HOW TO BREW OOLONG - Chaozhou Style Masterclass

hey tea heads this is don from mayleaf and in this video i'm going to be showing you how to brew your tea chao joe style and giving you some of the context and thinking around this very historic style of brewing you can skip directly to the step-by-step guide to brewing chao joe's style but i strongly advise you to learn the reason and rhyme behind chow chow star brewing to get the most out of it and to brew the best possible tea chow chow is a beautiful city in guangdong province in the south of china and in the qing dynasty around the beginning of the 18th century while most of china was brewing tea in the big pot pao cha style which is essentially similar to what we now know as western style with larger pots lower leaf to water ratio and longer steeping times in chao zhou a local style of brewing emerge which became known as gong fu style now you have certainly heard me going on about gong fu style brewing and throughout china you will hear people talk about gong foo tea but nowadays this term can be sort of loosely applied to quite different styles of tea preparation gong food basically means any practice which incorporates skill and discipline and so it has been adopted to describe brewing of fine teas when you pay care and attention to maximize the experience of the tea but this chow chow method of brewing is the original gong fu style invented in the 1700's in south china before spreading to neighboring fujian and its prefecture at the time taiwan in the 1990s the term gong fu brewing was reinvigorated during a renaissance of chinese tea culture at that time and began to be used to describe any brewing method which used smaller tea wear and shorter infusion times and has since been used as a way of describing chinese tea brewing methods in general but let's get back to the origins of gongfu style brewing and dive deeper into chow chow gongfu it's important to note from the outset that this style of broom was never intended to be ceremonial but instead is a simple minimal and social way of brewing with quite an informal appeal and yet like all things in t the simplicity of the practice gives space for an incredible amount of complexity that we will be looking into today the chaljo style of brewing was born out of the environment of south china and if you are ever fortunate enough to visit south china you will notice a lot of practice of uh tai chi chi gong martial arts as well as a lot more focus on like local rights rituals and history in taoism buddhism and confucianism and so gong foot tea comes from a culture rich in symbolism learning and self-cultivation i think that while chow chow style brewing may seem informal in every day in comparison to maybe more elaborate gong fu setups or ceremonial styles it is important to realize that the chow cho tea brewing and drinking is inspired by a cultural focus and importance on harmony social cohesion self-cultivation skill and symbolism so what prompted the advent of chow joe style brewing well there are two main factors which are often talked about the first was the advent of a new tea type during this time oolong tea and as you may or may not know oolong tea requires a great amount of skill and work to produce going through many more processes than any other t-type the result is a tea which is more crafted than other tea types that's not to say it's better or worse but more crafted and the aim of oolong tea or the producers is to create a very potent tea which carefully balances on one hand aroma and initial like fleeting taste and on the other hand flavor body texture finish and body sensation so a brewing method had to be devised to continue this aim of the producers to brew teas which are brimming with aromatics and like rising lifting transients while producing teas which are rich in body flavor and finish the second factor which is often talked about relating to the the birth of chao joe star brewing relates to the relative wealth of the people in south china during the qing dynasty this was a poorer area of china and so a brewing method was developed motivated around frugality and skill how could you maximize the enjoyment of coarser grades of tea and gram for gram make the best brews out of the teas in your stash so this charjo style of brewing was developed and you will see that this style is used in literally every shop and household in child show so much so that it it almost appears utilitarian and every day yet scratched beneath the surface and you will see that it is a world of skill learning and artistry so what are the fundamentals of chao joe star brewing well first of all it's minimal tea where you essentially need a pot or guy one cups and a waste bowl there is no need for a gong dal bay because we are pouring directly into the serving cups you can put the pot or gaiwan and the cups directly on a towel or on a tray or a large flat bowl and just have another bowl on the side which you're using to pour away your rinse in this case we've got our gongfu vessel to combine the tray with the rinse bowl into one unit to make things even more minimal you want to be brewing in very small tea wear to be faithful to the chow joe frugality but also to get the right balance of taste and aroma which we'll talk about uh shortly we recommend tea wear between sort of 50 mil to 80 mil capacity it is very important that you get the right size cups which will accommodate all of the liquor in your pot or guy one you do don't want any liquor remaining in the guy one as this will make the next infusion very bitter and you don't want to have to waste tea by pouring it away in the rinse bowl that's precious precious tea so you want to be making sure that when you empty your pot or guy one into the cups you are putting the right amount of tea in the cups sort of around three quarters full if it's too little then it looks stingy if it's too much then it's very awkward and cumbersome for your guests to pick up over filled cups the number of cups is traditionally three no matter if you're brewing solo or for two people this is supposedly because the three cups mimic the character pin which is used in the verb to savor flavor to save a taste honestly i like the balance of three cups but if i'm brewing by myself then i tend to use one larger cup and just pour directly into that it's less enjoyable because the larger cup means that the tea stays hotter for longer and it's nice to taste at like temperature which is a little bit lower but it just makes for a more simple setup if you have more than three people then i would recommend keeping the same size cups but just increasing your pot or guy one to like between 80 and 120 ml the second key factor in chiao is the type of tea and i really recommend that when you dive into chow chow star brewing you start brewing with strip oolongs like dan song or yensha because this is the type of tea that this brewing style was originally devised for of course you can experiment with other teas afterwards the third characteristic of chow chow style is strength the goal of chao joe star brewing is to make super rich and strong shots of tea when you first try chow joe style brew tea it may be too strong and bitter for you and you can certainly adapt the parameters to your taste however as you become accustomed to this stronger more physical tea i think that you will really appreciate the rich long finish and rime or yun of the tea and you will find yourself preferring this profile so please persist and push the boundaries a little we achieve this extra strength by using very hot water boiling point and a very high leaf to water ratio something in the region of about seven to nine grams per hundred mil so usually we recommend for this type of tea around five grams per hundred mil uh pot or guy one but for these strip oolongs and chow joe star brewing we're adding like about 40 to 80 percent more leaf here i have four grams of tea which is going to be going into my 50 ml guy one you can see here and i've also got five grams of tea here for my nafu chow chow clay teapot so i'm going to be showing you brewing in both of these vessels so if you don't want to weigh the leaf you can sort of look at it visually and you want to achieve around 70 to 80 percent visually in terms of capacity so you can see this is sort of filled up 70 to 80 percent but bear in mind that there are there is a lot of air in between these leaves because it's a strip oolong so if you're using like ball roll doulongs or smaller leaf tea or broken up cakes then it would be visually much lower in volume so let's look at this guy one it is busting out with leaves so much so that when these leaves hydrate they are not going to be able to fully open in this size vessel why is this a good thing haven't you always heard that giving leaves lots of space for brewing and for the leaves to open is important to make good tea well this is one of the key aspects of chow chow style brewing over stuffing the pot and it makes it especially suited for brewing strip oolongs remember before i said that the joy of oolongs was to achieve a rich balance between on the one hand aroma and transients and on the other hand finish and texture well it is broadly true that the very powerful aromatics are on the surface of the leaves in the form of juices which have dried on the leaf during the rolling phase of the production and that the texture aftertaste and bitterness and astringency of the brew are more dependent on dissolving and extracting the compounds from inside the leaf so by intentionally not leaving enough space in the pot for the leaves to fully expand we are controlling the rate of extraction of the inner leaf compounds and therefore we can manipulate the level of bitterness astringency body and aftertaste to be in balance with a very rich aroma so by having a very high leaf to water ratio with very short brewing times we can maximize the aromatics of the oolong coming from the dried juices on this on the outside of the leaf and we can control the texture astringency and yun or rime to be in harmony with these aromatics but what about those early infusions they're going to have the most amount of aroma since this is easily extracted from the surface of the leaves but the least amount of texture and aftertaste as it does take some time for the water to penetrate and enter the leaves this is why you often hear that with oolong teas the best infusions around in fusion three or four because at this point a good balance has been reached as the inner leaf material is starting to be extracted in balance with the aromatics now i don't know about you but i would prefer to get that delicious balance from a brew number one as opposed to brew number three and the chow chow style has got you covered with a really nifty trick of breaking some leaves i've done a video about this before but i'll repeat it in this video so what you're trying to do is create what's called a tea gall so a tea ball of broken leaves so if you crush some of the leaves in your pot or guy one from the very first infusion these broken leaves will extract the inner leaf compounds very readily because we've broken the outer membranes and there's more surface area for extraction so infusion number one we'll have lots of aroma coming from the the dried leaf juice on the outside of the leaf and the broken leaf will be doing the work to provide all of that aftertaste body and texture and by the time you reach infusion number three or four the whole leaves in your guy one or pot we'll be providing the bulk of this inner leaf compound to contribute to texture body and finish or be it in a controlled way since we are restricting the ability for the leaves to swell fully and the broken leaves what they they'll have done their work essentially they'll be providing very little this method allows you to get a better balanced tea from infusion one and essentially extends the sweet spot of the tea through more infusions as an added benefit it means that the steeping times can be kept very short and that means that you can preserve the aromatics and it means that you can get more infusions out of your tea frugal and clever huh i told you that there was a lot more complexity in this seemingly simple brewing style right now that you know a lot more about the history and theory of chow chow brewing let's show you step by step how it's done right to recap let's just uh disassemble this a little bit in order for you to have a chow chow style set up you basically need to have either a towel or a tray or a flat bulb which you're going to put your brewing vessel and your cups and a rinse bowl on the side or in this case you can use the gongfu vessel there are other similar products out there that allow you to have the tray on top of the gong fu bowl the rinse bowl i've also got some tools here not absolutely essential you can do away with all of this and just have a towel the gaiwan pot and cups and a bowl or the gongfu vessel or a similar piece of tea wear and a towel preferably just to soak up any spills and what i have here are three small cups this here this small guy one and cups we sell as a set so this is our sort of chao joe style brewing setup that we have um but i've also got a master wu nafu pot here love love this pot again the size on it i think it's about 70 mil and so that's perfect for ciao style brewing okay so one step at a time i don't want to miss out any steps here i've got four grams of leaf for this guy one here and i've got about five grams of leaf for this is slightly larger capacity okay so the first thing that you want to do make sure you've got boiling hot water so if i um if i rush through this a little bit then don't copy me make sure you always bring your water to temperature and you're going to heat up your t-wear so in this case we're heating up the guy one and i can usually i'd pour the guy the the water into the cups but you can also just just let everything get warmed up i'm also going to warm up my nafu pot here just by putting some boiling water in there so we want everything warmed up this is going to contribute to more even brewing and it's also going to mean that you're going to get more of a impactful aroma when leaves hit the hot vessel okay so i'm going to use these tweezers just to empty out this water so these thin porcelain so they're going to get warm very easily i'm going to give the elephant a little dousing because he's here and you can use that to count infusions okay so lid off and oh did i mix these up that looks like the lesser amount of leaf here so this is four grams going in right now the crushing method if you don't know what i mean because you skipped go back a little bit and you'll understand why i'm doing this i'm just gonna take my finger and i'm gonna go right into the middle of the guy one here and i'm gonna crush believe me i know that this is a bizarre thing for people for a lot of people who are sort of relatively new to this style of brewing but this is a very common practice let me asmr this a bit just so you get the full pleasure and horror of hearing leaves being cracked so i'm just cracking leaves crushing maybe 10 15 in the middle and i'm not moving it around okay lid goes on so i'm gonna allow that to just um warm up the leaves and give me some uh some aroma in the meantime i'm gonna pour this nafu out so obviously you're doing one or the other so i'm a little bit cramped here but you would do one or the other now with a pot if you're brewing with a pot then what i recommend is you take you know 10 or so of your leaf something like this and let me smooth this out the way so you can see and i'm going to crush this here i should say i'm drinking uh basian eight immortals danchong okay you can see i'm not being frightened to crush it because this is all about helping those first infusions to have good balance of texture now what i'm going to do is i'm going to put this very important towards the back of the pot so i'm going to put it in and i'm going to move this all to the back i'm going to tidy up a bit here okay that was a bit messier than i thought so do that separate from your vessel so i've cleaned up the vessel top okay so i'm just moving that those broken leaves and you can use your gongfu stem if you'd like just to move them to the back of the pot and then i'm going to put the rest of these leaves into the front of the pot i'm just going to use my hand as a little barrier so this means that the tea broken tea leaves are at the back which means that when i am uh brewing uh or i'm pouring off the brew the uh the leaves um these larger whole leaves act like a filter to stop the broken leaves from entering your brew as much as possible okay let's put this to the side so now i've got a hot pot or a hot guy one i'm gonna put that one to the side i'm gonna go back to the guy one now again that t dust went everywhere so i'm just gonna clean up so yeah do your crushing separate if you want for a very sort of neat setup okay and now you would smell the leaf so nose dry leaf start with the lid or much more caramelized than i remember but then it is the the dry leaf i'm not going to talk about the tasting notes i've done a video about eight immortals i'll put a link in the description below but this is where you really get to enjoy the delights of the aromatics of this tea and why this chao joe style brewing method uh was uh what prompted or motivated it being devised was a in large part due to the the bursting aromatics of this team wanting to capture those aromatics in the cup whilst making a tea which is strong in terms of texture and aftertaste ah incredibly complex cherries and vinyls and all sorts of baked goodness okay so now we're going to rinse the the tea so if you are pouring so i'm just going to crank up the temperature if you are pouring in the pot then you will want to make sure that you pour the the water towards the front of the pot so that you're not pouring directly on the gall which is that ball of of broken up leaves and in the case of the guy one you're going to want to do rim brewing so pouring around so again you're not pouring directly in you're pouring around this is what i would recommend for you so that way the water will of course hit the gall but it's not being broken by a direct stream of water okay so now we're gonna do our rinse and this is all about quick quick brewing okay so i tend to use my left hand just so that i'm ready with the right hand to do the the brew and it teaches me balance with my other hand so in and then out now you're pouring in a motion to try to even out get the same amount of uh of liquor in the uh in the cup now you can see here that there's a fair amount of broken leaf and that's really the point here is you want that rinse to get rid of any that that is not going to get trapped within those leaves so we're going to pour these out and hopefully you're going to see less now of course if you had left the leaves completely whole then you wouldn't see any of these and you may prefer that aesthetically but in terms of the taste experience i do like for most of my uh dan songs and yanchas i like to do this broken leaf method so as i said if you were brewing with the the the pot then pour at the front and again you're using the leaves as a filter so let's have a sniff yellow yellow cherries strong in that vinyl fruity varnish note and just just bursting with incredible bright high fruity um and um invigorating aromatics let's just do the chow chow version as well i mean sorry the the pop version as well so i'm pouring towards the front of the pot and then pouring immediately out you can see that the chow chow pot also is going to release some of the of the broken leaf and that's hopefully going to be less with next infusions and that's one of the purposes of rinsing your tea again you can smell incredible beautiful all right so now we're ready for our first infusion of course take your time you know smell the tea delight in all of the complexity of the aromatics we're still hot but i'm just going to make sure it's really really piping hot and again very short infusions here we want to just basically do it in put the kettle down and out and then when we're pouring out into the cups you're ideally looking for an even brew so the same amount of liquor ending up in the cups which means you want to put the cups pretty close together and you know pour so that you're starting one way and then sort of just factoring in that the last pores are going to be richer so you're going to start more diluted here and then it's going to be a bit stronger then it's going to be more concentrated then once you come back to here you're going to have uh you're going to top up with more concentrated tea now a lot of people say well you've got to be even some sometimes if i know that somebody likes a lighter brew you can customize so you can say well i'm going to pour lighter in your cup and then stronger in in these two cups so again this is not uh you don't have to make it even you can customize according to your guest taste the most important thing is getting all of the liquor out all of the water out so that you don't have anything left behind okay so again i'm pouring around down and you can see pretty much immediately out and take your time and get every last drop out here you might want to employ the roll-up method because there's always a few oh no no drops out there okay um and then i would advise taking the lid off now you can see again your choice if you want to have it perfectly clear then you could go through a filter but that's not the chaucho style and you know there is going to be some of this broken leaf in here if you are breaking using the crushed leaf method but i prefer it because i like to have that texture from infusion number one cheers everybody yeah bursting with aromatics and a great aftertaste a great texture and i know that if i just brewed this whole leaf without the crushing of the leaves that it would be very aromatic but a little bit light now this is like infusion number three two or three when you're comparing it with brewing it with uh with just whole leaf and oftentimes you'll just sort of pour away that last bit oftentimes you'll see in china very sort of uh uh um the way that they pour it away is is very theatrical they sort of like they pour it away and then then the cup goes down and um often times um most of the time people will serve themselves from here and they'll put their cup back you can of course use you know the gong fu stems to serve people if you wanted to do it a little bit more politely um but you know it's this is a social way of drinking and so i you know most of the time in chiao you see people just grabbing and putting back onto the the the tea where be it a tray most of the time they will have something like this in front of them but you can of course just pick up and serve in this way ah incredible this broken leaf method i highly recommend you a b it and see what you think now if we were going to be brewing with the pot it's pretty much exactly the same thing you're pouring to the front of the pot again so that you're not breaking that gall in the back and you're pouring immediately over now you can also oftentimes after you put the lid on pour some water over the top i'll quickly show you how that's done and just to make sure that the the t-wear is always staying very hot one of the things about chao joe star brewing you'll see the the the kettle of water is always going it's just steaming everything about the chow chow style of brewing in this hot weather is all you know it's all like steamy and hot and and and everything always stays warm and i don't know that somehow that that suits the weather bizarrely because it's sort of everything makes you sweat and that cools you down and it's it's just a very satisfying way to drink tea very very different from sort of more sort of colder regions where you're drinking green teas with with cooler temperature and it's a a little bit more sort of um how can i say it karma potentially or a little bit more sort of refined this is all sort of about the steamy hot streets of chow joe okay so brewing in the master wu nafu pot i'm pouring into the front lid on pour over down and then pretty much immediately i'm pouring out trying to get an even brew that's a bit better again take your time get every last drop you don't want little pockets of water in the teapot that are going to be brewing with those broken leaves especially and the liquor will clear up as more of the broken leaf sort of leave the pot um and as i said by sort of infusion three or four they've done all of their work and it's the whole leaves that are really contributing to the uh flavor let's have a taste of the nafu stronger partly because of the fact oh wow oh partly because of the fact that its clay holds the heat more that i poured the water that i it was a bit longer in terms of the brew especially because the pour is shorter it takes longer and therefore there was more brewing time wow really really delicious this is more of that chao joe style maybe i should have left the the guy one a little bit longer so what i'm getting is this quite aggressive like um it feels like it's gonna it's gonna be too much but then it's controlled and the aromatics that rise up into my nose are balancing it out really really beautifully you're getting that brightness the floral the fruity with that bitter and the texture and the and the um the astringency and the juiciness and that rising yun that vaporous rising sensation from the mouth that is classic ciaozo star brewing of a classic uh chow chow tea and now you would just roll through the infusions as you normally would you would just keep going this was infusion number one and infusion number one is impeccable so that broken leaf really really worked and then just keep going and again i would still use very very short brewing times to preserve the aromatics in theory by the time the the broken leaves have stopped sort of working to provide texture the the whole leaves will have opened up sufficiently so that they will be doing the work and because you are restricting the room for these leaves to fully open you're going to control the astringency um you know just by the nature of the of the size and shape of the pot and keep keep brewing at flash infusions and just you know obviously work on instinct and you're going to increase it over time so that's how you do chao joe style brewing i hope that this was informative i hope that you dive in it is at first glance a sort of very informal casual way of brewing with minimal setup but once you dive deeper and really explore this way of brewing you are going to brew the most immaculate oolong teas i can promise you that and it has so much skill and artistry to learn that's it t-heads check out our other videos taste rts wherever you're in the world by browsing mayleaf.com and come visit us if you're ever in london other than that i'm don from may leaf thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from those tea bags keep doing the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 21,719

Keywords: tea, mei leaf, don mei, loose leaf tea, white tea, green tea, yellow tea, oolong tea, matcha tea, black tea, puerh tea, websites for tea, tea tasting, tea shopping, high quality tea, chinese tea, taiwanese tea, japanese tea, tea ware, teaware, tea gifts, gong fu tea, gong fu brewing, chaozhou, chao zhou, chaozhou brewing, gongfu tea, gongfu brewing, brewing dan cong, brewing dancong, brewing oolong, brewing yan cha, brewing yancha, how to brew oolong tea

Id: 6VS-K31UK70

Length: 31min 56sec (1916 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021