I’m weighing my tea again
A treat for the new year + iteration vs intuition.
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A ray of sunshine
The tea: Winter Sun raw puer, sold by Fang Gourmet Tea. $59 for 40g.
I don’t care for the forced frivolity of the holidays, so the arrival of January 1st feels like a relief. Finally, I can experience the winter free of scheduled joy and social commitments. I like to celebrate this new-year period with a nice tea. Drink this puer after playing in the snow to warm up from within.
In addition to good oolong, Hakka pomelo tea, and my birthday puer cake that’s as old as I am, Fang Gourmet in Queens carries a line of looseleaf puer teas said to be from ancient trees. They sell nearly a dozen of them, each named for how it feels to drink, though only a few are listed online. They’re expensive, priced at over a dollar per gram, but since they only come in 40-gram portions they’re a nice way to taste high end puer without obliterating your yearly tea budget. Winter Sun is a 2008 puer from the Yibang mountain area. It’s one of my favorites.
The source: There are a few more days to check out Fang’s annual winter expo, which ends this Sunday the 11th. I’ve written in depth about the expo for the New York Times, but in brief, it’s when the staff bring out a menu of special aged teas that are only available to taste and purchase for a limited time. You can book a tasting online and select your teas when you visit. The high end ones cost $30 to $40 per person, unless you spring for some liu bao alleged to be from the late 19th century. (It’s good.) Fang’s lineup of ancient tree puers like Winter Sun are available year-round. Call for the full list; I’m also a big fan of the soothing TLC, which I like to drink on snow days.
To brew: Try 5 grams in a 75 milliliter pot (1g/15ml) with 10 second steeps that you lengthen as you go. Pay attention to your body as you drink this tea. You’ll feel it more than you taste it. Apothecary aromas give way to alluring dark tones, a pleasing bitterness, and a light, lubricating texture. Sweetness and a thicker mouthfeel increase in subsequent steeps. I get a warm, relaxed feeling around my head and shoulders when I drink Winter Sun. That sensation builds through the first dozen or so brews, then persists with longer steeps. You can get a lot of mileage from this tea. Stick with it and let the sunshine in.
Intuition vs iteration: when to quantify your tea drinking
Setting aside the dosage recommendations for teas featured on Leafhopper, I don’t usually weigh out my tea when brewing for myself. I prefer to go by feeling and the needs of the moment. Do I want a strong cup or a lighter brew? If I have a guest over, what might they prefer? I eyeball my leaf amounts and adjust my brewing accordingly. If a cup turns out too mild, I’ll steep for longer on the next one. This is my preferred approach to gong fu cha: following my intuition to make tea with skill.
Except recently I’ve been reaching for my gram scale more than usual. I blame my trip to Japan. Needle-thin leaves of Japanese tea are hard to guesstimate by volume and quick to oversteep. They often require dialing in specific dosages, brew times, and water temperatures to unlock their full potential. So lots of tea professionals in Japan weigh out their leaves, and as I taste through the cache of Japanese teas I brought back home, I’m doing the same. This requires iteration: measuring quantifiable metrics, noting their outcomes, and tweaking parameters for future pots.
A successful tea practice needs both intuition and iteration. I think my internal balance of the two has been out of whack.
