to put it in, and I'm going to move this all to the back, and I'm going to tidy up a bit here. Okay, that was a bit messier than I thought, so do that separate from your vessel. So I've cleaned up the vessel top. Okay, so I'm just moving those broken leaves, and you can use your Gong Fu stem, if you'd like, just to move them to the back of the pot. Then I'm going to put the rest of these leaves into the front of the pot. I'm just going to use my hand as a little barrier. So this means that the broken tea leaves are at the back, which means that when I am brewing, or I'm pouring off the brew, the leaves, these larger whole leaves, act like a filter to stop the broken leaves from entering your brew as much as possible. Okay, let's put this to the side. So now I've got a hot pot, or a hot Gai Wan. I'm going to put that one to the side. I'm dust went everywhere, so I'm just going to clean up. So yeah, do your crushing separate, if you want, for a very sort of neat setup. Okay, and now you would smell the leaf, so nose-dry leaf. Start with the lid. It's much more caramelized than I remember, but then it is the dry leaf. I'm not going to talk about the tasting notes. I've done a video about Eight Immortals. I'll put a link in the description below. But this is where you really get to enjoy the delights of the aromatics of this tea, and why this Chao Zhou style brewing method was what prompted, or motivated it being devised, was in large part due to the bursting aromatics of this tea, and wanting to capture those aromatics in the cup whilst making a tea which is strong in terms of texture and aftertaste. Oh! Incredibly complex. Cherries, and vinyls, and all sorts of baked goodness. Okay, so now we're going to rinse the tea. So if you are pouring... So I'm just going to crank up the temperature. If you are pouring in the pot then you will want to make sure that you pour the water towards the front of the pot so that you're not pouring directly on the gall, which is that ball of broken-up leaves. And in the case of the Gai Wan you're going to want to do rim-brewing, so pouring around. So again, you're not pouring directly in, you're pouring around. This is what I would recommend for you. So that way the water will, of course, hit the gall, but it's not being broken by a direct stream of water. Okay, so now we're going to do our rinse, and this is all about quick, quick brewing. Okay? So I tend to use my left hand, just so that I'm ready with the right hand to do the brewing. It teaches me balance with my other hand. So in, and then out. Now you're pouring in a motion to try to even out, get the same amount of liquor in the cup. Now you can see here that there's a fair amount of broken leaf, and that's really the point here, is you want that rinse to get rid of any that is not going to get trapped within those leaves. So we're going to pour these out, and hopefully you're going to see less. Now, of course, if you had left the leaves completely whole then you wouldn't see any of these, and you may prefer that aesthetically. But in terms of the taste experience, I do like, for most of my Dan Chong's and Yan Cha's, I like to do this broken leaf method. So, as I said, if you were brewing with the pot then pour at the front, and again, you're using the leaves as a filter. So let's have a sniff. Ah! Like yellow cherries, strong in that vinyl, fruity varnish note, and just bursting with incredible bright, high, fruity, and invigorating aromatics. Let's just do the Chao Zhou version as well. I mean, sorry, the pot version as well. So I'm pouring towards the front of the pot, and then pouring immediately out. You can see that the Chao Zhou pot also is going to release some of the broken leaf, and that's hopefully going to be less with next infusions. And that's one of the purposes of rinsing your tea. Again, you can smell incredible. Beautiful. All right, so now we're ready for our first infusion. Of course, take your time, smell the tea, delight in all of the complexity of the aromatics. We're still hot, but I'm just going to make sure it's really, really piping hot. And again, very short infusions here. We want to just basically do it in, put the kettle down, and out. And then when we're pouring out into the cups you're ideally looking for an even brew, so the same amount of liquor ending up in the cups, which means you want to put the cups pretty close together, and pour so that you're starting one way, and then sort of just factoring in that the last pours are going to be richer. So you're going to start more diluted here, and then it's going to be a bit stronger, and then it's going to be more concentrated. Then once you come back to here you're going to top up with more concentrated tea. Now, a lot of people say, well, you've got to be even. Sometimes, if I know that somebody likes a lighter brew you can customize. So you can say, well, I'm going to pour lighter in your cup, and then stronger in these two cups. So again, you don't have to make it even. You can customize according to your guest's taste. The most important thing is getting all of the liquor out, all of the water out, so that you don't have anything left behind. Okay, so again, I'm pouring around, down, and you can see, pretty much immediately out. Take your time, and get every last drop out here. You might want to employ the roll-up method, because there's always a few... Oh, no. No drops out there. Okay? Then I would advise taking the lid off. Now, you can see, again, your choice. If you want to have it perfectly clear then you could go through a filter, but that's not the Chao Zhou style, and there is going to be some of this broken leaf in here if you are using the crushed leaf method. But I prefer it, because I like to have that texture from infusion number one. Cheers, everybody. Yeah, bursting with aromatics, and a great aftertaste, a great texture. And I know that if I just brewed this whole leaf without the crushing of the leaves that it would be very aromatic, but a little bit light. Now, this is like infusion number three, two or three, when you're comparing it with brewing it with just whole leaf. And oftentimes you'll just sort of pour away that last bit. Oftentimes, you'll see in China a very sort of a... The way that they pour it away is very theatrical. They sort of like ... They pour it away, and then the cup goes down. And oftentimes, or most of the time, people will serve themselves from here, and they'll put their cup back. You can, of course, use the Gong Fu stems to serve people if you wanted to do it a little bit more politely, but this is a social way of drinking, and so most of the time in Chao Zhou you see people just grabbing and putting back onto the teaware, be it a tray. Most of the time they will have something like this in front of them, but you can, of course, just pick up and serve in this way. Oh! Incredible, this broken-leaf method. I highly recommend you A-B it and see what you think. Now, if we were going to be brewing with the pot it's pretty much exactly the same thing. You're pouring to the front of the pot, again, so that you're not breaking that gall in the back, and you're pouring immediately over. Now you can also, oftentimes after you put the lid on, pour some water over the top. I'll quickly show you how that's done, just to make sure that the teaware is always staying very, very hot. One of the things about Chao Zhou style brewing, you'll see the kettle of water is always going. It's just steaming. Everything about the Chao Zhou style of brewing, in this hot weather, is all, you know, it's all like steamy and hot, and everything always stays warm. And I don't know, somehow that suits the weather, bizarrely, because it's sort of everything makes you sweat, and that cools you down, and it's just a very satisfying way to drink tea. Very, very different from sort of more colder regions, where you're drinking green teas with cooler temperature, and it's a little bit more sort of, how can I say it, calmer, potentially, or a little bit more sort of refined. This is all sort of about the steamy, hot streets of Chao Zhou. Okay, so brewing in the Master Wu Na Fu pot. I'm pouring into the front, lid on, pour over, down, and then pretty much immediately I'm pouring out, trying to get an even brew. That's a bit better. Again, take your time. Get every last drop. You don't want little pockets of water in the teapot that are going to be brewing with those broken leaves, especially. And the liquor will clear up as more of the broken leaves sort of leave the pot, and as I said, by sort of infusion three or four, they've done all of their work, and it's the whole leaves that are really contributing to the flavor. Let's have a taste of the Na Fu. Mmm. Stronger, partly because of the fact that it's clay, holds the heat more, that I poured the water, that it was a bit longer in terms of the brew, especially because the pour is shorter. It takes longer, and therefore there was more brewing time. Wow! Really, really delicious. This is more of that Chao Zhou style. Maybe I should have left the Gai Wan a little bit longer. So what I'm getting is this quite aggressive, like it feels like it's going to be too much, but then it's controlled, and the aromatics that rise up into my nose are balancing it out really, really beautifully. You're getting that brightness, the floral, the fruity, with that bitter, and the texture, and the astringency, and the juiciness, and that rising Yun, that vaporous, rising sensation from the mouth. That is classic Chao Zhou style brewing of a classic Chao Zhou tea. Mmm. And now you would just roll through the infusions as you normally would. You would just keep going. This was infusion number one, and infusion number one is impeccable. So that broken leaf really, really worked, and then just keep going. And again, I would still use very, very short brewing times to preserve the aromatics. In theory, by the time the broken leaves have stopped sort of working to provide texture the whole leaves will have opened up sufficiently so that they will be doing the work, and because you are restricting the room for these leaves to fully open you're going to control the astringency just by the nature of the size and shape of the pot. And keep brewing at flash infusions, and just obviously work on instinct, and you're going to increase it over time. So that's how you do Chao Zhou style brewing. I hope that this was informative. I hope that you dive in. It is, at first glance, a sort of very informal, casual way of brewing with minimal setup, but once you dive deeper and really explore this way of brewing you are going to brew the most immaculate Oolong teas. I can promise you that, and it has so much skill and artistry to learn. That's it teaheads. Check out our other videos, taste our teas wherever you are in the world by browsing Mei Leaf.com, and come visit us if you're ever in London. Other than that, I'm Don from Mei Leaf. Thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea. Stay away from those tea bags, keep drinking the good stuff, and spread the word, because nobody deserves bad tea. Bye.