How I Like To Drink Tea - The Steps To Fully Enjoy Your Cup Of Tea

Hello everyone! Hey there! Welcome to the Tea Crane. I'm Tias Olsen and in today's video I want to show you how I drink and enjoy tea. So I've been showing you tea ceremony videos, I've been talking about tea ceremony in the previous videos, but this time I want to focus a little bit about the tea that I select and that I like to enjoy. So today I have a rather unique Japanese oolong kind of tea. The producer terms it a Baozhong or a Puchong, like the lightly oxidized types of teas that are available in mainland China. But this is of course of a my tea. So what I find very important about, especially the teas that I select which are mostly organic, pesticide free or absolutely natural teas produced within Japan in their natural conditions, those teas I find have more aroma as opposed to flavor. Commonly Japanese teas they're heavily fertilized to induce that type of umami flavor, that rich flavor that you get in Gyokuro that you have in different high-grade matcha teas. But with organic teas inevitably, in order to reduce the amount of pesticides that are being used on the teas, you have to reduce the amount of fertilizer that you're using. So if you reduce the amount of fertilizer that you use, you also reduce the amount of flavor that you add to the final product, which means that the tea will be more like what the tea is originally intended to be. So these teas that I have here are teas that lean more towards their natural identity. They really show, they give an outing of what they were meant to be by nature. And it's only the producer's job to bring out the goodness that is in that leaf. So this producer, he chose to produce this tea into this kind of lightly oxidized tea. And with this tea, I'm just going to take you through a few steps that I like to observe when I'm really enjoying my tea. So first of all, I find it very important not just to taste and to savor the tea, but also to appreciate the way the tea looks, to see how the leaf has been formed, how it's been curled. This one is obviously, it's a hand-picked tea. The leaf is much more unrolled, curled. So if I just want to show you one thing here, see that the leaf is still on the branch and it's got the bud and two leaves. It's a hand-picked tea. And then of course, I also like to smell the scent of the tea. And if you just inhale the aroma of the tea, you get a faint aroma. But what you really want to do is to add some heat to it. So by exhaling on the leaf through your nose, for example, by exhaling on the leaf, you can heat the leaf up and it will exert more aroma. So I like to inhale, exhale, inhale and get two types of different aromas from the same leaf just by changing the temperature. And you can really experience that with the second inhaling after you've exhaled onto it, the aroma is much more intense. It's warmer also and it gives more away. Now, again, to enhance this aroma and to also further enjoy the aroma, to build up a sort of anticipation before really drinking and enjoying the tea, what I like to do is to heat up the Kyusu, the teapot that we're going to use. And when it's warmed up, I will throw out the water and I will insert the leaf in this empty Kyusu and let it sit with the lid on it for a little bit so that the leaf can warm up. So I've done that just now. I'm going to insert the tea leaf. This is a very practical approach to tea drinking. It's less ceremonial, but it's more focused on what do we do to enjoy these kinds of teas and which steps do I like to observe. So I've warmed up my Kyusu, I've inserted the leaf and it's the same function as exhaling onto the leaf and appreciating its aroma, but now it's in a little bit more warmer environment. And so you get the steps cool leaf, slightly warmed up leaf, much warmer aroma, much more strongly expressed through warming the leaf in the Kyusu. And you can get different notes throughout these steps, which can help you build anticipation towards when you're actually going to drink the tea. So you can start to think about what is the tea going to taste like? Is this aroma going to be expressed in the final brew as well? What is going to happen when the leaf is wet? Is this aroma going to go away? Is it going to become stronger? So you can think about all those things and you can, that to me, that is a way of enjoying the tea and really appreciating it for what it is. So now next what I'm going to do is I'm going to add additional water. This time I'm really going to brew the water, to brew the tea. And so I add water to the teapot which has the leaf in it already and then I let it steep. Now technically, as you've seen, I've just gotten the water from my hot water pot here. What I do is most of the teas that I select and that I have at the tea crane available for purchase, I brew those with absolutely boiling hot water or should I say right off the boil hot water, around 98 degrees. Because again, the teas that are grown organically or more naturally, they have a stronger aroma and are less expressive in their taste, so to say. And an interesting thing that I might want to share with you is when the tea is heavily fertilized, that means that the fertilizer that they add to the tea in Japan is mostly nitrates. Nitrates help the leaf to contain more amino acids, which means that there's going to be more umami, sweet umami flavor. But the more of that umami flavor, the more of those amino acids that you enhance in the tea, the more catechins that will also be produced. Because through photosynthesis, when the sun reaches the tea leaf, those amino acids will transfer into catechin and catechin is responsible for bitter taste. So the more fertilizer you add, the more amino acids you produce, the more catechins will also be produced. And so the bitter your tea will become inevitably. Now when you're not fertilizing that heavy, the tea produces only the natural amount of amino acids that the tea bush usually produces. And so only that amount of tea of amino acids can transfer into catechin. So the amount of sweetness and the amount of bitterness is definitely going to be much lower than heavily fertilized tea. And knowing that, for those conventional teas, of course, we only want that umami sweetness. We don't want to drink the bitterness. So what research has proven is that below a water temperature of 80 degrees, catechins do not release from within the leaf. So technically with sencha or with gyokuro or other types of Japanese tea, what is deemed as the proper approach to brewing tea is brewing the tea at a water temperature lower than 80 degrees. So you can get those umami flavors out, but not the catechins. But also you don't get much of the aroma because the water is much cooler. So with these teas it's the opposite, because they've not been heavily fertilized, their tastes have not been increased as much. But they possess a very strong aroma and that's also what the producers of these teas aim to do. So what I suggest with these teas is always to brew them with hot water and perhaps instead take a shorter infusion time. Now I've done that here and you've seen the teas already prepared here while I was talking. But then next what I would like to do is again observe how the leaf has unfurled, how it has regained its original shape. Or maybe because I've only taken a very short infusion time, the leaf has not unfurled as much. And so this means that there is still possibility for second, third, fourth, fifth brews. These tea leaves they can be used over and over. So in the end from the same leaf, if you keep steeping them, you do get a quite a good amount of tea out of it. And so I appreciate the color, I appreciate the way the leaf has been unfurled and I also appreciate its aroma. And I think back of the previous steps thinking have I had, have I discovered this aroma in any of the previous times that I smelled the leaf? Is there any aroma that is new? And only then we go over to tasting the tea. I also like to look at the the color of the liquor, which is in this case is very pale, very transparent, slightly on the green yellowish side, but very clear. And then there's of course savoring the brew also, appreciating the aroma of the brew itself and then the taste. And with these aromatic teas what you get is that the impact of the flavor is usually not as strong with the first sip, but then as you let it unfold itself, give it some time to express the different notes and tones that it has, the tea will develop its aroma throughout the mouth and you can you can see it, you can feel it develop. First around the tongue, then in the back of the mouth, coming back from the throat, digging into the cheeks. There's all these different steps that happen and of course they are very subtle, but it is of course important that you point your attention towards it. And that is why I like to say that tea in a way is in a form of meditation, because you focus on this moment with this tea, this particular time only. Also taking the steps that went prior to savoring the tea help you to bring your focus, bring your attention into this moment and to become aware of what you're doing. And then once the time comes that you're savoring the tea, you have built up that stronger awareness of the present moment. So now with this same leaf, you can continue brewing it until the flavor diminishes, the aroma goes away. You can get several steepings out of it and you can keep enjoying it for as long as you think the tea is still good. I technically get three infusions out of them, sometimes five. With these lightly oxidized teas it's more common that I reach closer to 10, but then of course I always take high temperature, short infusion time. And last thing to be said I think is brewing tea is really not difficult, especially not these teas. What is important is that you understand where the tea comes from, what kind of tea it is and how you would like it to come out. And the other thing that you have to do is to experiment. You brew it one way, see how it comes out, brew it another way and then discover which way you like best. And that is what is so fun about tea. So this is where I will leave it for today. I hope you picked up a thing or two. I enjoyed making this video and I enjoyed drinking this tea and I'm going to continue sipping it a bit further after this video as well. And I'll be looking forward to seeing you again. If you want to stay updated on new videos that I'm going to produce, new videos that come out, first hit the subscribe button down there and then there's also a bell that you can tick. If you tick the bell you will get notified of new videos and you won't miss any of the videos that I'm going to be putting out. So hit the subscribe button, tick that bell and I'll be seeing you again in the next video. Thank you, stay happy, stay healthy and continue drinking the tea. See you!