Le rouge et le noir

Posted on 28 January 2011

Here’s a look at a tea I got from Teasmith upon my recent visit to this gorgeous London tea bar. Simply titled Red/Black Taiwan, it actually is sourced from Teamasters and I’m told it’s the 2010 Winter Da Yeh discussed in detail here.

It’s the third time I taste a Taiwanese black tea sourced by Stéphane Erler (see a tasting note here), and they have been pretty consistent. They are indeed more ‘red’ (as they are termed in Chinese tea culture) than black, delivering medium-bodied, brick-coloured, very fruity infusions that lack the strong tannins of Chinese or Indian Assam black tea.

Brewed in a large pot with a short steep time, this tea is just delightful. It has a complex fruity profile with red cherries, currants, pomegranate, and that distinctive dried fruits flavour that seems a recurrent note in Taiwanese blacks. It’s not as light as a Darjeeling first flush but is definitely juicy and airy for a red tea (the structure actually reminds me of an aged Baozhong). Interestingly, the dry leaves look fairly small but many open to pretty large dimensions, substantiating the Da Yeh (‘large leaf’) cultivar name. The spent leaves look more like an oolong tea, again, than high-quality Chinese black that usually consists of small leaf.

With Chinese black, the best results are often obtained by gongfu brewing: a lot of leaf, little water, and a series of very short infusions. Here, I wasn’t convinced by this approach. The first infusion came out coarse and rather earthy, and at no time did I have access to that stunning fruitiness of the single large pot steep. For my next session I think I’ll adopt the ‘Teamasters technique’: a good ceramic teapot, just a few leaves and a long, patient infusion. This should emphasise the fruit character even more.

Disclosure

Source of tea: own purchase.