Why You Should Switch to Gong Fu Tea Brewing

hey tea heads this is don from mayleaf in this video why you should switch to gungfu tea brewing in this video i'm going to be tasting a raw puerty and i'm going to be giving you my thoughts on why gongfu tea brewing is the superior way of brewing most teas in terms of the quality in the cup this video is going to go under the basic tea educations and the single tea tastings playlists if any point in time you enjoyed 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 i know a lot of you out there already do gong foo brewing you already know what's up but keep watching because you are my gongfu ambassadors i want you to go out and spread the word about guang fu brewing if you're not doing so already and hopefully some of the things that i'm gonna say will help to convince some of your friends to go gong foo so before we get into it i'm going to tell you a little bit about the tea that we're drinking today this is young gushu 2016 the successor of yung gu shu 2015 every year we try to bring in uh raw gushu puati for those that don't know gushu is ancient tea tree material puerti and these teas have been selected especially um for their ability to be drunk young so this is why we call it young goo shoes so young gushu 2015 came from ching mai mountain it was a very successful harvest for us and i think the last few packs are still in stock but we're about to run out and so young gushu 2016 is now in stock so let's scope this tea so you know a little bit about it scope stands for season cultivar origin picking and elevation the season for this tea is spring this is a spring 2016 tea the cultivar variety is the da yejung asamika variety which is the classic pure variety for the most rich and complex puertis o stands for origin as i said we previously got our 2015 young gushu from ching mai mountain this one comes from shiguri mountain now we tried to find another one from chiang mai mountain for some reason i don't know how yupua heads felt out there but ching mai this year in 2016 wasn't great for us this year so we searched around a lot and we found a worthy successor in the very much revered she mountains in yunnan province so this comes from shigui the picking this is a bud and up to three or four leaves the amount of leaves they pick doesn't really matter because it's always sorted out afterwards so they take out the huang pian the yellow leaves so any leaves that are not tender enough to make tea they'll take them out but it's usually three or four leaves finally the elevation this is an 800 meter elevation tea so we've scoped this tea and we're going to be tasting it in a little bit but before that i want to give you my thoughts as to why gongfu brewing is better than western brewing now i'm not going to be talking today about lots of aspects in gongfu brewing that i love for example the social aspects of gongfu brewing or the aesthetics of gongfu brewing instead what i want to focus on today is simply does gong foo brewing produce a more delicious tea many of you don't know this but i used to work in the music industry i was a sound engineer and producer so i spent many years of my life in sound studios recording musicians mixing music and it's interesting because as my passion has turned to tea i've noticed similarities and i would like to present to you an analogy in terms of tea and music which i hope demonstrates why gongfu brewing is superior to western brewing so the leaves the leaves represent the musical instruments there's no point in producing great music or you can't produce great music if the musical instruments are no good you can get plywood violin or you could get a stradivarius so the leaves are the starting point that's the musical instrument the producers and farmers out there in the east they are the musicians so you can have amazing instruments but if you don't have the right musicians it's not going to be able to produce the right sound so you need the musicians and the musical instruments right now the brewer that's you the brewer is the producer what i used to do your job is to try to basically take the musicians and the musical instruments and get that sound and express it in the way that the musicians had intended to do that you have some variables the first is t-wear and i equate t-wear to the sound equipment either the recording equipment or the playback equipment you can have the most incredible music but if you're listening to it on tiny headphones it's not going to be that great right so t-wear is really fundamental and i know a lot of people out there that are teaware obsessed understand what i mean you get so much more enjoyment if you find the right t-web so t-wear is the equipment then you have three brewing parameters the temperature the water-to-leaf ratio and the steeping time the temperature affects what levels of different compounds are extracted from the leaves and so in my analogy i equate it very much similar to equalization so you know on uh hi-fi's or any um nice audio equipment you'll have bass you'll have treble you'll have mid-range you may have multi-band uh equalizers where you can tweak the levels of each band to make a perfectly balanced and sweet sound so the temperature is equated to the equalization the steeping time in other words how long you brew for is equated to the volume how loud you're turning the music up now if you don't get the equalization right it doesn't matter how loud or how soft it is it's not going to sound right similarly even if you get the equalization right if you turn it too loud it distorts and the sound starts to become fuzzy similar with t it's exactly the same thing so getting the right steeping time is very important and now finally the water to leaf ratio and this is where gong food brewing is key because gong fu brewing for those that don't know is the the main difference between gongfu brewing and western brewing is the amount of leaf that you use to water so in front of me i've got the amount of leaf that i would use for gong fu brewing for 150 mil this is about 7.5 grams of young gushu 2016 and here i've got the amount that i would be using for western style brewing for the same amount of water so 1.5 grams for 150 ml so 7.5 for 150 ml gong fu style and this is 1.5 grams per 150 mil this is western style so you can see visually the difference in the amount of leaves that you use and when we go back to that analogy with music the difference is the richness of the sound so if you imagine that every one of these leaves is a violin so you can imagine that a smaller number of violins maybe a quartet of violence is going to produce a different richness of sound compared to a whole symphony or to a you know a whole string section maybe 24 violins you are never no matter how much you turn up the volume you will never be able to get the same richness of sound from the four violins as you would from the 24 violins it's just not possible and this richness in terms of flavor and in terms of texture is the key difference as to why gong foo brewing is the best way to get the most delicious tea and i want to ex i want to not just explain that to you theoretically but i want to show you so let's start brewing right i have here my gongfu guru those of you who know us know the gong food guru very well so we have our tea tree here and you know what gong foo brewing can be as complicated or as simple as you want so don't get too hung up at the beginning if you're just starting out and going through brewing on whether or not you need all the tea wear because you don't obviously it's nice to have it but you can start just by literally increasing the amount of leaf you're using to water ratio so here i have two 150 ml pots and what i'm going to be doing is making sure all the variables are identical except for time and water to leaf ratio so i'm going to be putting in let's do this in here in the western brew style my 1.5 grams of leaf here and in here i'm going to be putting my 7.5 grams of leaf now obviously because i am putting about five times the amount of leaf in the gongfu style i'm going to be brewing the western style five times as long in order to equalize the strength now this is to show to you that it doesn't matter how much longer you brew you will never get the same richness so i have here boiling water so nearly 100 degrees or to about 210 fahrenheit now we're going to give them both a quick rinse first so that will heat up the tea wear make sure we get a nice even brew and it will pour away any of the broken leaves if there are any but these leaves are really nice and whole so that gets poured away same here right so we're going to be doing 100 seconds here we go and we start there we go 100 seconds and then this one here i'm going to be brewing for 20 seconds you can hear that going i wish it didn't have a sound anyway no matter oh can i turn it down i can good all right so we're gonna allow that to infuse and what i'm trying to do is achieve the same kind of color infusion and a similar kind of volume so remember we're turning the volume up every every second that we're leaving this to brew we're turning the volume up but what i hope that will notice is that it doesn't matter about the volume the taste and the richness will be different so 40 seconds in time for me to smell these leaves a bit more it's got an incredible like molasses and salted caramel it's also got some of the appleiness of the jingmai but it's more of a cooked apple and it's got a little bit of kind of humid forest you know the classic yunnan forest that that humid uh warm summer forests but that cooked apple and sea salt and caramel kind of like a toffee apple it's really really nice how we doing all right so we are nearly there so that's 80 seconds i want to do this quite geekily make sure i get this right otherwise i know i'm gonna get some comments out there saying i didn't do it properly so now we're up to 90 seconds and we are ready to pour okay so that's my western style brewed youngshu 2016. now let's do the same here let's pour this in and we are going to be doing 20 seconds here while it's still going so i can see where we're at i'm excited to taste this tea has come recently about um it arrived about three or four weeks ago but i haven't had a real chance to to sit down and have a session with it yet so here we go so that's 20 seconds let's see first of all whether or not the color is about the same i will show it the camera this goes away take the lid off right let me just pause this for a second get back to my camera screen here make sure everything's in focus right here we go i'm going to bring this to you and then focus it so that's the westin and this is the gongfu and i think i've done not a bad job there not a bad job they're pretty similar in terms of color although you know what i can already see and i don't know if you can probably it's a bit difficult but i have the light going through these uh tea liquors and i can already see that this one here just looks much thicker just has more of a thickness to it you know how they say with wine that some wines just leave a nice kind of streak on the glass it just has a thicker body to it let's give it a taste so what should i taste first let's taste the westin first cheers everyone cheers tea heads well if i will serve this in a restaurant and you know restaurants always serve western style it really winds me up but i would be quite disappointed because i'm not getting too much the color of the liquor looks nice the texture is quite flat i am getting some taste kind of um a slight fruity taste like a asian pear but that warm butterscotchy salted salted caramel aroma is certainly not coming through i'm left with very little sensation in terms of any kind of grip in the mouth and it's just tasting very um yeah it's tasting quite flat let's go with this one gongfu brood i can already see just by looking at the bubbles you know one of the great ways to to figure out texture in terms of tea is not just even before you put it in your mouth when you're pouring it you see little bubbles and the way that they kind of move on the surface demonstrates a lot about the thickness when you see that it's kind of jelly-like it has a much thicker texture let's give it a taste a world of difference so now the texture is very lubricating slightly oily thicker and the taste is okay so i'm getting that butterscotch that warm salty um dark caramel and i'm getting a slight um pear refreshment not apples so much but more pear and um more minerality so much more texture when i swallow i'm feeling that that grip on the on at the back of my throat that grip and this just just the sensation that there is there's a lot of minerality that there's a lot going on my tongue is starting to kind of react actually physically it's kind of puckering a little bit and tingling a little bit so it's it's really giving me this this intense tea experience and remember as you drink more it'll build up more and more flavor as you lay down layer upon layer upon layer of the minerals and all the good stuff which is in the tea i don't really want to go back to this one but i will really it tastes very very weak it tastes um quite flat it has the minerality sure it's got some structure of course it has some flavor and the flavors are nice but the level i mean if you go back to the music analogy it's even more than just richness it's just it's like you know you've bought tickets to a concert and you you're in the car park versus being in the auditorium you can kind of hear it it's there but it's it's just not very loud and it's a bit muffled and the texture and the the the base and the feeling in your body the physical sensation of the music is very very muted you're only getting a kind of whisper of what it should be compared to this one the gongfu way of brewing much thicker much juicier now i'm in the auditorium now i'm tasting or i'm hearing the music properly it is just a world of difference and those of you who brew gongfu style i know you know all of this already because once you go gongfu you really really don't go back it's one of those things i implore everybody out there try gong food brewing just you don't have to buy the whole set you don't have to go crazy and spend lots of money on tea wear just take a lot of leaf and don't be scared because you know i see people and they're putting little pinches of leaves in and they're kind of going i don't want to waste it's very expensive tea i don't want to waste it but you are wasting it by doing that you really are because you're not getting the full flavor of the tea and instead you're getting a dumbed down weakened diluted version and the farmers the producers the sellers all that we're trying to do is to try to show you how wonderful this tea is and instead what you're doing is producing or playing that music back over really really bad headphones at a really low volume and it's just not going to give you the flavor that we want you to taste so you're not wasting tea if you're using a lot of leaf believe me just keep infusing it keep hitting it with water and you will really experience the tea your knowledge your your ability to taste the tea will improve everything will improve if you go gongfu style so please go gongfu and those of you who brew gongfu you are the gongfu ambassadors i want you to spread the word about gongfu brewing really tell your friends get them to understand that this is the way of brewing tea this is not some speciality way this is not some you know ultra geeky only for the higher echelons of tea drinkers way this is the way that you should be brewing tea so i'm gonna keep drinking this oh i'm just getting this nice jasmine jasmine um hui gun this jasmine sweetness which is rising from my throat mmm it's a soft it's quite soft finish soft to dry but i'm getting this amazing jasminey floral orchid that floral sweetness rising from my throat beautiful delicious i'm gonna keep drinking this i hope that i've done my utmost to convince you to brew gonfu style that's it tea 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 are any videos that you would like us to make if you're ever in london then please come and 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 don may from may leaf thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from the tea bags keep drinking the good stuff gongfu style and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 112,847

Keywords: tea, gongfu brewing, gong fu brewing, gong fu tea, gongfu tea, chinese tea, puerh, puer pu erh, raw puer, raw pu erh, gushu puerh, how to brew tea, how to brew gong fu tea, mei leaf, don mei, chinalife, sheng puerh, sheng pu erh, gongfu tea ceremony, tea ceremony, chinalife tea bar

Id: lNO_v8L2vI4

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2016