A flame, a stand and a tea pot.
Room temperature water and tea goes into the pot; heat the pot over a slow flame.
Works well with a full-bodied oolong tea or a complex pu’er that’s already been infused a few times.
New dimensions of flavor and taste. This method forces you to really slow down to enjoy a nice cup of tea.
Drink good tea and enrich your life.
A good, well-oxidized oolong can last for years. Some teas are OK just being put into a jar and kept over time, but most will benefit from regular re-roasting. I usually spot roast by putting tea in a sheet of paper that I circle over a flame. A quick touch-up makes a stale tea more enjoyable, but doing more than 10 minutes of spot roasting by hand gets tedious. There are specialized spot roasting sets, but they’re not cheap.
Teaguyver (that’s me, at least for today) pieced together a suitable & cheap spot roaster.
I took the lid and base from a yixing gaiwan. The base went on top of the heating stand for a chocolate fondue set that I had (>$10). Light the candle, stir it around from time to time, and you’re good to go.
I spot roasted a 2009 Dong Ding that had gone stale in my jar. 20 minutes made a HUGE difference - 30+ would’ve been even better. The stale flavor of a tea is very noticeable, but staleness doesn’t taste the same between different teas. For this Dong Ding, it’s a raw, vegetal taste, like past-date celery.
The point is to remove moisture and extraneous tastes. There’s quite a bit of moisture that accumulates in the tea; I put a lid on top of the heating tea to show the escaping moisture. It came out for a good 7 minutes.
Some notes:
-I don’t think spot-roasting works as well with a lid. It is important to trap some heat, but air circulation is important as well. Sticking some chopsticks/skewers between the lid and the base will help retain heat and provide better air circulation.
-An enclosed shape, like an old teapot, would be a good spot-roasting vessel.
-Spot roasting should be done shortly before drinking the tea.
-The process will not turn a “bad” tea into a “good” one. It will help a good oolong that no longer tastes very good turn into something more pleasant.
-Spot roasting will not return a tea to its original condition. The taste will be improved, but different.
I love oolongs.
It can taste magical when it's fresh, with so many layers of flavor and aromas that a thesaurus may be needed to adequately describe its characteristics. They can also be very expensive. Depending on the tea, the top-prize oolongs can go for more than $1000 USD/pound – that’s if you even get the chance to buy them.
Depending on the tea and the competition, there may be quite a number of winners – grand prize, first prizes, second places, 3rd places, honorable mentions…. If you’ve ever chanced to buy a competition oolong and have kept it around – especially the less-oxidized one – you may have noticed that its taste changes a lot as it ages.
I pulled out a 2nd-place Muzha TGY sample that I found while unpacking the other day and brewed it. I remember how it tasted nearly 3 years ago – full bodied, fruity, truly alive. I checked the tasting notes from my trip and it was something that I would have bought if there was any supply to buy. I tasted the sample and it was expectedly stale. Its roast had faded, but there was more clarity for me to taste the tea base. It tasted off, unpleasant and unfulfilling.
Why would such a well-roasted tea deteriorate so much? It happens a lot with competition teas and I think that the original processing and oxidation of the tea is to blame. This tea, and many like them, was not adequately oxidized before it was baked. As the fire and roast fades, one can more easily compare the tea base to the tea’s roast, and there is a big gap. Could such a problem be “fixed” so many years after? Kinda yes, mostly no. To re-roast the tea’s base, one must be able to heat the core of the tea and force out the extraneous flavors using increasing levels of heat; heating and rest must be alternated. Finally, one must seal in the flavor with a correct finishing roast. However, finished teas have already been touched by high heat and it’s difficult to produce a great result through re-roasting. The best that one can hope for is to transform the tea into a more consistent taste, but it is very hard to make it excellent. Oxidation happens before the tea is finished and first touched by fire, so it is not easy to alter the taste from the original oxidation process. Can it be done? Master roasters have given me mixed answers, but I have yet to have any of them successfully bring such a tea back to life for me.
Like a green or high mountain tea, the competition oolongs are meant to wow you when they’re fresh. There may be value in holding on to the tea for a long while, but if we go by taste, they tend to taste best shortly after production. I know that back in the old days, many competition teas were stored and aged (you can still buy some decades-old prize-winning oolongs; they’re not cheap) but changes to tea processing, oxidation levels and consumer tastes have altered the storability of these teas. A quick spot roast right before drinking will make it more palatable. I have several different spot roasting sets on order – stay tuned for results from my next round of experiments.
Ten bucks an ounce, fifteen years old, real Dong Ding tea…and you can buy it right here in the US.
Shiuwen at Floating Leaves brought back a limited supply of aged Dong Ding from her recent tea-buying tour. I tried it when it came in over a month ago, but I haven’t (and still haven’t) experimented too much with it or taken the time to understand the tea.
It is aged and its musty/fruit tartness/mellowness is developing. The tea base is stronger than many other aged teas at this price and beyond. As nice as it is to drink now, it will very likely taste quite a bit better if it’s stored in stoneware for a few more years to pull out the lingering extraneous flavors, harshness and fire. I’ve got some stored in porcelain, tin and clay to see how it turns out over the next few months. Clay tends to pull too much life out of oolongs, so I’ll have to transfer it to a less porous material for aging. For $10, it’s worth buying to keep around for a while; there is no more quantity of this product for her to purchase. Her $7.50 aged Muzha TGY is still a great value, she’s almost sold out of it with only a limited supply left in Taiwan for her to bring in.
I’ve bought about 15 different aged oolongs over the past 4 months and most of them were substandard (most were reasonably priced, some were spendy). I dipped into Taobao and received my first aged teas “straight from the producer,” but it was a huge let-down. I sent some over to Gingko at Life in Teacup to try (she is a Taobao tea-buying expert) and she was kind to not make me feel embarrassed by my first foray into the massive Taobao emporium of stuff. I’ve got to admit that it was exciting to read about the products and await their arrival….
Oh Taiwan, when oh when will I return? It’s been so long that I’m even missing the scent of the stinkiest stinky tofu (which, when fried, actually tastes pretty dang good).
Drink good tea and enrich your life.
I was worried that they wouldn’t be very good. The variation in quality for Taiwan’s spring oolongs isn’t as big as for winter teas, but still, no one wants a relatively poor product. Winter, though, typically has wetter and colder weather that can affect both the leaves and harvesting times.
The early reports for Taiwan’s spring weather showed more rain than usual. Pickers cannot/should not harvest high mountain tea after heavy rains. They normally wait some number of days after the heavy rains before picking. The extra time on the bush can definitely affect how “good” the tea ends up being. There was a tea season about 3 years ago when nearly every high mountain tea had a bitter base, something the farmers explained as being a by-product of an especially rainy and cold season that delayed picking (I still have several samples from that season, leaves were thicker and larger than normal).
I’ve been anxiously waiting for Floating Leaves tea to re-open after their spring tea tour and buying trip. Shiuwen and Floating Leaves consistently have high-quality Taiwan oolongs and I respect that she will not buy a certain tea if it’s not to her standard (hence she did not have Dayuling for a number of seasons). Although I’m not a huge fan of greener oolongs, it’s very hard for me to resist a good Lishan that she often carries. I was relieved when she returned this past week with some solid high mountains. The Dayuling in particular is good, the Lishan is pretty smooth (it needs a few weeks to settle down and blossom) and the Dinghu Alishan was surprisingly good (this Alishan does not have the typical flavor profile of Alishans, but it’s my favorite growing region for this tea because of its clean & clear characteristics). Good stuff, relieved I am.
I am most anxiously awaiting the special-request teas that will arrive in 2 weeks. A 15-year old Dong Ding for $10/oz and a limited-production charcoal-roasted Dong Ding. I also got a sample of a 3-year old moderate roast/oxidation Muzha Tieguanyin that is very good – can’t wait for that to arrive, too. More reports and tasting notes to come.
Drinking good tea and continuing to enrich my life.
My Chinese handwriting is ugly, so bad that elementary school kids laugh at me. It’s so bad that I don’t handwrite anything in Chinese anymore (typing is faster anyway) and because of that, I recently forgot how to write my Chinese name at a banquet I went to. Sad….
When I visit Asia and buy a load of tea, I have to keep track of them with labels (many high mountain teas, for example, are packed in the same type of generic bag for oolongs). The first time I went to Dong Ding and met one of my teachers, I brought back a significant amount of tea to practice my roasting with. On each bag, I wrote “Dong Ding X1” so that I knew it was my practice tea.
My teacher doesn’t care what I write on the bag as long as I pay for it! However, the guy down the street was more particular about my methods.
About a 15 minute drive from my teacher’s house, we met a fellow tea producer and old friend of his. As I pulled one of the bags of tea from my backpack to share with him, Mr. 8 (I think he had about eight teeth, definitely less than 10) saw my writing on the bottom of the label, grabbed the bag from me and said “This is wrong, you wrote it wrong, spell it the right way!”
Huh?
Mr. 8 reached into his cabinet and pulled out a box with English words on it. He pointed to the label, “Tung Ting.” This was, he said, the correct way to write it. He wasn’t mean or rude, he actually seemed pretty amused and looked as if he was excited to have the opportunity to share his knowledge.
Tung Ting is from the Wade-Giles system of romanizing Chinese and predates the wider-spread usage of contemporary Putonghua Pinyin. If you visit Taiwan, you’ll find that there is a mix of several different types of romanization. The usage of Putonghua Pinyin has increased, but there are many that don’t use it, not just because they don’t know how to, but for various political reasons. Folks such as Mr. 8 are resistant to mainland Chinese influences and thus, they cling to systems that were in use before the Communists took over the mainland. Fair enough, if I were to buy tea from him, I’d respect his preference.
Ahlisan wulong and Pingling Pouchong are just as good regardless of how it’s spelled. Drink good tea and enrich your life.
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