Egregoros

By yesterday I was surmising that the teas that would be most interesting to brew gyokuro style were those that have a fairly high astringency, because peeling back the astringency might expose something new and valuable.

So I figured I should try a counterexample: a tea with essentially no astringency that would presumably not benefit from low-and-slow brewing. That would be black tea made from C. crassicolumna leaves at 60°C/4g/120 ml/2 minutes.

And…I liked it! Turns out, crassicolumna has *some* astringency at high temp, and lower temp made it softer and fuller in the mouth. And it preserved the crazy long crassicolumna huigan. I found 60°C/5 min was ideal.

Not that I think low temp made this tea better exactly, but it did show enjoyable qualities.

@tea

> the science of caffeine and sleep

Since bitter tastes don’t bother me, I have the liberty to do what I did yesterday afternoon: push green tea extremely hard.

I put 4g of Bhutanese var. sinensis green tea into a 70ml titanium gaiwan and repeatedly brewed short steeps with near-boiling water. They were flash steeps till maybe the fifth one.

You get a bold flavor that way and a surprisingly thick texture if the bitterness doesn’t ruin it for you. I don’t know how many steeps I brewed, but I didn’t stop till after 7 PM.

The upshot: last night I had more trouble sleeping than in at least a month.

@tea

Why did I buy tea out of a back room at Frankel’s Discount Clothing?

Well, an old Net tea friend of mine recently posted about tea from Myanmar, which he’s been getting from a website for Burmese crafts called myanmarmakers.com. And lo, they list a bricks & mortar location just a subway ride away from me.

So I went to the address on a dreary corner in Sunset Park, Brooklyn under the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and it turned out to be what used to be called an Army & Navy store, more than a hundred years at the current location, presided over by an 85-year-old guy with a Borscht Belt sense of humor.

Myanmar Makers is the old guy’s son Eric, who in addition to selling Carhartt has a business passion project fostering craftspeople in Indochina.

@tea

The tea I brewed today was the Roasted one, whatever that means.

I got 6 gongfu steeps from it. The liquor was never astringent. It had a decent soft mouthfeel. There was a vague smokiness to it, but the leading flavor was a fermented funk, not like heicha but more like fermented foods. It did dance around in the mouth, pleasingly, to a certain extent and linger a bit in the front of the mouth after swallowing, but there wasn’t much of a huigan.

The flavor didn’t change greatly till the last long steep, when the flavor was dominated by an unfamiliar but not unpleasant herbal note.

The brewed leaves never lost much of their dark brown color and stayed stiff till the end. Is this a sign of fermentation? If it came from over-roasting, there would be more tiny fragments, I’d expect.

@tea

Today’s Myanmar tea is Zayan Sour Tea. This one too is soft in the mouth, with hardly any astringency or bitterness even though you can see it’s basically a green tea.

There’s a very strong fermentation flavor/aroma. It’s almost like sauerkraut, which would make sense because of the lactobacillus it lived with for months. But there’s also a sweet, nearly floral aroma, especially in the nose and front of the mouth. Nice sweet beidixiang too.

The leaves don’t want to unfurl even after 5 steeps, but unlike yesterday’s Roasted tea, they’re flexible.

I’ve no idea where this tea stands on the quality spectrum of its type. But I suspect that lactobacillus fermentation of tea is a technique that’s orthogonal to fungal (heicha) fermentation, let alone enzymatic oxidation.

@tea

Today I brewed the last of the 3 Myanmar teas from the Army & Navy—not the Burmese Army!—store. I didn’t have high expectations for it; I mainly wanted to use it to try to figure out if the leaf was pretty much the same as C. sinensis cultivars I’m used to or something different like C. crassicolumna.

The dried leaves didn’t look unusual. They looked, I dunno, like some not-so-great Dian lü, and ominously, had no aroma when I broke the seal. The packaging was silent about the time of harvest.

@tea

I started out cautiously at 65°C/45 seconds. It was without astringency, so it had a nice soft mouthfeel, but it was pretty insipid.

I kept upping the ante, so to speak, and it was only on the fourth steep at 85°C/3 minutes that I got the slightest briskness, but again without much flavor or aroma.

So my surmise is that this tea is stale unto death, but it probably is C. sinensis.

This raises an interesting question about the Roasted and Sour teas. Since they arrived in the same box as the green tea, chances are that they are more or less the same age but better preserved due to the way they were manufactured. So would they be even better if they were fresher?

@tea

tired: chicken-fried steak
wired: gyokuro-brewed Darjeeling

Gyokuro is famous for there being strict rules for brewing it to bring out its celebrated umami. Recently I’ve been wondering: what if you brewed other teas that way?

Autumn flush Darjeeling is between first and second flush in oxidation level, and brewed “normally” has a kind of austere quality.

Brewing it at 60°C, 4g/120ml, 2 minutes, it’s totally different: thick, soft, cherry-scented, no astringency at all. I’m baffled by it being more fragrant at lower temperature, but there’s no denying it.

@tea