Egregoros

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