Baking Beidou Rock Tea, part 2

We had perfect weather for sorting our wuyi rock tea, but we took longer than anticipated separating the ten kilograms we bought last June. Friends came who are interested in opening a tea shop in Dubai, and we enjoyed introducing them to the great diversity of China's teas. Fu tea one found smooth and delicious, while liuan guapian green tea he thought tasted like fatty meat! They both liked jasmine green tea and got some for their wives. Green tea is becoming popular as a dieting "digestif" in the Middle East, they said, but by green tea they mean the chalky infusion made with dry Lipton brand bags. The idea that green tea needs to be refrigerated to maintain not just its antioxidants but its flavor is something they were not familiar with. They add sugar to this green tea, not so much as they add to regular Lipton red (or black) tea. Another popular belief is that some teas tea ameliorate diabetes, something we have heard before from an Iranian customer.


Our friends left Beijing just as the rain came. Today it is clear again and the humidity has started to fall. It has reached 57%, still too humid for baking. So we will wait to bake our tea. While freezing green tea helps it last longer just like baking wuyi rock tea helps it maintain its clear clean taste, we have no worries about our wuyi rock tea spoiling because we wait to bake it. Wuyi oolong, or rock tea, is one of the driest oolong teas, and it quickly absorbs water if exposed to the air. Oolong tea, however, is not fixed at as high a temperature as green tea, so it maintains many of its natural antibiotic qualities and will not spoil so easily as green tea. Oolong tea does thin with time, and if it is not baked every one to two years it may also develop unpleasant bitter and astringent flavors. These can usually be baked out of the tea, creating ever more subtle layers of taste. Indeed a wuyi rock tea that does not taste good one year is bagged and put away to be sampled and baked again the following year, after which it may taste wonderful. The best wuyi rock teas are aged, but these are rarely found for sale on the open market. Unlike old dark tea which can be left on a high shelf and forgotten, old rock oolongs need to be periodically rebaked, and this makes them fabulously expensive.

Baking a wuyi rock tea for aging is different than preparing it for a near-term sale. There is an art to choosing the fuel, heat and duration of baking when aging wuyi rock teas. Baking slower a leaf will retain more subtlety. Baking with charcoal adds heavier flavors to the tea. There must be depth already inside the leaf if baking is to reveal more taste. Tea leaves picked in early spring have more sap so they provide more to work with. Tea leaves picked from older trees grown in rock in areas with greater biodiversity are also often fuller. The process has been compared to adding floors of taste by peeling off lesser layers. This is done through baking, and it is assuming one starts with a leaf amply fortified with minerals and sap. Wuyi rock tea from the best and oldest trees in Fujian will still loose its flavor and smell (especially in dry climates). To help seal the flavor inside requires baking. There is disagreement as to whether using charcoal is necessary. Some say the charcoal helps preserve the tea's flavor. Others say that the taste of the charcoal adds definition to a good tea. A man who sells us tea from a three hundred year old shuixian tree tells us he only uses charcoal with his young generic trees. Old trees and trees in unique locations have their own distinctive taste and so he bakes those electrically because he doesn't want to distort the natural taste of the tea. Every year we go early and watch him bake our tea before taking it back to keep in metal tins in Beijing. Because the tea we have acquired this year is from a textbook-perfect domain, we don't want to add any taste to it. Instead we will follow his methodology to electrically desiccate our leaves.

Again and again our tea teachers tell us neither to listen to others pontificate nor to read about tea but instead to drink tea alone and with friends, and to cure tea ourselves. By performing the relatively simple process of sorting and baking this year's rock tea we could buy more of the real stuff while paying less. Here we are going to log the process in as much detail as possible for comparison in future years. Perhaps sorting and baking the tea will also teach us some of tea's many secrets. The beidou no.1 tea leaves are not so unique in flavor as our shuixian because they are not from three hundred year old beidou trees. This beidou is over thirty years old and from an excellent location deep in the park, growing in the mist right out of the crumbling red rock. The location was chosen and the trees were planted by the man who knew dahongpao best. We infuse some of the unsorted maocha and find just a touch of hardness (which was not there when we tried the tea in June). This is from moisture that the leaves have sucked up from the air. The taste is still golden, a ghostly orange peel that immediately enters the head as is characteristic of beidou. Soft bitters rise slowly behind, overshadowing the first few infusions. It is this cloud we will look to transform, perhaps into a sourness, perhaps into a ring which will give form to the spacial qualities of the taste, adding to our tea's flavor what is called a level or floor. Each year we will then add a little more dimension through our baking regime.

Baking Beidou Rock Tea, part 1

Autumn weather has come early this year. August is cool and dry under blue skies. In this dry period our friends in Fujian are also baking their rock teas for the second or even third time. Humidity is the enemy of wuyi rock tea, creating an astringent, fuzzy taste in the otherwise clear dark oolong. Baking is done to dry the tea, and for lesser teas to also flavor or color them darkly. It should be done in dry weather. This year we have managed to track down a very special rock tea grove, which we tweeted happily about earlier in the summer. Trying to get the best price while ensuring quality we bought this just after it was picked, still unsorted, but great tasting already. The grove was planted by the almost legendary Yao Yue Ming in the 1980's after his other groves were destroyed in the cultural revolution. Known as the father of dahongpao, he was the first to systematically understand that beidou tea leaves gave dahongpao its defining physiological characteristic. Known as Beidou first generation, these were planted probably by grafting from the first descendants of the original six dahongpao trees. They may have come from the original six, themselves. Today we close the windows and doors. Turning on the air-conditioning we lower the humidity from 37% to 34%, then open the bag and remove handfuls of the lightly spiced leaves and branches. To increase its flavor oolong rock tea is picked and rolled and baked (the first time) while the leaves are still attached to the stems. This makes for more tasty tea because the leaves continue to draw in nutrients from the stems, but it also requires more delicate fingers to separate each leaf. Separated leaves can be categorized into three quality categories: yellow/green and flat, green/brown/black and rolled, consistent black/brown and tightly rolled. The most important distinction is between the leaves that have been correctly and tightly rolled and those that have remained flat. This will affect how the tea ages. Here are example of the three types of leaves still attached to their stems.

Here are more clues as to the importance of color, fundamental when understanding and categorizing tea, its flavors and quality. Left over twigs smell lovely, and we will use them to make summer pillows. It is slow going but we separate our precious leaves into three qualities. At one point the farmer calls and jokes that he stopped doing this himself long ago. We can hire people very cheaply. It is true that only with aching backs and color-strained eyes we finally separate four distinct piles: clockwise from the top left are twigs, yellow flat leaves, greener rolled leaves, and the darkest, most consistent, rolled leaves.

Our next step will be baking them for the last time this year to drive out some of the water still present.