Gong Fu Cha Workshop for all levels

hi there this is rainey from selling tea greetings from seattle um so in this video i'll be teaching a 45 minutes to about an hour gong fucha course basically we'll be covering a variety of topics such as the western style versus gunfucha style brewing a brief history of gunfucha what tea where you need to prepare in order to brew tea with gunfuchang style and lastly we'll go over four different brewing methods by using a guide one so this course is for people with various levels whether you are a gong fuchsia beginner or if you're thinking about you know getting into learning about the style or if you're experienced um gongfu chop tea drinker and you're maybe looking for more comprehensive or more detailed information to enhance your knowledge this course will be for you [Music] all right so for those that are not familiar with what gong foo cha exactly is i will give a brief introduction basically kung fu cha is a traditional brewing style of tea from china and is exclusive to chinese tea culture to put it in a fancier way just like what the name indicates to brew tea with gongfu style it requires gongfu or in other words skills such as the amount of water they will be using the amount of tea leaves that you'll be using or the steeping time so instead of using a timer you're going to time it with your mind so after you put all these components together you should be able to reach the optimal result when you brew tea so you might be asking what are some of the main differences between western brewing style and chinese gong fujian brewing style and that's an excellent question first of all let's talk about the difference in mythology for a western brewing style we usually use a teapot and the same amount of tea leaves and brew the teas for up to three to five minutes and repeat the process for maybe two to three times whereas when you do go for chai style you use either a guy one or you use a chinese style teapot such as this one right here or here's another example you will use also the same amount of tea leaves the same tea leaves the brewing time is anywhere between three to five seconds very fast and you repeat the process for maybe up to 10 times 15 times even 20 times sometimes depending on the tea the second difference lies in the brewing result western style is more likely to burn tea leaves since the sleeping time is so long the teas the tea flavors tend to be more flat but consistent however it is an easy and good brewing style for tea bags herbal teas milk teas and flavored teas so gongfu cha style on the other hand doesn't burn tea leaves it actually reveals the changes of fragrance and flavors over each steeping this process helps tea drinkers to better understand the truth of a tea to recognize the quality of a tea and hence it creates a more interesting process for tea drinkers it's also a more ideal brewing method for more delicate and pure teas such as the traditional loose leaf teas from china and taiwan however it is a little more complicated um compared to western style and you can tell by looking at how many things are laying in front of me right now but it doesn't matter that's why we're here to learn all about it [Music] i would also like to go over a very very brief history of gun fucha as mentioned earlier we typically use a gaiwan or a teapot for this style so gaiwan first showed up during yuan dynasty but back then people would use it both for brewing tea and to drink tea directly from it just like that but gradually over the course of roughly 800 years people stop drinking it directly from it instead they just brewed they just brew tea in the gaiwan and then pour the liquor out however if you go to china and go to sutran province for example the tea houses over there are still using the traditional style which is to brew tea inside and to drink directly from it alright so after all those background information let's finally get to the exciting part and let me first of all answer your question which is probably what are all these things laid out on my table and i will go over them one by one but just to let you know this is what a full gong fucha tea set would look like first of all i have this big tea tree here as you can see i really like using a big tea tray with a big uh drawer that can catch a lot of excessive water then secondly we have a taiwan as as mentioned earlier some gong fucha teacups noticing how they are much smaller compared to other type of teacups [Music] a shearing picture this is when you pour liquor out from the guy one into the shearing picture it makes sure that the liquid is evenly mixed in it so when you pour the liquor out from the sharing pitcher into your teacups the thickness of the liquor is evenly distributed then i have this accessory set it has a very elegant name in chinese which is six gentlemen because there are six pieces with it so first of all i have a um well actually let's do this one first i have this here this is actually it has two functions so it's in there's a needle on this side that helps me to clean the sprout of a teapot just like that and then on this side is sort of like a little scoop what it does is it helps me to maybe just like you know like pick the leaves like if it gets stuck on my guy one lid and like put it back in the cup so you know seems small but very useful then secondly i have this tong here what the tone does again it helps you to you know pick some leaves out if you want to observe the leaves better it also comes it also helps you to pinch the cups and then pour the water out from the cups instead of touching the cups directly with your hands because it is considered a rude manner on the tea table when you serve your tea guest then i have this big guy which obviously is a tea scoop which helps you to scoop up the teas and put the dry loose leaf teas into your gaiwan or your teapot oh okay i don't think this belongs to here this is also a needle um i think this actually comes from another set but i just put in here so let's put that away then this piece is really interesting however i unfortunately i don't know the i can't find the english translation for this one i will quickly show you what it does so you see this teapot here what you do is you put this on the opening of your teapot so when you pour when you scoop dry tea leaves inside it makes sure that the dry leaves goes smoothly into your teapot instead of splashing everywhere and this is very useful if your teapot opening is small and then lastly i have this bottle here so one two three four four five this is two in one and six all together they are the um six gentlemen a tea pet tea scoop or maybe tea plate in chinese is known as chatza what it does is you can put dry leaves on uh the chatza before you start brewing tea so you can show the to your tea guests and you can just pour the dry leaf directly into your gaiwan or your teapot then we also have a tea towel which cleans your tea table if you accidentally spill water or tea lastly we also have some plants you're probably wondering if you have to get every single thing that i just showed you and the answer is yes no i'm just kidding no absolutely not the essential items are guy one tea tray obviously teacups a sharing picture and something that i would highly recommend is the sixth gentleman accessory or you don't have to get the whole six gentlemen set i highly oops however i would highly recommend the tone because it helps you to you know pinch the teacups um it's just good manner on the tea table when you especially when you have guests over and um the the needle which helps you to clean the sprout of the teapot and the the little scoop here that helps you to for example scoop the dry leaves into your gaiwan when do i choose a teapot and when do i choose to use a guy one first of all guy one has an interesting nickname in china which is the universal brewing pot indicating how it can be used for brewing all types of teas no problem teapot on the other hand is more recommended for brewing teas that can handle a higher water temperature since it traps heat better for example poor tea or dark tea hyt medium to higher level roasting wulong teas such as the oriental beauty or dongdin and maybe some aged oolong teas as well [Music] do so oh do so before we get into the specific four brewing methods with guy one i figure i should probably just give a quick overview of how to hold a go on properly in case you're not very familiar with it so i'll do a quick demonstration so here you can see i'm using this guy one today and since guy one has this circle shape you can kind of review it as a clock so 12 o'clock six o'clock three o'clock and nine o'clock while it's facing you you will be mainly use your thumb and your ring finger to hold the guy one and i will show you what the other where the other fingers go so first thing is to place your ring uh sorry your thumb at six o'clock and your middle finger at 12 o'clock and after that so kind of like that after that you place your index finger on the top of the lid just gently place there there's no there's no there shouldn't be much force coming from this uh index finger okay so once you place everything as you can see here they're kind of aligned six o'clock twelve o'clock and the one in the middle of course everybody's finger length is different and everybody's hand size is also different if you can't align them there's nothing wrong with that maybe you find your middle finger sliding backwards or maybe sliding tilting a little bit more forward it will depends on your hand size so 6 o'clock and 12 o'clock are more like a reference point the most important thing is to find where that is the most comfortable for you let's lift up our guy one and as you can see here i'm actually not really i'm not using my ring finger or pinky at all because they don't really do anything and that with that being said after you hold up again one successfully you can gently place your ring finger just kind of hide it and also your pinky just high hide both of them um tuck them in you know under your middle finger and it should look more or less like this from above and you shouldn't feel unnatural or kind of shaking and if you do feel like that that means you probably need a little bit more practice and from the front this is what it looks like from top and from the other side i hope that helps it definitely takes a lot of practice just to give you an idea it took me about two months to really really feel comfortable holding the guy one and after that and not just with right hand right not just with right hand but also with my left hand once you start to feel comfortable doing this then when you pour tea you generally again there's that clock 12 3 6 at night you open the lid to about this much so kind of like a crescent moon like a very very skinny crescent moon and the opening should be should have the biggest gap at about nine o'clock then you do exactly what i just showed you place your thumb your middle finger index finger hold your guideline up and pour the liquor out so that was a quick demonstration of how to use a guide one and now let's go straight into the four golden rules of how to brew the tea with guy one [Music] so you have seen the leaf to water ratio as well as the water temperature so now let's go straight into how to pour water into the guide one so the first method we'll be doing is called swirling leaf six o'clock generally speaking it is used for the first and second round of steeping the goal is to let tea leaves square in gaiwan in a clockwise or counterclockwise circular motion in order to stimulate the frequency to come out and it is generally used for teas there are all butts such as green tea white tea silver needle yellow tea and some black teas that only have butts such as yunnan den hong and ginger mei and maybe some small leaf teas as well also for the ball shaped taiwanese woolen teeth so let's go ahead and i'll do a quick demonstration and you can do it with me together so the first thing i'm going to do is to put leaves into my guide one i have pre-rinsed all the tea wear and you should always do that as mentioned earlier this method is called six o'clock swirling tea leaf that means again remember the clock thing we talked about before 12 o'clock three six and nine and so for this method you will be pouring water from a six o'clock angle right here and your tea cattle your water cattle should be more or less tuted instead of going instead of going straight and just like that you should always be coming from the side all right are you ready and there we go let's close the lid [Music] so there's just some details i want to go over after our first steeping first thing is this guy one contains about 130 to 140 ml of water and as you can see i actually didn't feel the water all the way up so i would say i calculated the water as about 120 milliliters to 125 because you read the leaf to water ratio from the previous slide i measured about 5.5 grams of tea so somewhere between 5 and 6 grams and i think that is a good ratio for this guy one here and second thing is as you can see here i'm using a yt silver needle for the demonstration of this method and i'm sure you saw how tea leaves were trying to swear in the gaiwan from earlier even though it was not super smooth nonetheless there was the action when you go for your second steeping you can do the same thing pour the water around six o'clock and make the leaves swear one more time in yoga one i decided to do the first brewing method again since i feel like this guy one is going to be easier for everybody to see and in this demonstration here i'm using a green tea based on the 1 to 25 leaf to water ratio so just as mentioned before always pour water in from the side angle at about six o'clock right here very nice and let's close the lid and since it's a green tea the brewing time is about three to four seconds awesome let's open the lid so that the heat won't be trapped inside to burn the leaves okay perfect i think that would be everything that you need to know about the first brewing method so let's move on to the second brewing method the second method is called fixed seven o'clock it could be used for the first and second round of steeping but generally it is used for third or fourth round of steeping it's similar to the first method and is generally used for old butt tea or small leaf teas such as green tea white tea and black tea as well as for big leaves such as taiwanese high mountain wulong tea it allows tea leaves to swallow vertically in gaiwan in order to further stimulate the fragrance out it also prevents hot water from pouring directly on the leaf so the teas won't become astringent for this round of demonstration i will be using the same teas like the one that we have used before which is this green tea here and as you heard from earlier we'll be pouring water in from a seven o'clock angle instead of six o'clock and what this action will do is you will make the tease instead of swarting in the guideline like counterclockwise or clockwise it will actually make the tissue sore vertically so it's a different direction so just like the first method we're going to pour water and from a seven o'clock but from the side angle rather than going vertically like that so pour your cattle if you're using your left hand or maybe you're using your um right hand if you are right-handed i would say just do the opposite instead of seven o'clock you can pour water in from a four o'clock angle however as you can see now my teeth are on this side um so what i would do is i would turn my guy one around to make sure that whichever direction that my water is going to pour in that's where most tea leaves are going to be however since i am actually left-handed when it comes to but only when it comes to pouring water into guy one i'm going to use my left hand and going from this side all right whenever you're ready let's go perfect good awesome those two demonstrations conclude the first two methods the main purpose of these two methods is to stimulate the aroma of teas to come out through either the circular motion or the vertical motion it definitely takes a lot of practice again just to give you an idea it took me about a month to two months to do it successfully at um a 90 successful rate but once you get a hand of it it just comes to you very naturally and very quickly another trick that i would like to tell you is that um i see there are a lot of really really um well-designed very pretty water cattle out there on the market these days however as you can see here i'm still using my grandpa watercattle this is the bonavita brand right here so i really really like this one because the goose neck size is big enough and the sprout is big enough when i pour water out the water stream is very strong if the water stream is not strong enough it's more likely that you will encounter a harder time for the leaves to have that kind of motion in yo one the second tip that i would like to give to you is um at what length oh sorry at what height that you pour the water in um some people might be afraid of spilling water out everywhere so they're pouring water at a very low angle almost touching the lid um i mean the ring that wouldn't be a good idea because that's another mistake that will result in not having strong enough water stream [Music] okay so now let's move on to the third method and i'm going to change guy one again i'm excited the third method is called circle on the ring this is probably the easiest brewing method of guy one generally it is used for any rounds of steeping from the first round to the last round but it's better for teas with big leaves for example whitey hanlu or shomei both have really big leaves taiwanese wooden teeth after the first a couple rounds of steeping the leaves open up and start to have really big leaves too each tease from the cake such as aged whitey poor or dark tea however for poor tea and dark tea you should specifically circle water slowly and very gently on the ring for the first and second round of steeping in order to avoid too much aging earthiness to come out all at once and very strongly otherwise you may find it tastes a little too earthy and some people don't really like that so for this demonstration i'm actually using a phoenix stanton woolen tea and as you can see here the leaves are quite big as well and plus would be look at that and for the last brewing method we'll be using the same leaf so i think it would be good okay first thing the usual just pour the leaves in there perfect and as mentioned earlier this method is called pouring water around the ring when you encounter big leaf teas and try to brew them in guy one you want to submerge tea leaves in water as fast as possible and that's why we use this poor water on well around the rim area method because it helps the big leaves to get in water as fast as possible okay let's begin you can choose anywhere as a starting point i mean a pouring water endpoint and this method is probably the most encountered gaiwan brewing methods that you see i have seen so many people using this method for every single type of tea on especially on social media there we go that was pretty good just close the lid okay so i'm not going to pour the tea out right away even if that's what i'm supposed to do because something is happening here and i really want to give you um a quick explanation as you can see here i'm going to zoom in as you can see here if there's a part of the lid that's buried in the water because it's very hard to encounter guy once that has the perfect lid that fits the perfect body that there's no gap at all and hence when you have the tea beaker overflow and covering where the lid and the body meet it helps to lock the water inside and it helps to keep the air out basically it will just help you to brew better teas okay so now i'm going to pour the liquor out and obviously this tea is over steeped because i was trying to explain and there you go as mentioned you can use this method from the very first round of steeping all the way to the very last now you're probably wondering well i can just use this method for every single t you absolutely can it's the safest method it's the easiest method however would it make a difference from the first two methods that we talked about it definitely will my personal experience and experiments tell me that when you brew different teas such as the small leaf green teas or butts green teas or white teas like a silver needle or taiwanese woolen teeth if you do not make the tea leaves sweat in your cai wine whether it's vertically or a circular motion the fragrance that comes out is very different from when you do that so this is definitely an experience that's very personal and worth experiment on for example you can prepare two guy ones and brew the silver needle side by side for one you try to make the tea leaves swallow in the guy one and for the second one you can do the pour water around the ring and compare the difference because when i was going through my tisol media training and this is a story that i always tell that's what my teacher made me do and the result was very very different so that's something i strongly encourage you to experiment and really understand and see the difference for yourself alright so we only have the last method left to talk about and let's go straight to it the last method is called central pouring it is almost never used for the first round of steeping and it is used for reviving highly oxidized teas aroma such as oolong teas when it's getting wary and we usually use it for the fifth or the sixth stippings and so on it is for medium to high oxidized volunteers such as wee rock tea the traditional dongdin poor tease and dark tea so put it in a simple way let's pretend that we have steeped this phoenix stance on keys three four five times even though i know we have only done it for one time but let's just pretend and after that four or five steppings i feel like the fragrance and the flavors are slowly fading away you know they're getting a little wary and so in order to um revive revive this tea what i'm going to do is something that i don't i haven't told you guys to do for any other tea which is to pour water directly on the leaves this is something that i would never ask people to do for for example a green tea or a white tea basically more delicate tea and that's why i said you mainly use this method for medium to high level oxidized teas such as wee rock tea traditional dongdin poor tea and dark tea because those teas are the ones that can handle a higher water temperature level and hence when they're getting wary you can use a higher water temperature and pour the water directly on the tea leaves to bring some of the flavors and fragrance back and so here comes the quick demonstration very simple just as i mentioned you are going to pour water right in the middle from a relatively high point there we go [Music] and again the reason that we're pouring water in front a relatively higher point is to make sure the water stream is strong enough all right so those are the four gaiwan brewing methods for gongfu cha style i hope those methods are helpful and as i have said many times during the video no matter which methods you will take some practice especially the first and the second one even the third one it seems really easy that you're just pouring water around the ring but you want to make sure that the water does get on the rim and during which process you don't want to shake your hand the water is spilling everywhere so you still takes some practice and also as mentioned in the video i strongly encourage you to use one tea the same tea but use these four different methods and see if you can feel any difference the last thing that i would like to mention is that you can also use a clay pot for kung fu chat style obviously so clipboard is a lot easier and i have a clear pot right here and as you can see it's not very big at all compared to the british style clay pot um there's no pouring water rules um the most important thing is the teas should fill up about one third of the space of the teapot in terms of proportion or you can use the leave to water ratio for guy one the same one the water temperature for gaiwan brewing also applies to clay pot brewing while the steeping time is a little longer for about 20 seconds for aged teas and about what about five seconds for wool on tease as well just like a guy one there are a lot of rooms to wiggle the rules and experiment the rules your personal preference can also come in the picture so this is something that i strongly recommend you to experiment and practice until you find your personal preference anyways thank you so much for watching and i really hope everything is helpful for you however don't go away just yet i still have a few last notes to pass to you see you back on the tea table hi welcome back so while you're away learning how to do gun fuja i also made some teas myself um then but then you know i'm done drinking i have some excessive tea here and i just don't want to drink it anymore so um i'm going to use the tea to demonstrate maybe another question that's been wandering in your head which is what does a tea pet do and i'm going to show you first of all different t-pads perform differently but to give you a quick idea before we end our class by using this t-pad as example are you ready all right [Laughter] that's basically what a teapot does just to bring you some laughters but of course they also symbolize um good fortune good luck you know on your tea table it's just a little cute accessory so that concludes our gong fuchsia workshop today obviously there's a lot of information and it takes a lot of practice to master in holding and using a guy one so i really hope that the content of this video is helpful for you and maybe will sparkle some interest in you to get into the gongfu chat if you have any questions feel free to maybe write me an email or leave a comment i would love to hear from you so thank you very much and happy sleeping [Music] bye

Channel: SereneTeaCha Tea Education & Gong Fu Cha

Views: 17,228

Keywords:

Id: _a41kkan8zc

Length: 44min 49sec (2689 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021