Brewing Hou Kui Green Tea Grandpa Style

hey th-this is don from a leaf in this video brewing holy quran par style in this video i'm going to introduce you to this tea we're gonna scope it and then we're going to taste it grandpa style this video is going to go under the tea master classes and the single tea tastings playlist if at any point in time you enjoy this video then please give the video the thumbs up the more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are going to come your way and if you haven't subscribed to our youtube channel yet then go click that button so some of you may have already heard hole Kwai Hoch ways also known as monkey king or monkey picked tea it's a relatively new tea invented around a hundred years ago so the early 1900s in an Hawaii province this tea has a few legends behind it in terms of its naming one of the legends is that a farmer discovered a monkey that had passed away and buried that monkey and that monkey blessed the farmer by giving him some visions when he was sleeping to go into the forest and find this special tea plant to produce this amazing tea the second story is that birds were flying and they they dropped seeds from the heavens down onto these onto the mountains of an Hawaii province for this special tea plant but the farmers felt that the trees were growing in areas that were too dangerous for them to pick and so they sent specially trained monkeys with their perfectly padded fingers to scuttle up the trees and pluck the the tea and bring it back to the farmer again that's not true anybody who tells you that it's really monkey picked T is is telling you a lie but monkey picked became something that became designated to high quality tea and especially this whole cui tea another story is that this tea comes from Hong Kong village which is true a Hong Kong area in the ant way province with Ho Kong ho means monkey in Chinese and the farmer that created it made the recipe to make this tea had the name cui in his name and so the two are put together whole cui and therefore that's how it's named so it's a relatively new tea but it has quickly become one of the most revered Chinese green teas and is often given as gift tea to businessmen politicians etc and it has something of a cachet about it as something very special about it when you hear people talking about whole Quay and when you see these beautiful amazing leaves which I'll show you very soon there's just something very special about this green tea anyway let's scope the tea so the season for this is obviously with all green teas the high quality is spring pick there are summer picked whole Cui's I would avoid them you need to get spring picked however the growing season for for this plant is a little bit later than normal green teas so around the middle of April to the beginning of May the cultivar is the sugar pin John cultivar this is a quite a special cultivar the leaves that are pointed and they just grow slightly larger than the average census tea cultivar so that's the cultivar the origin this comes from an Hawaii province and specifically from Hong Kong which is in typing County so typing County and we province Hong Kong is is the name of the area and there are a few villages around hong kong hong kong means monkey pit and so that is really the only place to get proper whole cui P stands for picking and processing this is a very labor-intensive tea around 1 kilo of this tea is about 20,000 pickings so it's a very light tea and therefore you need a lot of it in order to make one kilo but also it is very labor intensive so what they do is they pick the bud and usually about three or four leaves they pluck them they bring them back to the processing area where they're going to make the whole Quay they then refine the plucking so they'll pluck the course leaves off so that usually leaves a bud and two leaves maybe a bud in three leaves depending on how tender the leaves are and then they wither it slightly to allow it to soften then they pan fry it and they pan fry it over a hot heat but very very quickly in order to fix the the green in other words deactivate the enzyme in the leaf that causes oxidation and then after that a hand flattened in on meshes and then they cover the mesh so you see this crisscross pattern and I can quickly show you hopefully some of this crisscross pattern let me see if I can find one that is particularly crisscross II see if you can see that you might be able to get a close-up of that oh you see bit closer so what they do is they flatten them by hand so they lay them all out by hand over a silk mesh or some sort of cloth mesh and then they cover it with another cloth mesh and then they they clamp them together and then they roll them with these rollers and what that rollin does is it starts to extract some of the essential oils it's it makes the tea more flavorful and then they dry them and they dry them in racks at different temperatures starting at a hotter temperature around a hundred degrees and then a bit more than 100 degrees Celsius and then they reduce the temperature by moving the racks around in different ovens and the whole baking process takes about an hour and hour and a half after that they then will cure the leaf sometimes they'll sometimes put them in containers to draw more of the moisture out but it is a very labor-intensive tea and it is all handmade so the price of the whole cuase also represents the effort that's gone into it finally in our scoping East stands for elevation just like most teas in this area this is not super high elevation tea we're talking about 350 to 450 meters but what they want is to pick what you really want is to find tea that is picked from the north side of the mountains because there's more mists there there's less Sun it means that the tea grows slower and therefore can be rich and flavorful but without developing too many of the catechins which make the tea potentially go more bitter so what you want to look out for for whole Quay is long leaves around 3 to 5 centimeters you want to see that it's relatively translucent or very light so you can see how the light can really travel through this leaf and you can see that it's a nice light green obviously where the buds and the leaves are compressed together it's more dark but if you look down at this part here you can see how light green they are and you can see how sharp and pointed these leaves are so this is from the right cultivar which is a genscher a pointed cultivar of tea okay so you've scoped we've scoped the tea now let's taste the tea now normally I'd be brewing this gongfu style and I want to make it very very clear from the outset that I still believe that with any teas the best way to taste the flavor is gongfu style but grandpa's style or glass brewing is something that's very popular in China and there are some teas that I think are suited to grandpa's style or glass brewing and this is one of them and the reason is because this tea is grown in relative shade it's as I said it's grown mostly on the north side of the mountain where there's a lot of cloud cover and so it doesn't get a huge amount of sunlight and because of that it is more delicate it is more light it hasn't developed those catechins that are in other green teas especially teas from Serge angle from Sichuan or from Japan it hasn't built up so much of those catechins and therefore it is less susceptible to going bitter when it is kept in hot water for a long period of time and that is why this tea is suitable for grandpa style or glass brewing so let me show you how to do that so gongfu style I'd be recommending around 2 grams per hundred mil but for grandpa's style we are going to be using about a 300 mil it's 400 up to the top so we're not going to fill it to the top so about 300 mil and I'd be looking at something like around half a gram to a gram per 100 mil so I'm going to eyeball it here and I'm going to say this is probably about 2 grams so it's amazing one of the amazing things about this tea is that the leaves look very large but because if they're good quality they're very very thin they're extremely extremely light so this quantity here is around 2 grams and I would say that's about around 8 leaves now hot water we're brewing with about 85 degrees here so green tea temperature 80 to 85 degrees and you pour and pour in a circular motion if you can just to try and agitate the leaves and as I said we're not going to go straight to the top and immediately you can see that the leaves are starting to soften up and the liquid is starting the liqueur is starting to change color but it's very very light it's a really really light tea and this is what I love about this tea the reason I love whole Quay is its lightness now if you look at provinces in China and you look at their Jiang province you look at situation so you look at the other green tea growing provinces they differ from Ann Hui because and we T's just seem much lighter much purer and I don't mean that the others are not pure I just mean that the taste is very elegant very delicate very pure it's almost like taking water and purifying water so you're not getting a huge amount of complexity in flavours but what you're getting is a delightful elegance that comes from Ann Hui green tea so if you look at things like Hongshan malfunction of lis green tea from Ann Hui province which is again very light and you get the fresh notes and you get less of the kind of umami and the the astringent see and the depth of the other provinces so this has been I would say about a minute and you're ready to drink so with grandpa's style or glass brewing you're leaving the leaves in the water and then you're just topping up with water what you want to make sure you do is that you drink you don't finish the tea you drink up to about a third so you leave some of the liquor there before you refill so that way you're not starting from scratch in terms of a brewing process but you're taking the concentrated tea and basically diluting it and allowing it to brew again as you get further on with your infusions you can cover the glass so you can cover it in order to try and extract more to maintain the heat a little bit more because obviously as it brews it will extract less and less as it's been infused more times okay Cheers let's taste this grandpa's style so you can see the color is very light it's a nice light vibrant green and obviously that's going to change as it brews for longer and one of the wonderful things about this tea and other and we teas is that you have the purity of taste but you have a wonderful aroma a very floral aroma I'm getting a lot of orchid aroma here so a lot of fresh floral fresh grassy aroma but the taste is very gentle there's no bitterness there's no bite it's very very soft so if you are somebody out there that wants to drink green tea but find that green tea can be a bit too strong for you maybe you feel that it's too strong in effect or it's too strong in flavor maybe you feel it's too vegetal it's too mommy it's got too much of those savoury notes or it's got too much of an intense grassy notes then I would really strongly suggest that you start to explore an Hawaii province and the two teas that you should explore are misty peak or huangshan malfunctioning which is lightness freshness aroma but without that heaviness that can come from some of the other green tea provinces so what I'm tasting is what I'm smelling and what's coming through my nose when I breathe out is the orchid and the floral but the taste the texture is is quite light relatively thin but the taste is got a slight spice to it I I would refer to a kind of nutmeg spice so a slight nutmeg spice the tea also has a very light creaminess to it so similar to similar to a milk or at like an egg custard but a very very very light with a sprinkling of nutmeg over it and I'm talking very very light the predominance of the taste is very pure very refreshing it's got grassy notes freshly cut grass it's got some green bamboo in it but it's all really really light and you can see that this leaf is sitting in here and it's honestly not going bitter at all it's maintaining its its freshness now as I said I would always recommend gongfu stylo that any other style of brewing if you brew Gong from style you're going to get the ultimate freshness of it there's not gonna be any stewed notes and as this moves on it'll start to develop a bit of a stewed note which some people like and some people don't like but it's a great way to drink tea because there's nothing to it right you've got your glass you get your thermos or kettle of hot water you just keep refilling throughout the day and this is often the way that they brew in China if you're traveling around with tea leaves you go into a taxi you see people with their thermoses and leaves just sitting there and they just keep refilling with water so this glass brewing or grandpa style brewing is certainly something that's done a lot in China but not when you want full tea appreciation it's something that is just an enjoyable simple way to brew tea mmm delicious so storage of this is really important make sure you keep this out of the air is one of those teas that will change very very quickly so keep it sealed very very well ideally airtight in sort in foil packages really really take care with this tea because what your seed starts to happen is that the size starts to shrink and everything starts to get darker and you know that you're losing some of the freshness of it and those aromatics those bright notes will start to deaden down slightly not a big deal but obviously you want to drink it in its prime condition so this is one that you want to make sure you drink as fresh as possible okay I hope that that has introduced you to this incredible tea we'll put a link to purchase this tea in the description below and I hope that this interests you in grandpa style brewing it's not suitable for all teas but certainly for Hoch way it definitely works that's it see heads if you made it to the end of this video then please give the video the thumbs up check out our YouTube playlist and let us know if there any videos that you would like us to make if you're ever in London then come visit us in Camden to say hi and taste our wares if you have any questions or comments then please fire them over other than that I'm Dom made from a leaf thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from the teabags keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 23,003

Keywords: tea, green tea, monkey picked tea, hou kui, monkey king tea, chinese tea, grandpa style brewing, grandpa brewing, mei leaf, chinalife tea bar, don mei, how to brew tea, brewing tea, brewing green tea, how to brew green tea, chinalife, gong fu tea, green tea (tea), chinalife tea, how to make, how to make tea, healthy green tea, celine mei leaf, brewing instructions, drink green tea, how to make green tea, green tea preparation, make green tea, tea (beverage type)

Id: 4iW_gd_ixSQ

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2016