Tea from North Korea
Posted on 15 July 2012
Short note today for a most unusual tea: a green from North Korea. Now I am big fan of the teas of South Korea, which enjoy great prestige among aficionados for their distinctive style and high quality. But North Korea? There must be some tea there, but how is it made, how is it sold and drunk? Mystery.
Plain-looking but good-tasting.
So there was a frisson of excitement when a friend brought the above-pictured box of dried leaves to taste. And it turned out to be perfectly fine. Clean, crisp with good depth of flavour and a wholesome profile. Rather fragile on the brewing parameters front: steep a little too long this developed some fierce bitterness, so it’s best brewed with a light hand.
Well-made: these leaves have been processed with care.
This tea is styled as a Longjing. It doesn’t say so on the pack (I’m told: my Korean is non-existent), but the leaves look and behave like the real thing. The Polish-Japanese friend who brought this tea is actually positive it is a fake: i.e., not made in North Korea, but smuggled from China to be sold as Korean. The reasonably high quality of this tea (it is no grand cru, but it is on the level of a $15 Longjing, which is good medium class) would substantiate the theory, because without a long tradition of manufacture, quality control, and a steady knowledgeable consumer base, it is difficult to consistently make tea of this quality. I prefer to be cautious with such approach – it did for a second remind me of the patronising condescending approach toward Chinese wine that I discussed in my notorious Wine racism? article – but knowing absolutely nothing about how tea could be made in North Korea, I think I must accept the theory.
Source of tea: sourced and provided by a tea friend.