Here is another tea blog after a long hiatus. For the past few months, we’ve been focusing on upgrading our in-store tea drinking experience. We’re very proud for what we’ve achieved: we’ve relaunched our tea set service, and we’ve also updated our chilled tea service with new teas and wares. We look forward to welcoming you to our new location at 2015 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC.
-- Yunhan
If you’ve been to one of my Sunday Morning Tea Tastings (for more info regarding the schedule, follow us @valleybrooktea for announcement), you’ve probably noticed that I spend a lot of time explaining the importance of the aroma, the tea soup color, the taste, and the mouthfeel of a good tea. When it comes to oolong, this connection becomes more even intertwined. A good oolong cannot have just one of the good qualities. It must have all the good qualities.
However, when it comes to daily tea-drinking, even the most seasoned tea drinkers often value one quality more than the other. For example, many tea lovers believe that as long as the tea soup looks rich and vibrant, the tea must taste as rich as the soup color.
Unfortunately, a rich tea soup color does not always indicate a rich taste. Today, let’s discuss the why and how this inconsistency exists.
There are 2 types of oolong that often have a rich tea soup color but a bland taste. The first kind is an over-roasted oolong; the second is typically an old oolong.
Roasting is a necessary step in oolong tea-making. Depending on the product and the tea plant, oolong teas are commonly roasted into 3 different categories: light (e.g. Tie Guan Yin, currently only available in-store), medium (e.g. Golden Peony), and heavy (e.g. Rou Gui). When an oolong tea product is roasted more than it should be, it is considered as “over-roasted”. “Over-roasting” does not mean a tea is heavily roasted, it means a tea is simply roasted harder than what is acceptable for its category.
An “over-roasting” can be an accident, but in practice, most over-roasted oolong products are not the result of mistakes. They are simply over-roasted to cover certain imperfections happened or discovered during the tea-making.
There are many steps in tea-making that can force tea makers to over-roast leaves: low quality fresh leaves, flawed withering and/or shaking techniques, etc. When one or more of these conditions occur, a tea maker must try to maneuver the leaves to get rid of the problem, and keep roasting leaves is a standard and effective method.
However, after a while, the extra layers of roasting will eventually fade away. And this is the beginning of a vicious cycle. To compensate the loss of extra roasting, there needs to be even more rounds of roasting. Still, tea leaves are weakened by each extra round of roasting. Weakened leaves would have a weakened taste. This is why over-roasted oolong tea products would have a very bland taste but a rich tea soup color.
Another example of this type of oolong tea products is an old oolong.
An old oolong is different from an aged tea. To make an old oolong, we must re-roast tea leaves every year. This is why a good quality old oolong is very rare. As a matter of fact, many old oolong products on the market are leftovers from previous years.
An old oolong faces the same “over-roasting” problem. An old oolong already loses part of its fragrance profile due to the long storage time. The repeated roasting over the years can only exacerbate this loss of fragrance.
Some tea lovers might ask what about oolong tea products that are just heavily roasted? Wouldn’t they be damaged by more rounds of roasting?
The answer is NO, but with a twist. In the two cases we’ve discussed, over-roasting is a method that has to be used to cover up flaws. A standard heavy-roast oolong tea is made with fresh leaves that can withstand the intense heat from the roasting.
But if the fresh leaves are just not good quality enough, a heavy-roast can become an over-roast. This is why heavy-roast oolong tea products are usually more in demand because the requirement of fresh leaf quality is far higher, and the tea-making needs to be very precise.
We hope you enjoyed today’s blog. As always, if you have questions or suggestions, please leave a comment, tweet us @valleybrooktea or email the author directly at zhang@valleybrooktea.com. Please also follow us on Instagram @valleybrooktea and join our mail list to get our daily tea updates and our latest promotions!
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