HOW TO BREW TEA - PRACTICAL STEP BY STEP TUTORIAL

hey t-heads this is don from mayleaf in this video i'm going to be giving you a practical step-by-step tutorial in how to brew tea gong futi can seem very complicated you've got all of these different pots different tea wear different styles of brewing all of the different equipment that you can geek out on and of course we've done many master class videos discussing the intricacies of shape and material and how you pour your water how long you should brew your tea for all of that geekery you can dive deep in and it's a lifetime of learning but tea at its heart should be simple so let's strip this all back and just focus on a bowl and some leaf so let's pretend you have no gong fu equipment you've got no tea wear at all most people will have a small bowl in their home right so bowl brewing is the most basic is the most simple and you can brew delicious tea just with bowl brewing before i dive in i want to say a few things the first is that i am not going to be giving too much explanation in this video this is going to be more of a practical step-by-step guide so if you want to dive more into the detail of why we use a certain amount of leaf why the temperatures of water change then go check out our other videos i'll put links to our master classes in the description below the second thing i'd like to say is that the guidelines that i'm going to be presenting today are intentionally generalized they are a starting point from which you can explore and experiment i want this video to be a basic practical step-by-step tutorial for everybody including beginners so i'm not going to make things excessively complicated and the third thing i'd like to say is obviously the most important thing here at the beginning is that you find high quality tea the highest quality tea that you can find the higher the quality the better your tea no matter how you brew it right super super simple if you want to do bulb brewing then follow these guidelines in terms of weights of tea that you should use per 100 ml of water and these guidelines in terms of temperature of water that i would advise as a starting point obviously explore i'm not going to be doing western brewing today western brewing is using a very small amount of leaf to water ratio and brewing it for three to four minutes before straining out the leaves and throwing the leaves away i don't really like western style brewing so we're going to start with bowl brewing and it's very very simple you have your bowl you have your leaf feel free to warm your bowl up if you would like to beforehand that way you can get more aromatics out of the leaf as the heat causes those volatiles to evaporate and then you want to pour the water try to pour it in a circular motion and the way that you do that is actually holding your kettle relatively still finding a spot on the wall of the bowl and allowing that water to naturally form a circular motion now the amount of leaf that you use depends on how much water you're planning to put in the guidelines that i've given you are 400 ml of water which i think is a great quantity as a sort of starting point when you are drinking by yourself so the first thing to do is try to work out how much 100 ml is now you can take your bowl with your leaf and put it on top of a scale and then pour whilst looking at the scale and 100 grams of water is approximately 100 ml of water but tea should not be about looking at digital scales tea should be about feel so what i advise you to do is you can take a bowl the bowl that you're planning to use measure out 100 ml of water put it in the bowl and just sort of get a visual sort of idea of where 100 ml is and then just take it from there don't get too hung up on it just you know allow feel to be a part of your gongfu brewing because if you don't then you know you're always going to be relying on those digital numbers to guide you so here we go we're not going to be doing a rinse this is super simple bowl brewing i'm just going to be pouring in one area and then once the leaves start moving you can then increase and once you got to this point if there's a few leaves that are still not submerged then just a little drizzle of water over those just to dunk them under the surface right now you're leaving the tea to infuse for as long as you feel you want the tea to infuse i'd like this to be about feel but i would recommend something in the region of a minute we are using less leaf to water ratio than we will in gong fu brewing and strict gongfu bring which is going to be moving into the next step so you want to leave it for a little while some people may refer to this as grandpa brewing because what you are doing is essentially leaving the leaves in the water and while you're drinking it the leaves are continuing to infuse so it's going to continue to build up strength even while you are drinking but again the point here is feel should start to develop you should start to smell the the liquor if you're using a white colored bowl then you can see you can assess the color of the liquor when you are ready to drink you are just literally picking it up and drinking direct from the bowl now there will be leaves that are touching your lip but you just blow them away and then sip the tea blow them away sip the tea now some teas will float to the surface others will quite quickly um move to the bottom of the bowl which will make it obviously easier when you are drinking and you can brew delicious bowls of tea in this way and it's it's a lovely simple comforting way to drink tea there is something so beautiful about the pared down simplicity of bowl brewing and the tactile feeling of a warm bowl in your hands i highly recommend that you try bowl brewing if you've not tried it before now if the tea starts to get too strong because it's still infusing and still extracting then you can just top up with more water that's the grand pass style of brewing just top up use extra water to dilute the tea if you finish the tea then of course you can leave it and you can reinfuse later there's no rush you don't have to reinfuse it immediately and you just use the same method just pouring it so it moves into a circular motion and just drink when you feel it is ready of course you're going to potentially eat a few leaves that's no bad thing either as long as you've got high quality leaves that's fine too so that's bowl brewing but what if you want to move up to gongfu brewing but you don't have any gear well then get yourself two bowls and ideally a strainer it doesn't have to be a particular fine strainer like this any strainer will do two bowls in a strainer and a little plate if you can i have here duck oolong a delicious dan song oolong now with gongfu brewing we're going to increase the leaf to water ratio so these are my guidelines of how much leaf you should be using per 100 ml of water the temperature stays the same i'm just going to briefly warm this bowl and another bowl just to help the aromatics now pour that away in the sink so preheat your bowls ideally not essential but it is nice for that aroma to really hit you and then we're going to be pouring the leaves into the bowl again take your time breathe in that lovely creamy almond and cherry notes of this duck oolong so this is very very simple gongfu brewing all of you gongfu brewers are sort of looking going but what about rinsing we're not gonna be rinsing the tea we're just gonna keep it super super simple for those of you who would like to taste gongfu brewing but don't have the gear you can rinse the tea of course you could pour the water in here and then bring this over the sink and just pour the water out you can do that if you'd like but i'm going to do it without rinsing so again i'm going to judge what a 100 ml of water is and again we're going to be pouring to try and get some movement here that's about 100 mil and then i'm just going to cover it with the plate and i'm going to be leaving it for about 30 seconds maybe a bit longer because it hasn't rinsed just to you know it's going to take a little bit longer if you rinse it then you want to reduce your times but again i really want to stress the point that this should all be about feel and experience rather than a stopwatch please just use your feel and experience larger leaves take more time to infuse smaller more broken leaves will take less time to infuse so i can't give you an accurate time for all of the different tea types i think that that's pretty close you can take the plate off take a look you can see the leaves are starting to unravel and open up and then you want to take your strainer and just pour from the strainer from the bowl i should say in through the strainer into the other bowl take your time no rush empty that bowl you can see the leaves are perfectly happy here for the next infusion you can smell those wet leaves oh this year's duck oolong is really really we we've commissioned an extra bake on the daksha oolong this year and you can just it's just accentuated all of the buttery creamy almondy notes of the tea a very very special tea and now you have a bowl of tea you don't have to think about blowing away the leaves you've got a bowl of tea for you to enjoy and you've just brewed gongfu tea with no equipment at all apart from a strainer and if you didn't have the strainer then you pour it anyway and just be careful and you can see that it's not you're not gonna have a load of leaves falling and there'll be some leaves in here but that's not a big deal delicious so you can see gongfu brewing is very very simple you can do it with no equipment at all apart from a couple of bowls and a plate ideally a strainer these leaves are sitting waiting for your next infusion you can get such joy out of smelling the aroma of these wet leaves so that's an advantage that you have over bowl brewing the other advantage is these leaves are now sitting waiting they're fixed they're not extracting continuously like with bowl brewing so you're going to get more individual infusions this way you hit them again with hot water whenever you are ready no rush they can sit there for minutes if not hours waiting for your next infusion delicious okay so you've tried gongfu brewing you really enjoy the taste and you just want some very basic gongfu equipment no problem all you need is a guy one a guy one is simply a bowl with a lid so we're just imitating what we've just had as our setup a bowl with a plate a bowl with a lid it is the most simple but the most delightful way of brewing tea this is like the light saber of gongfu brewing every single jedi of tea needs one of these on their shelves i have done videos all about how much i love guy ones why i love guy ones and how to pour with a guy one because it does take a little bit of practice it is a bit of a rite of passage once you've passed that right you are a gongfu brewer okay so i've heated the guy one already we've got tiegwanyi in here you're using the same amounts of leaf as i showed you before because it's the same thing this is a 70 ml guy one so slightly less leaf but just take the same guidelines as your starting point and then depending upon the size of your guy one you can adjust the amount of leaf beautiful floral honeysuckle but also a little bit custardy now we are going to rinse this time so pouring water over the leaves and then i'm going to be taking a bowl since i had one handy and pouring this is especially important for ball roll do longs now you can brew in a bowl ball roll do longs you can brew in the two bowls like i showed you before you don't have to rinse ball roll do longs but it is helpful because they are so tightly ball rolled that you need to give them a little bit of that heat and moisture to help them unravel let's have a sniff bamboo sour apple candies aloe slight coke young coconut yogurt delicious right as you can now guess all we're doing is the same thing pouring around the side so that the leaves are agitated put the lid on and we wait because we've done the rinse because they've already started to open up we can shorten our brewing time if you want to know how to hold a guy one check out the video link in the description below but these small guy ones and this is part of our set this is called the gongfu solo set so you get a towel you get a cup you get this small guy one and this tiny guy one is a great practice guy one because of the fact that it's small you you have more control you're less likely to feel that it's a bit clumsy once you get used to it you can move up to a larger size guy one i did not put this through a filter as you can see because the aperture control that you can have with a guy one allows you to pretty much catch any large leaves you get a little bit of dust that hits the bottom of the cup you can use a strainer of course a perfect gong fu brew you really don't need any more gear than this if you are solo brewing but what about if you have some guests over well all you need then is one of these this is a pitcher also known as a fairness cup also known as a gong dao bay and what this does is it allows you to pour the tea from your lidded bowl aka a guy one into the gong dao bay or fairness pitcher and that evens out the brew so that every one of your guests gets to taste the same strength tea you could pour directly from the gaiwan into the cups but you're not gonna get an even brew unless you're very skilled and that's a particular style of brewing called chow joe star brewing so i'll quickly brew this for you this is a heated guy one so i can smell this yung gushu 2000 looking aged already give this a rinse now you can pour the rinse into your fairness cup that warms up the fairness cup or gong dar bay you can pour that rinse into your cups that again warms everything up so that you're not drinking out of a cold cup and you can choose to throw this rinse in the bowl in your sink but if you wanted to you could get yourself one of these which is a water catcher that allows you to just pour the tea away very very simply and it catches the rinse so you can see we are now looking like more of a standard gongfu setup but you can see hopefully the purpose of each bit of kit oh it is aging wow has a very wild forest wild forest red currants and and and and tangy berries very very interesting so now we're gonna pour so we're using the same quantity per 100 mil as when we're doing our two bowl brewing and our small guy one brewing you're leaving the guy one lid on for it to keep the heat in and infuse nicely and again you can use a filter if you would like but i tend to brew raw pour unfiltered because i like the texture of the tea when it when it contains some of the fine trichome hairs that are on the leaf so we're going to pour into our gondol bay great thing about having a water catcher is you can be a little bit more free with your pores you don't have to worry about making a mess or spilling things because the water or the tea is just being caught by the water catcher and then you can serve your guests and that is the essence of gongfu brewing you can obviously it's got like a creaminess but also like a sappy and sweet tang of chewing on young sugarcane really really lovely so you can obviously adorn this setup with all sorts of beautiful handmade pots like this juni here or this niching you can get all sorts of other tea wear and kyusu's you can also get tea pets which act as infusion counters there's all sorts of lovely accessories that can you can build around this setup but i hope that you see that the trajectory of all of this beauty comes from simplicity the simplicity of leaf vessel and water i hope that this practical step-by-step tutorial has been useful to you if you want me to do any more of these step-by-step tutorials then please let me know in the comments section below what subjects you would like me to cover that's it tea heads check out our other videos taste rts wherever you are 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 drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 33,073

Keywords: tea, white tea, green tea, yellow tea, oolong tea, matcha tea, black tea, puerh tea, puer tea, pu erh tea, tea ware, teaware, gong fu tea, gong fu brewing, how to brew tea, brewing tea tutorial, gong fu tea tutorial, how to brew gong fu tea, guide to brewing tea, how to brew loose leaf tea, how to make better tea, bowl brewing tea, brewing tea without equipment, bowl tea, how to brew white, how to brew green, beginners guide to tea, how to brew oolong, brewing black tea

Id: rPJtA1PQkPU

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020