Experiments with blending

The recent teas I tried came from 10g (+/-) samples. Because I tested each using 7g in my gaiwan, I had about 2-4g of each left. I decided to review the results of the first brews to see which teas I thought might blend well.

Here they are again, in short:

1. Douji 2011 Nannuo
1. Good: aroma, flavor, bittersweetness (gan), camphor
2. Bad: thin texture, flavors could be stronger in later infusions
2. Douji 2011 Mengsong Mao Cha
1. Good: heavy in "middle flavors"
2. Bad: weak flavor and texture
3. Douji 2011 Red Da Dou (thrown out!)
1. Good: ??
2. Bad: green tea pu
4. Yangpin Hao 2011 (2010?) Jingmai
1. Good: mouthfeel, savory bass notes, interesting flavors, some cooling/camphor
2. Bad: gives out quickly, becomes unpleasant when it gives out, a bit sour at times
5. Dayi 2011 7542
1. Good: well rounded, potent, aftertaste lasts once it appears
2. Bad: smoky aroma, can brew sour, no initial aftertaste

I decided to make two blends, the first a 50/50 blend of 7542 and Douji Nannuo, and the second a 50/50 blend of the YPH Jingmai and Douji Mengsong. I didn't quite have enough of the Jingmai for the second blend, so I threw in about 0.5g of the 7542, of which I had too much.

Here's what I learned:

• Blending is not a straightforward science

Two teas with good traits mixed in equal portions does not make a tea that has all their traits equally highlighted. Some of the finer notes of the older tree maocha disappeared into softening the harsher notes of the plantation tea. While the effect was good, it tasted like "less than the sum of its parts".

• A little plantation tea goes a long way in a blend

Being stronger in bitterness and off flavors, a little plantation leaf goes a long way. To the same effect, old tree tea requires less correction, I think. The 50/50 blend of Nannuo-7542 tasted like 75% 7542 and 25% Nannuo, and the 47.5/47.5/5 blend of Mengsong, Jingmai, and 7542 tasted like 85% plantation and 15% Mengsong. I think an actual 85/15 or 75/25 blend of these two teas would have been a better place to start.

This made me think of the many, many times vendors told me that a pu'er was a blend of X (plantation) with a little bit of Y (old leaf). My taste buds made me skeptical of such claims, because very little if any trace of old leaf traits could be found in those teas. Now I wonder if the vendor told the truth, but the producer did a poor job of blending. Ah, speculation.

• It's not easy, but it's fun!

Blending stuff makes fun work out of the odds and ends of samples that otherwise get thrown in a big jar of leftover samples (to later become what MarshalN calls "house blend").

An Experiment with Pu'er Flowers, Part Two: 2006 7562 Zhuan (Yunnan Sourcing)

Davin invited me over to join him and a friend to smoke a brisket, grill some chicken, and watch Auntie Mame. I brought the tasting sets and decided to finish our look at tea flowers and pu'er as the food was cooking. Thankfully, barbeque and smoking cooks with little attention, so we could pay attention to the tea.

We had already decided our opinions of tea flower with adolescent pu'er: I couldn't decide which I liked better, and Davin preferred the tea unadulterated. I wondered if shu pu'er might benefit from the addition of tea flowers the way it can benefit from the inclusion of chrysanthemum buds.

Parameters: 5.3g of tea in each cup, 1.2g of tea flower in one. We used mineralized filtered water (with bamboo charcoal and meifan stones) boiled with bamboo charcoal in a glazed clay kettle. Brewed each infusion for 10 seconds after a 10 second wash, the final infusion 30 seconds.

Davin made the poetic observation: "With the flowers, it smells like the forest floor in Spring. Without, like the forest floor in winter." I found hot cream in the smell of the leaves without pu'er flowers, and honey in the aroma of the tea with flowers. Davin found honey not as a flavor in the fleured pu'er, but in the viscosity of its brew.

7562 is a recipe I came to love at Scott's (Yunnan Sourcing) recommendation. It's a blend of different fermentations, from light to very dark, giving it a more complex aroma and flavor than other more fermented blends. It's not as rich as most, but it's very forgiving with brewing errors. The leaves offer notes that vary from coffee, earth, bark, and butter, with most flavors centered on the tongue. Decent energy, but little aftertaste. Already liking it so much, I should have predicted that I would prefer it plain before I thought of doctoring it with flowers.


Coffee vs. caramel, drying vs. thirst-quenching, woody vs. earthy, the plain 7562 and the 7562 with flowers different greatly. The flowers lended texture and a different aroma and flavor to the tea, but Davin and I didn't prefer it. Our third, a friend of Davin's, seemed to prefer the pu'er-plus-flowers.


Without flowers on left, with flowers on right

The flowers did not alter the aftertaste of the tea, as they had with the 1999 cake, nor did they stretch the flavors or make the tea more tenacious. In fact, at the final infusion the unadulterated tea ended better.


Without flowers


With flowers
I still reserve judgment about the inclusion of flowers. I'd like to play around with them more, using less of them, and with different teas. On a related note, I brought the sample to work and tried them with some Yunnan green tea with coworkers, and all of us preferred the tea with the addition of a few flowers.

Amateur Roasting...

I roasted a mediocre Zhejiang tie guan yin or TGY analog in my new yixing gourd roaster. Before the roast, the tea was unpalatable: slightly sour and metallic. It had a long finish and a thickness to it, positive traits that I wanted to highlight with a more savory flavor. I roasted the tea in a yixing pot on low heat for about 20 minutes, then let it quench for a few days, then roasted it again over a flame in a gourd roaster, pictured below.

Yesterday I drank the roasted version. Today, I drank the unroasted version after a five minute "refresh" roast. My notes for each are below.

The Twice-Roasted


Dry leaf in the heated gaiwan smells burnt, but once wet, the leaf smells like roasted oolong, as well it should, sweet and toasty. The first infusion was remarkably fruity, like raisins, and finished toasty. The second infusion, displaying mostly roasted sweetness, had an oily texture and faded to a little citrus note on side of tongue. The raisin flavor disappeared in the infusions that followed, and the citrus did, too. I expected the tea to taste less roasted with time, but it remained consistently toasty, getting a little bitter, the finish lengthening. Well balanced at the 5th infusion, the flavor faded to sweet wateriness, and at the last infusion it hit me that the tea had a neutral mouthfeel--it didn't seem to have an affect at all. Or, I just didn't pay attention.

The Refresh Roasted

Dry leaf in hot gaiwan smells a little sweet. Wet leaf in gaiwan smells vegetal and a bit fruity. The first infusion is meek, sweet, and finishes buttery. This buttery finish I've come to associate with mainland fist oolong. The toasted-ness of the refresh roast is in the aroma and just a bit in the center of the tongue. It does hit sour if overbrewed, but with shorter steep times, under 15 seconds, the sourness doesn't appear. It also gets bitter in the middle brews, like the more heavily roasted tea. It's sharper, like the unroasted tea, and tastes less roasted over time.

Conclusions

The roasted and reroasted oolong shared many traits, from the obvious (roasted aroma and flavor) to the more subtle (fruitiness, tongue-centered bitterness, grain sweetness at finish). My guess is the quicker, higher temperature roast I did to both teas takes the lion's share of the responsibility for changing their flavors, while the longer roast seemed to prevent the roasted tea from tasting unroasted or less roasted in later infusions. Only more roasting experimentation will tell for sure.

Both teas tasted better than the staled tea, of course.

An Experiment with Pu'er Flowers, 1999 Menghai Mini Bing (Silk Road Tea)

My guest reviewer from before, Davin, purchased some "Fleur de Pu Er" from Le Palais Gourmet. The same day, I received a package of tea I purchased from a friend who wanted to unload some of his surplus. He generously included a few freebies, amongst which was the 1999 Mini Menghai Bing from Silk Road Teas.

We decided to do a two-part experiment out of curiosity. Because some vendors have claimed that including tea flowers in pu'er cakes was "traditional" or the "indigenous" way of making tea (oddly enough, tea plants flower in fall, and pu'er is supposedly traditionally made in spring...hrm...), we decided to brew, side by side, the 1999 cake with and without tea flowers, to see how it fared.

Before the meat of the post, I'd like to mention that I have seen only one cake include tea flowers, the 2004 Rongzhen Factory cake formerly offered at Hou De, currently on offer at Puerhshop. I have never tasted nor seen any aged tea from the 1920s or after that included flowers. In fact, the only tea I've seen that does is the 2004 Rongzhen cake. I can't trace the documentation, because almost nobody seems to be selling these flowers currently (only Rishi Tea and Palais Gourmet, the latter may have sourced from the former, and neither gives information). If anyone has any source information on the history of the use of tea flowers in China, please contact me.

Another bit of information: according to a 2002 study at the Institute of Biochemistry at National Taiwan University, tea flowers have nearly the same antioxidant levels, but far less caffeine, than actual tea leaves. If you want the benefit of drinking tea but are caffeine sensitive or want to avoid caffeine, these might be for you.

We used competition tasting sets and identical weights of tea, 7 grams of the cake. In the tea flower mix, we used 1.5 grams of tea flowers, about 8 blossoms.

Parameters: 7g leaf, 7g leaf + 1.5g flowers, 120ml tasting sets, boiling remineralized RO water with bamboo charcoal. timing: 5s rinse. 10s, 10s, 15s, 10s, 10s



A couple of things stood out to me. First, the 1999 cake--looking far younger than 8-9 years old--had some aged taste to it. Second, the aroma of the leaves, without flowers, resembled bbq sauce: sweet, spicy, smokey. With the flowers, though, the aroma was floral, orchid, honey, and masked the smoke. Initially, the leaves-only mix tasted flat, and the leaves with flowers tasted rounder, softer, finished longer, and had a thick, syrupy texture.


Without flowers on left, with flowers on right

But which tea we preferred alternated from brew to brew. Some brews, the leaves-only brew offered aged flavor that hit the gullet the whole way down. Other times, the roundness and soft texture of the flowered pu'er softened bitterness and awkward adolescent flavors found in the leaves-only mix. Both, at times, were very astringent and drying, and both sometimes had none. In the fourth infusion, the difference in flavor and aroma was so subtle we couldn't distinguish one from the other. The fifth infusion then reversed this, and they were very distinct: the flowered version stayed on the palate much, much longer.


Without flowers


With flowers

Ask me which I'd prefer to drink, and I don't think I could say. Davin says the tea was more interesting with flowers, but not necessarily more enjoyable. I agree: the age of this tea gives it some strange pubescent flavors, so it was a weird comparison. Even without the flowers, this mini bing needs more time; it's not wonderful to drink, yet. With its interesting mouthfeel and relative power after 9 years of very dry storage, I think it has some promise.

As mentioned, we intend to experiment again. Next time we intend to test if the flowers, which overall lend a very muted flavor and subtle aroma, blend well with shu pu'er.