How To Steep Black Tea - Darjeeling First Flush

hi today I'm going to show you how to make a good darjeeling tea and I have selected our first class Darjeeling tea from single yes debt now this is a very unique tea because it is it was made in 2008 that's all more than 10 years ago you must be wondering how how this tea lasted so long the reason is because I wanted to test this out I wanted to keep this Darjeeling tea for 10 years and see how it turns out now we always talk about the keeping qualities of tea and here's the secret about good tea if you make the tea correctly or follow the principles of good tea making you are not with an excellent tea which would last 10 15 even 20 years if it is preserved well preservation of tea is a two-step process one it has to be made right and secondly it has to be stored correctly it has to be stored in a climate-controlled environment with very less humidity so an air-conditioned building would be perfect in your home you would keep it in a cupboard but never in the refrigerator because the refrigerator has moisture and it also has food smell and he will easily absorb that so today this Darjeeling tea is still excellent and in fact it has an enhanced flavor it is an improved flavor it's like a vintage Darjeeling that's what I would call it a vintage - actually a 2008 singly estate first flush Darjeeling available on our website only a only limited amount of tea is available so I'm going to show how to make this tea because it's it has to be treated differently from other teeth first-class teas any way less oxidized than normal traditional black teas now simply a state is in Darjeeling district and Darjeeling district is in the northern part of India at the foothills of the Himalayas and it's well known reputed world over as the champagne of teas but the champagne of teas are only manufactured during certain time of year and that is in spring from about the end of march to about the end of April during which time you get the first pick for the season that's called the first flush and then the second pick for the season is called the second flush the difference between the two is that the first trustees are even less oxidized because the climate is such recovering from winter these tea bushes just starting to grow and produce new leaves and this would go on for right through the year kill about the end of November but that's it during December January and February it stays dormant and there's no growth there's no harvesting there is no production but in spring when it starts to grow it will produce very tender leaves and because of the soil conditions in Darjeeling itself and because of the climatic conditions it's perfect for making very very high-quality flavor the manufacturing process is very complicated and I am NOT going to details of that but suffice to say that it requires expertise and certainly there has been a lot of expertise to make this deal so I will talk about about it a little more as we infuse the tea but for now I'm going to show you what the tea looks like hold it up to the camera this tea is looks very much like an ordinary black tea but if you look closer you will find there are some particles of leaf that are greenish it has a greenish hue the greenish hue is because the the the those particular leaves are less oxidized when it when it's fully oxidized it turns black but if it is less oxidized there's a greenish hue in the in the tea you see that in very commonly in green teas so but this is not a green tea but there are some particles which are which resemble green tea and that is a characteristic of first flush Darjeeling tea there'll be less of that in the second flush Darjeeling but it certainly is Pradhan is is very noticeable in the first flush nitrogen so I'm going to weigh out 2 grams for 8 ounces and since this pot is 16 ounces I'm going to weigh out four grams of tea now you would ask why four grams of tea the usual measurement for black tea is 2 grams for 8 ounces of water now when you say 2 grams or 4 grams or whatever the weighting in terms of teaspoons how do you measure that well roughly a spoon like this decides a spoon of this size would be about a gram but again it all depends on the type of tea there are some teas that some tea leaves that are very large there are some tea leaves which are very very small so how do you measure that it comes through experience the more you play around with it the better it is never mind if you make a mistake about too much to you but it is important for a tea like this that you get the measurements right and the weights right so we are going to weigh out four grams of Kate that's 3.1 grams there we go that's that's 4 grams and as I told you in an earlier segment I like to use glassware because you can actually see the key leaves unfurling when they are put in water and the color also is visible through glassware so this is a 16-ounce glass teapot available on our website it's called the 16-ounce conventional glass teapot the temperature of water is very important and as I said we are going to use 195 degrees for this tea the Darjeeling teas although they are considered black teas as I said they're less oxidized and therefore it could be technically called an oolong tea but the Italian teas are never called along teas although they are semi oxidized and 195 degrees is about right you can can go down possibly to about 185 degrees but this particularly I like to keep it at 195 so let's fill up water making sure that I don't spill anything these have tiny perforations at the bottom of the infuser to let them to let the water out but when you use small leaf teas it could get blocked so yeah yeah now I'm going to hold this up to you so that you can see the color right now it's more like a yellowish orange and you can see the tea leaves unfurling later you will see that the leaves have opened out a lot more now I'm going to stick this at 3 for 3 minutes I'm not the traditional 5 minutes that I would use for a normal black thing again it's because of the uniqueness of this first class tea so three minutes is what I'm going to brew this act and you will see the color getting a little darker as time proceeds now this tea is available on our website it's called single estate first flush Darjeeling tea it's available in a four ounce package or if you want it in a pack in a tin we can do that also now again as I said the characteristic of the Darjeeling tea especially this particular tea is because I have preserved it for 10 years under controlled conditions to make it a vintage tea so what happens during this process now a normal team has less than three percent moisture a good Darjeeling tea would have at the time of at the time it's meant you probably have only about one percent one-and-a-half percent of moisture so it's considered fully fully dried but as you keep it longer it absorbs a little bit of moisture he went under controlled conditions it just absorbs very very my new amount of moisture and at the tip at the end of ten years I would reckon that it has gathered about another two two or two three percentages of moisture so this tea would probably have roughly four to five percent of moisture so what it does to the tea is that it mellows the tea so instead of a high quality when in spite of her instead of a very high quality I'm sorry instead of instead of instead of making instead of tasting very greenish as some first-class Darjeeling's do reminiscing offer of a green tea these this one has mellowed and therefore you will see that even the colour is a little darker than a regular first flush Darjeeling tea you can see the color changing now it is it's darker than what it was and the leaves are unfurling so it's almost taking the whole the the whole tea infuser the space of the whole infuser and here we are it's ready so I will slowly take the the infuser out I get the aroma I went up to here it's wonderful aroma typical of a thirst flush dodging and this is what the infusion looks like it's a little greenish in color that's because it's less oxidized than a black tea very uniform in the sense that all the particles are evenly oxidized yeah that's a beautiful golden color very much like traditional Darjeeling tea and the truth of the pudding means they say is in the eating in this case the truth of the pretty truth of the tea is in the testing so I'm going to pour myself a cup of excellent first flush Darjeeling tea from simple estate and there again here we are that's the beautiful color that you can see and when you taste it I would expect it to be full of flavor a very unique flavor of the Darjeeling first flush teas and I would expect it to be smooth and not bitter although the oxidization has been low because we have made it correctly with the steeping time of only three minutes and using the right amount of tea and using the right amount of water at the right temperature I am going to expect this tea to be just outstanding Cheers it's truly amazing every time I have this tea I think to myself the amount of work I wanna amount of expertise that has gone into making this tea on singly estate 2008 it's more than ten years ago I don't know I've never been there but I bet those that the factory manager and the estate manager would have been a source killed to have produced this tea and I congratulate them and I did convey to them at the time i purchased the tea in 2008 that this was a very very high quality tea and and and i have preserved it and they would be very pleased to know that that even after ten years or longer that it is even even better than what it was so cheers to single estate and it's tough and the high very high standard of manufacture I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope to see you again soon bye

Channel: Lalith Paranavitana

Views: 838

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Id: LMoz83UpAs8

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020