Tag: hangzhou

Time flies, it’s been 6 months since I posted Part I; there we looked at harvesting and processing Green Tea, now, in Part II we’ll wrap up with brewing, drinking and selling…

Brewing
As we know, the flavors of green tea, whilst fresh and bright in small quantities, if left to brew too long will become unpleasant, bitter and acrid. Where better than a Chinese Government run store to learn about the brewing process?  Unlike most other teas, Green Tea is brewed and consumed in the same glass.

The brewing process is made up of a number of steps:

1. Most importantly, use water at only 80 to 90 degrees. Boiling water is the the most significant cause of the overly seaweed taste of the leaves that I struggled with for so long. You can in fact brew tea with cold water. The ladies harvesting leaves will typically have large beakers in the field, they will fill these with cold water and brew the tea over the course of about ½ hour; drinking through the day.
2. Depending on the harvest of leaves, you’ll need to play around with the amount of leaves you use – the rule of thumb (excuse the pun) is a single thumb and forefinger for late March leaves and a three fingers for early April. Place your leaves at the bottom of your glass and quarter fill the cup. Leave the leaves to absorb a small amount of water, expand and open up. At this point you are recommended to deeply inhale the aroma.
3. Next you fill the cup to the top. You should dip the kettle three times in order to pour water from height. This has the effect of mixing the leaves and ensuring they are well agitated. At this point you should cup the glass to your eye in order to stimulate the eyes and prevent aging.
4. After about 3 minutes your tea is ready to drink.

Drinking Eating
One of the problems that I immediately had in Hangzhou was how to drink tea without ending up with a mouthful of leaves. I tried blowing, swilling, chopsticks… nothing was particularly effective or elegant. There is an expression in Hangzhou that “people don’t drink tea, they eat it”. Not only is this far more pragmatic, it’s a lot more satisfying. A good set of leaves will stand up to about 3 brews in the same glass – provided that you don’t eat them all in the first glass.

The health benefits of Green Tea have long been recognized. The shop that we visited had a pretty kitsch way of demonstrating this – a mixture of iodine, water and rice is made. To this dark liquid green tea leaves are introduced. After a couple of minutes you’ll see that the leaves absorb the iodine from the rice. The polyphenol in the tea is said to drive this effect. Polyphenol is said to stimulate fat loss, cholesterol reduction etc. There is an even more intriguing variation of the experiment where a green tea extract tablet is shown to remove the iodine 8 times faster and 8 time more. Whilst we found the demo interesting, the salesperson lost a fair amount of credibility when she said that Green Tea contained no caffeine. I’m not a chemist so I’ll pause my discussion of the health benefits at this point. I’m sure her grandmother wouldn’t agree with my skepticism, she has spent her life putting the vapor to her eye and applying a facemask of used leaves with egg – she’s 100 years-old and still alive – hey, it’s got to be true..

Selling
Empress tea is the most valued, it is relatively scarce compared to the other harvests. A good way to know if you’re getting true empress is to study the color. It should be very pale compared with other harvests. Along with the color, the quality of the leaves degrades with age. It gets to a point where the harvests are viable only in the export market (sorry!). As with all things Chinese, locals will choke at the prices we were quoted and say that we were robbed – a kilo of leaves costs $100 for late April, $130 for early April and $200 for late March.

Due to the relative scarcity and value of Longjing, there is a large problem with counterfeit tea being produced, particularly in the Szechuan province. Being China, the people in the shop made great efforts to explain how they were government owned and therefore legitimate. I’ve found it best to not protest too much, similarly, not to be too skeptical. Either way, it was an experience of a life-time.

Confession… I’ve always wanted to like Green Tea, but have almost always failed. Apart from the Yamamotoyama bags that we buy in Mitsuwa, Chicago, it always seemed, literally, too fishy to me… an overpowering taste of seaweed and greens that I struggled to enjoy. What better challenge, therefore, to start our journey to better understand Chinese tea? No surprises, a trip to the spiritual heart of 80% of the world’s production of green tea changed my mind…

In Mid-April we took a family holiday in Hangzhou. Although not widely known outside of China, Hangzhou was the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) and likely the largest city in the world during the same time. Anyone familiar with Chinese currency will recognize Hangzhou’s most famous landmark; The West Lake, from the 1 Yuan note. Apart from being a UNESCO world heritage site and major center of Buddhism in China, it is home to the most famous of all Green Teas; Longjing. Fitting with the history of Hangzhou, green tea has the longest history in China, being the tea that was consumed for the majority of 4,000 years until oxidized teas came to prominence.

Harvesting
There are a number of harvesting seasons (“flushes”) during the year – the Spring flush is broken into three. As with many things in the countryside in China, it is defined based on the lunar calendar – leaves picked in late March (the fifth solar term “pure brightness”) are called “empress”), early April (Pre-Qingming), “before-rain” and “after rain” (Yu Qian). There are subsequent harvests in Summer and Autumn, but these are not as valued as the Spring picking. Harvesting is extremely intensive. Not only are the leaves picked by hand, but the trees are tended throughout the entire picking period (190 to 200 days of the year). During this time the leaves on a single tree may give up to 22 pickings. There are 8 to 9 times pickings in Spring and, if it’s good weather, leaves may reappear within 3 days.

Blanca will say it’s the Protestant in me, but my favorite part of the entire trip also happened to be completely free. We were traveling along the road and saw some ladies working in the field. Our guide pulled over and we went to meet them. Whilst the men tend to maintain the trees, the women are responsible for the harvesting. We were lucky, we had travelled to the best place in China for green tea at the best time of the year for harvesting. Matilde tried her hand picking. Initially she was convinced that the bigger the leaf the better, but after a few attempts of putting them into the one lady’s basket, she began to understand that the smaller the better. In the case of Longjing, only a couple of leaves on the stem are picked. Leaves should be no longer than 2 centimeters. The smallest leaves are left for the next picking, allowing them to germinate and produce more leaves.

Processing
First, a little bit of science – there are 6 main teas; the light, pale, delicate, natural vegetable flavors of unoxidized teas (white and green), fuller, darker, yet still delicate semi-oxidized teas (yellow and oolong) and, finally, the full, rich, dark, smooth fully-oxidized teas (red (our black) and black (their puer)). As you can see, it is the degree of oxidation of the leaves allowed during processing that controls where, on the spectrum, the tea will reside. Oxidation is the process that starts the minute a leaf is picked; liquid inside the leaf contains enzymes that bond with oxygen and create new chemicals. Oxidation stops when the leaves become either too hot or too dry. The less oxidation that occurs, the more of the natural vegetable flavors remain in the tea; chlorophyll, phenols etc… making green tea the strongest tasting tea in terms of spinach, seaweed and olive flavors.

[v_toggles style=”alt” type=”accordion”][v_toggle title=”The Science (open if you want)” toggle=”off”]Adapted from various websites and books:
the 6 catechins (antixodants) + polyphenol oxidase (enzymes) => theaflavins (tannin responsible for yellow color)
the 6 catechins (antixodants) + peroxidase (enzymes) => thearubigins (tannin responsible for reddish color)
chlorophylls => pheophytin pigment (dark color)
lipids, amino acids and carotenoids => flavor and aroma[/v_toggle][/v_toggles]

Green tea is essentially unoxidized. Once they are picked, the leaves are left to wither for a few hours. After that they are hand-fried in large electrical woks at about 250 Celsius. We were invited by a friend, Lei, to visit the “Tea Research Institute of the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Hangzhou” (you can tell if it’s Chinese Government institution if the name is unwieldy long). Along with the field of ladies, it was another example of those serendipitous experiences in life… we arrived a little late, but found Wang and Francesca waiting for us. Wang is a PHD student of green tea and Francesca is a master researcher, visiting from Italy researching the DNA origins of some of Italy’s teas. They took us to visit the “factory” in the institute. About 40 people, each with their own wok, “frying green”. You could see the steam rising off the leaves that they were turning in their woks. The leaves’ surfaces are about 60 degrees. Frying stops any further oxidation of the leaves, after which they are fried at a slightly lower temperature and then left to cool. The hand-pressure applied during frying produces and an incredibly flat (distinctive shape for Longjing) leaf, it’s crispy and can be eaten as a snack (a pretty stimulant snack!). From there we visited the fields where the TRI breeds tea – the less mystic side of Chinese agriculture; the famous Longjing clone 43 in all its glory.

In Part II we’ll look at brewing, drinking and selling Green Tea.