Wojciech Bońkowski
Master of Wine

Tasting tea blind

‘Blind’ tasting lies at the centre of wine assessment. Nowadays, whenever you taste a wine to give a judgment and profess about its merits (or lack thereof), you’re expected to do so ‘blind’ – meaning you don’t know what you are tasting. At least put a series of bottles into brown bags (in Poland, we use black socks), though real blind tasting should be ‘double-blind’: you’re not even supposed to have the vaguest clue about what wine types are possible. (This requires a full-time secretary with a wine degree to organise the tasting for you).
I dislike blind tasting. Profoundly so, in fact. Not only because on several occasions, I made a fool of myself by voting a Banfi Brunello as wine of the tasting (no joke). I dislike blind tasting because to an extent, all wine tasters make fool of themselves by accepting to reduce the wine to its ‘objective’ characteristics. Limpidity (who cares? But it’s a standard criterion on wine competitions), cleanliness of aromas, balance of tannins, ‘persistence’: as if, for example, the L’Inattendu white from Languedoc I blogged on recently could be fairly assessed through a set of technical parameters. I have experienced dozens of occasions where excellent bottles tasted bland and hollow when put in a series of twenty similar wines. Blind tasting is awfully reductive and its only theoretical advantage – that you assess a wine free of any bias – turns out to be an illusion: one bias (the label) is replaced by another (we are influences by elements we like, like a dark colour or a flowery bouquet).

In my book, the only real usefulness of blind tasting is to develop your own palate and tasting mind by making educated guesses. Tasting a single wine blind, you are forced to concentrate really hard on all its aspects: you have no reference points to assist you in your interpretation.

My palate for tea is that of a beginner, and I find blind tasting a truly useful exercise. It was an exciting perspective, therefore, to receive two unlabelled tea samples from fellow US tea drinker, Kimble22 (a.k.a. Shibumi – check out his blog here). I tasted them as analytically as possible (these were no pleasure sessions) and come up with approximate conclusions. Perhaps, looking at the photos and reading my descriptions, you’ll have better ideas: let me know as I’ll hold on posting the teas’ real identity (which I still don’t know) for a few more days.

Mystery sample ‘A’
It comes as a generous chunk of compressed tea: this is obviously sheng [‘raw’] puer. Leaf size is average, with a proportion of tips. Compression is medium. A good-looking sample, showing some age: there’s little green to the colour, and a minor amount of dusty frosting on the consistently brownish leaves. Aroma leaf is very subdued: dominated by soft wet wood, with a bit of tobacco. Tobacco notes are reinforced when leaves are put in warm cup, but it’s a very low-key aroma. The dry leaf hints at a tea anything between 5 and 15 years of age I guess.
Colour of 5-minute competition brewing.

I brewed this tea twice: the first time ‘competition style’ (2g of leaf for 100ml boiling water, single 5-minute steep), the second time in 120ml yixing clay teapot where I’ve used 8g of leaf. It’s my personal record of dosage for this teapot, and it was clearly a bit too much (leaves had no room to fully unfold). The former session brought a subdued, sweet-fruity, not very powerful puer. A darker colour than expected, light brown (not orange or amber). Aroma has a high-pitched woody richness with hints of dried fruits and tobacco, hinting at its moderate age. Tannic power is moderate, and this seems almost completely resolved and mature. I like the balance here, and it’s definitely dry-stored: there’s not the merest hint of fermentative shicang. A harmonious and qualitative tea, and look at the spent leaves on the photo below. Really good quality, little fragmentations, larges leaves with a consistent medium brown colour. The easiest thing to guess here is the age: I reckon this is 8–10 years old, making it a tea from 1999 through 2001. To guess the origin takes a more experienced palate than mine but there’s an elegance and spiciness that reminds me of the Yiwu mountain teas. This tea doesn’t look like a large factory production.

2 grams of leaf after 5 minutes of steeping.
The high-dosage yixing teapot session yielded no less than 15 satisfying infusions (25s, 10s, 7s, 10s, 30s, 50s, 1m, 2m30s and then at will). In summary, the tea showed a lot more power and reserve than suggested by the single long brewing. Through the initial brewings there’s a strong beany character dominating the profile, and a solid core of clean bitterness on end. Good length too, and the lack of fruit notes is interesting. Very good concentration (befits an 8g dosage), this is quite chewy. It is with brewings #4–5 that bone-dry beaniness is replaced with sweeter tobacco, and some sweet huigan making its appearance. Later brewings are consistently good, if perhaps never emotional. All in all this session shows a tea with a lot of stuffing (‘wild tree’? Perhaps) and still some way to go in terms of ageing. It might be younger than I initially thought: a 2001–2003?

Mystery sample ‘B’

Visually this is quite different from ‘A’. Small leaves, very tight compression; there’s a pattern on the surface of the sample like those that are pressed onto bricks, not cakes. A one-dimensional but very intense smokey aroma to the leaves.

As dark as this tea gets: colour after 5 minutes of infusion.

The ‘competition style’ brewing reveals a tea that’s obviously younger than ‘A’. Everything from the wet leaf (‘lid’) aroma through the colour of the brew down to the dryness of taste indicates a tea in that unsympathetic ‘middle age’: 3 to 7 years perhaps. Smoke, white beans, tannic grip, mint, strong young puer energy; this verges on an alkaliney, mildly animal aroma that for a lack of better descriptor, I call ‘sweaty’. It’s a tea with some power but really not very flattering at this stage.
Chopped leaves, smokey aroma: Xiaguan?
A session in yixing teapot (‘dahongpao’ clay) brings a consistent tea. It is very smokey throughout, and looking at the spent leaves, it reminds me obviously of the Xiaguan Tea Factory production: these leaves have gone through every possible torture and dismembration before being tightly pressed. Deep beige colours of mid-age, oily texture, a chewy mouthfeel and a kicking qi energy (courtesy of the high leaf fragmentation, too). This needs to age further to gain more complexity and anything like charm. A good tea. My educated guess: a Xiaguan brick (they’re more known for their tuocha but occasionally make some bricks too) from 2002–2006.
Read another interesting exercise in blind tasting on the Half-Dipper blog (this and following posts). Please do leave comments here on what you think the above-described teas are. I’ll reveal their identity in 3 days’ time.
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Update 6th October 2009:
Kimble22 / Shibumi has now kindly revealed the identity of the above teas.
Tea ‘A’ is the 2003 Jinzhu Mountain. I have little information about this alleged ‘wild tree’ tea other than it’s reviewed here.
Tea ‘B’ is the 1999 Xiaguan Traditional Characters. It’s with the vintage of this that I missed the mark by the widest margin. I can be justified by the fact that the rock-hard compression of this tea makes for a much slower ageing than a standard puer cake: 2–3 years by decade is often the perceptive gap between actual and apparent age.
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1980s Loose Daye

Autumn is slowly arriving here to the Polish lowlands. We’re having a delightful Indian summer with afternoons in the mid-25Cs and no rain, a very positive weather for the Polish grape harvest. But the evenings are fairly chilly and mists are rising steadily at 8pm. It’s the sort of weather that makes my go down to the cellar for two things: sweet Tokaj wine and a bing of ageing puer tea.

Let’s start with the latter. After a summer busy with drinking Japanese green teas it’s a welcome change to move into the world of earthy, mushroomey, spicy  puer. I have a number of samples to delve into this autumn and today, I went for the simplest of them all.
This 1980s Daye Loose-Leaf is from NadaCha, and costs the incredibly modic (in the context of its age) sum of £11 per 100g. Nada explains this is made of the largest tea leaves that in the production of ‘proper’ puer, are usually sorted out (though you can see more than a fair amount within the lower-end cake blends, in my experience). Due to their size and position lower down the tea branch they usually have less aroma and less than the young leaves and buds.

This tea is interesting in being so old: you don’t often see a daye [large-leaf] of this age. In its youth it’s a cheap and simple tea for quick consumption. Here we have a variation on the theme.

These leaves live up to their name: they are really large! The colour is a consistent dark brown (not black), with quite some evolution: some leaves are looking almost powdery. They are uniformly thin and look rather fragile. They have a low, subdued aroma with some nice walnutty notes; a moderately pungent shicang [wet-storage] character comes up when the leaves are warmed in the gaiwan.
Competition-style brewing: 2g of leaf / 100ml water / 5 minutes.
The colour of the brew is only a medium brown. This is a surprising tea, showing little wet storage and an interestingly fruity, approachable character. Attack shows that unmistakeable old puer umami fatness, followed by echoes of the nose notes: walnuts, dried fruits (dates perhaps) in a sweet context. Length or huigan are not special but this is a very moreish tea, unchallenging, comfortable, balanced and clean. A really good start to the new puer season! And at this price it’s really recommended.

These leaves are not worthy of very intricate brewing strategies. A couple of attempts in yixing pot brought little extra interest. Now I just put a small amount in a gaiwan and brew almost at will: 2, 5, 8 minutes depending on how many e-mails I’m reading through. There’s no bitterness and the wet storage notes are low so overbrewing is not a problem.
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Tea and chocolate

An exercise matching tea and chocolate. Can this work at all? Isn’t chocolate too powerful to have with tea? I try some artisanal chocolate pralines with green, oolong, black and puer tea.

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Tea on the move

How to brew decent tea while travelling? Without access to infinite tea supply from your own tea cabinet and 25 brewing utensils. The answers are: keep it simple; carry your own tea; choose a tea that will perform well in less-than-perfect circumstances.

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2008 Fenghuang Winter Hungshui

I feel a little strange after my recent Japanese green tea overdose (see this link for a list of related posts). When perceiving the ‘outside world’ with our senses, we all benefit from temporary specialisation. If you drink one Chablis amidst a diet of California Zinfandels, chances are you won’t like it or appreciate it. If, however, you travel to Chablis to taste the local wines for a week, you become much more aware of the nuances that differentiate the various Chablis. The same goes for music. If you’re due to write an essay on the operas of Wagner, you’d better do a bit of listening before that. It’s good to have that individual style well ‘in your ear’.

But there’s another aspect to that. Overdo that Wagner listening, and all his operas will seem like one repetitive ramble. After two weeks of drinking only Japanese shincha three or four times a day, I didn’t feel like having more, and all those notes of green fruit and mild astringency on the palate really didn’t make much difference. So it’s good to switch to something different after a while. Yet the first sips of that ‘different’ tea (wine, food, music) always seem strange. Everything’s out of sync. The mouthfeel is not what it’s supposed to be. Even a tea’s colour can seem anomalous.
 

This 2008 Winter Fenghuang Hungshui oolong is a sample courtesy of Stéphane Erler of Tea Masters (merci!). In many ways it’s the perfect antidote to a Japanese overdose, yet it took me two sessions to really acknowledge its quality and personality to the full.

The Tea Masters website has a comprehensive description of this tea. Tea vendors’ websites and product descriptions can dangerously degenerate into repetitive marketing ramble but Tea Masters are (in my opinion) a notable exception. Their tasting notes are universally well-written and to the point.

Hungshui is a traditional term for a high mountain rolled oolong from Central Taiwan, produced with ‘traditional’ roast (i.e., higher than most modern Taiwanese mountain oolongs). As all tea terms it is approximate: with this specific 2008 Fenghuang, it is at most a medium roast, lower than I remember from Tea Masters’ 2008 Spring Dongding produced from exactly the same area. But (typically for a winter harvest) the fruity and flowery aromas of this tea are also quite subdued, making this medium roast a sensible choice: it doesn’t overpower the natural expression but is present throughout in the profile. You see it clearly in the xiangbei [‘aroma cup’] where there is a very interesting progression: starting with fumé, toasted-woody smells through cereals, then chocolate and caramel, going back to woodsy, herby, toasted, baked-bready scents. Hmm, interesting… I spend a few minutes smelling the aroma cup alone.

Infusions no. 1 (45 seconds, left) and 2 (25 seconds, right).
Brewed in: gaiwan
Dosage: 2.5g / 120ml
Tasting notes:
45s: Leaves are slow to open and the first infusion is a pale apricot-mauve in colour. This has retained some good fruit underneath the roast, with a subdued but fascinating retronasal perfume mixing red fruits (raspberries?) with almonds, almost like a Dancong. Length is good, though this brew is obviously rather light – if you’d like a proper gongfu brewing session I recommend dosing more like 5–6g (though see below). Texturally an interesting combination of butter and toasted grain. A noble, satisfying tea.
25s: Deeper colour and a bit more intensity but the whole register is unchanged. This tea seems like a great pearl-white canvas on which only time will paint a colourful picture. A bit more butter and less toast now; a touch less fruity too. Now this is tasting very mountain oolong-like, with restraint and noblesse: whispers not utterances of texture and flavour.
40s: A deeper apricotty-beige colour (finally). Aroma still centered on roast. However more sweetness on the long huigan finish. Losing some of it grainey personality in favour of a more intense (if still shy) fruit.

This tea is a masterpiece of roast if there ever was one. It’s roasted to the millisecond and millidegree of temperature. At no moment does it show that bitterish astringency of excessive roast, nor the shallow buttery vagueness of insufficient one. The natural tea leaf flavours are perfectly combined with the delicate roasted notes. Stéphane mentions this tea was roasted by an old master, now retired, and it really shows: it’s a study in effortless, self-effacing craftsmanship.

Be warned: it’s a really delicate, low-key tea. Even following Stéphane’s advice (which I found very sound: this tea has little to gain from a tough-headed gongfu progression) of infusing little leaf for long times, the intensity is never very high, and it’s all about nuances. But what nuances! I’m now healed from the Japanese overdose, and for 32€ / 100g, I’ll be sure to order more to see how this tea can age.
These leaves are very slow to open…
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(10) 2008 Tama Homare Gyokuro

An outstanding gyokuro, crystal-clear with fantastic depth of flavour.

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(9) 2008 Kame-Jiru-Shi Gyokuro

Gyokuro: any other tea that triggers the same sense of excitement and festivity?

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(8) 2008 Otowa Karigane

Other posts in this series:
2008 Gyokuro Kame-Jiru-Shi (O-Cha)
2008 Gyokuro Tama Homare (Marukyu)
2008 Kabusecha Takamado (Marukyu)
2008 Sencha Miyabi (O-Cha)
2009 Shincha Fukamushi Supreme (O-Cha)
2009 Shincha Shigaraki (Marukyu)
2009 Shincha Shuei (Marukyu)
2009 Shincha Uji Gold (Marukyu)
2009 Shincha Yutakamidori (O-Cha)

There are many aspects of the Japanese civilisation that I find totally incomprehensible (such as pachinko) and many others that I find highly admirable.

One such aspect is the pragmatic savviness that is applied to tea production. Unlike those crazy Chinese that insist on making tea from whole leaves and often conduct only one harvest per year, the Japanese really make their tea trees and leaves work hard for their living. From the most immaculate gyokuro to the lowliest genmaicha nothing is ever wasted and everything is produced with logic and order.

Your summer harvest has produced large leaves with no finesse and lots of bitterness? Roast them and sell cheaply to restaurants as bancha. Lots of substandard leaves in your sencha? Mix with puffed rice and a bit of tea powder for a good genmaicha. Gyokuro yields low and takes a long time to cash in? There’s always market for an earlier release of affordable kabusecha.

The Japanese tea tradition has also created a number of products made from material that elsewhere would be considered leftovers. Tea debris from the production of sencha or other grades make mecha and konacha. And then there are stems, stalks and twigs. Surely there’s the occasional twig in some oolongs (like the Young Tree Baozhong from Tea Masters), and most puer is made with leaves attached to the stems, but the latter’s amount remains marginal. Kukicha, on the other hand, is a Japanese speciality made mostly from stems with some addition of leaf; the whole is roasted and yields a rich, toasty, grainy infusion that is low in caffeine and reputed to be even healthier than ‘standard’ green tea. Here’s an image of a standard kukicha:

When the stems are a by-product of a higher grade material, the obtained tea is renamed karigane. Karigane is rarely roasted, so that you can taste the flavour of quality stems in its unadulterated sweetness and creaminess. Usually it is blended with a proportion of leaf for a richer taste.

The 2008 Otowa Gyokuro-Karigane I am tasting today is yet another tea from the ever-so-reliable Marukyu-Koyamaen. It is the aristocracy of stem tea: tiny young tea shoots blended with gyokuro-grade leaf. The visual aspect is quite delightful and so is the aroma: spinach-vegetal but with a rounder, richer, almost white-chocolatey dimension than a leaf-only tea.

3g of Karigane separated into 0.9g of stems (left) and 2.1 of gyokuro-grade leaf (right).

Eager to find out more, I sacrificed an hour to separate the stems from the leaves in a 3g sample. It turns out that the former constitute less than half the material here (1/3 by weight, but they’re lighter than the leaves proper). Then I brewed these two fractions separately. The leaves are of excellent quality yielding a sweet, excitingly raspberry-scented, gyokuro-styled infusion. Really surprising. As for the stems, I expected the brew to be quite thin but in fact it is quite intense. Karigane is often described as ‘sweet’ and ‘creamy’ but these stems are giving a bone-dry, rather woodsy, dried-herby flavour. Interesting.

Infused karigane stems (top), karigane leaves (bottom left) and kukicha (bottom right).

It was not the end of my exploration. While centuries of practice and gazillions of reference points have contributed to setting the best infusion parameters for classic tea such as sencha and gyokuro, karigane is trickier. Should you brew it like the leaf it is based on? Or with hot water and longer times to extract the maximum from these tiny stems? I explored all the alternatives in a series of comparative tastings, and came up with the following table:

50C

60C

70C

1 gram

Light colour. Decent umami personality here but unintense. Not bad if you like your Japanese tea quite light. Only one good brewing.

Moderate intensity even at this highish temperature. Unremarkable, plus the stale, seaweedy element dominates.

2 grams

Brews very light but the glutamic thickness is obvious. Really interesting how this develops more texture and sweetness than at higher temperatures. Lacks a bit of oomph if you like an ‘expressive’ tea, otherwise I found it as good as a higher dosage at this temperature.

More aroma and intensity to the flavour than the 50C version but somehow loses thickness (because it isn’t extracted, or its perception is masked by the higher temperature of tea in cup?). A clear taste of umami and all in all a good compromise. I also like the 2nd brewing here.

Very similar to the 60C version, again seems less thick than the 50C. Quite vegetal. 2nd brewing is OK. But no doubt this temperature is too high to obtain good extraction and balance.

3 grams

Good thickness but profile is less transparent than with 2 grams: umami clashes with spinach vegetality. A touch bitter. But also good sweetness. This dosage is OK if you want a proper session of 3–4 infusions.

A deeper colour. At 70C this is quite more nutty than the 2-gram version. Less finesse and less interest. More vegetality than umami. Some interest to the second brew.

One of my comparative tastings: 1, 2 and 3 grams of leaf (from left to right).

Having found out the best dosage (2g) and brewing temperature (60C) I went on to compare various brewing times:

1 minute

2 minutes

3 minutes

Colour is pale but a nice brewing, good mixture of sweetness and umami, not too intense or long but there’s a glutinous kiss on the finish. Representative and there’s no need for a longer steeping.

Little change to the 1-minute version apart from the colour and the stem influence: a more woodsy, herby taste. Sweetness is masked though, the whole is chunky and slightly lacks charm.

Almost identical to the 2-minute version, as if the extraction stopped. Not very sweet and no more interest than the 1-minute.

Colour of first infusion with ‘standard’ parameters (3g / 100ml / 60C / 60 seconds).

To summarise, this aristocratic karigane should be brewed like a gyokuro, with warm not hot water (55–60C seems best). 2 grams of leaf per 100ml of water is a good dosage; infusion times can vary but short ones (60 seconds) are pretty good.

This is a truly interesting tea: I can’t remember spending so much time recently with a single tea, and I hardly got bored. It shows a bit of 2008 staleness to it (I identify it as dried herbs and seaweeds) but it’s not too obtrusive. The key is to brew it properly. Done sencha-style it is underwhelming with little personality, but gyokuro-style is a completely different animal. Little aroma but on the palate this erupts with glutamic density and length, with good sweetness and an added herby dimension from the leaf. A challenging taste if you’re not ‘of the school’ but impressive for sure. And at ¥1575 / 90g can it is really good value.

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(7) 2008 Takamado Kabusecha

Great thanks to readers who are enduring this Japanese tea marathon. We are done with sencha / shincha for now but a few more reviews are pending for other tea types. Here’s one that you don’t see often: kabusecha. Tea geeks will know it’s a style midway between sencha and gyokuro: the tea trees are shaded during the last stage of vegetation but for a shorter period than real gyokuro (days instead of months). The result is a tea that’s heftier than gyokuro but having less catechins, is less grassy and pungent than sencha. An intermediate style that’s rarely seen on sale, it is a by-product of gyokuro for some, and a distinctive tea category for others.


Marukyu-Koyamaen are selling this 2008 Takamado Kabusecha for ¥1,100 / 90g can. The dry leaf has that nice dark green colour of good quality Japanese green tea, with a bit more fragmentation than in the recently reviewed sencha from Marukyu. It’s actually looking more like gyokuro than sencha to my taste, though the leaves are larger. The aroma is quite distinctive. There’s none of the intense sweet fruit of sencha, instead the profile is very vegetal (almost spicy) ranging from olive oil to spinach.

Infusion no. 1 (60 seconds at 70C): a light colour typical of a low-steamed [asamushi] tea.

We find the latter scent again in the infused leaves: boiled spinach. Brewed sencha style (2g of leaf / water @ 70C / 1 minute steep) the flavour register is consistent with the leaf aroma: very green and vegetal, without the top citrusy notes of sencha, and not exactly ‘milder’ as people often define kabusecha. A bit of kick on the finish. Good length and an overall impression of cleanliness and very good leaf material. There’s very little bitterness even when brewed at higher temperatures, although it’s really a simple tea with no great depth.

Spent leaves show low steaming and good quality: whole and wholish leaves, no fannings.

I’ve juggled a bit with the variables here. Kabusecha being mid-way into gyokuro territory, you’re naturally tempted to brew it like the latter. While there’s reasonable texture and a kiss of umami to be obtained, this tea just lacks the guts to benefit much from higher dosage and longer infusions. On the other hand, brewing at 80C and 2–3 minutes results in a pervasive seaweedy vegetality and an almost matcha-like powderiness that shows a bit of 2008 staleness, so I don’t recommend that. It’s at its most satisfying and distinctive brewed as in the tasting note above. And it’s one tea that IMHO benefits most from a Tokoname kyusu pot, with the rough vegetal edges rounded off a bit and some extra creaminess to the texture added.

As mentioned, this is a simple, one-dimensional tea with not a lot of content, plus it’s clearly going down as a 2008. That being said, it is very good quality as all Marukyu offerings IME, is really inexpensive, and makes a fine change from your daily sencha.

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(6) 2009 Shuei Shincha

OK, so here’s the last sencha review for this year. Yes, it’s another tea from Marukyu-Koyamaen, and my notes will sound repetitive again – let’s hope they can also be useful. As well as provide some dramatic crescendo to my mini-series, as this is by a margin the best Japanese tea I’ve tasted from this new season.

The 2009 Shincha Shuei is a competition grade tea – but more knowledgeable readers will have to enlighten me as to the status of the ‘All-Japan Competitive Tea Exhibition’. In any case it’s among the more expensive offerings from Marukyu but at ¥2,600 / 100g it’s hardly exorbitant.

The good people at Marukyu seem to have a preference for asamushi [short-steamed] teas. This is another very well-presented tea with intact leaves of a consistent dark emerald green colour, no fragmentation, no fannings. Visually it is similar to the 2009 Shigaraki and 2009 Uji Gold from the same merchant I’ve reviewed before. However there is a mild variation introduced in the aroma. This tea smells almost erotic – it is so intense, sweet and creamy, full and vegetal while staying really elegant. Smelling the freshly opened can is almost as satisfying as a proper brewing session. In the background there is some very pleasant baked bread light roast.

A standard session with 2g / 100ml, water at 70C and 60 seconds for the first infusion reveals a tea that is both typical and excitingly good. The colour is medium light with as many shades of green as of gold. Flavour-wise this is eminently fresh and has so much presence and subdued, understated intensity. The concentration of a cup of tea is largely a factor of your brewing parameters but what I define as ‘presence’ is derived from the leaf quality. I rarely wax lyrical but this shincha has a haunting finesse that makes the ‘liquid jade’ metaphor sound very adequate. The leafy, spinach-like vegetality of this tea (usual in any sencha) is subordinated to its evocative character of ripe summer fruits and flowers; for me, this is the hallmark of a truly exciting tea.

First infusion with ‘standard parameters’: 2g, 70C, 60s.

In my previous post on the 2009 Uji Gold from Marukyu I mentioned that with this low-steamed category of Japanese sencha green tea, in order to boost the flavour of your infusion, you have two options to depart from the ‘standard’ sencha brewing parameters: increasing leaf dosage and/or water temperature. Applying these with discrimination, you will obtain more body and flavour without extracting too much bitterness from the leaves. (Grassy, tangy bitterness and ‘fishy’ flavours are a reason why Japanese teas – a large portion of which is long-steamed, fukamushi – are usually steeped briefly from a small dosage of leaves). With this very high-quality Shuei tea, I came up with another solution.

I’ll call it ‘gyokuro technique’, in that it consists of treating sencha tea [made from leaves grown in full sun] a bit like gyokuro [a different grade of Japanese tea made from leaves that are shaded]. In my experiment I increased dosage to 4.5g of leaf / 100ml of water and increased steeping time to 2 minutes, but lowered the water temperature to 55C. In this way, extraction of colour, flavour and nutrients from the tea is changed into a ‘softer’ but ‘deeper’ one. The colour becomes a little more intense but keeps the same greenish-golden register. The aroma is a little more intense too, but again doesn’t change substantially. The major change affects the texture. The tea becomes really thick with a glutinous, oily feel to it, and there is a very distinctive brothy, salty character that is defined as umami [the fifth taste; see more about it in this post], although it’s a little more salt-driven than umami is usually considered to be. (When discussing the concept, I’m often told I should identify it as a flavour impression independent of saltiness).

The distinctive salinity of this 2009 Shuei shincha reminded me of a great mineral white wine from such places as Cinqueterre in Italy or Santorini in Greece. Its eminent quality is also confirmed when you brew it the wrong way. Heavily overbrewed with 85C water, this is shown packing in some considerable power for asamushi, but the bitterness it develops is clean and excitingly fruit-flavoured. Whereas the similarly profiled Shigaraki Shincha from Marukyu was a very tasty but eminently simple tea this has a lot of dimension. Is it three times better as the price would suggest? No. Would I buy it again at the same price? Very definitely so.

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