The Mini Green Tuocha Experiment

Pu-erh tea

4 cups of tuocha

I am no expert on pu-erh tea, but I’m learning. Over the past few months I’ve tried several loose leaf pu-erhs, as well as a small pu-erh cake I picked up from Ten Ren here in Melbourne. Last week, I made my latest pu-erh purchase: a small bag of mini green tuocha, sold by Tea Leaves (a local Australian chain of tea stores).

Today, I finally got a chance to make this for the first time. As I said, I’m no expert on pu-erh, and for a minute there I stopped and realized that I wasn’t really sure how to brew this. Ardent pu-erh aficionados tend to prefer the gong-fu style of brewing, but I have neither yixing nor gaiwan, so I am yet to venture into the world of gong-fu brewing. In The Story of Tea, the Heisses offer some broad parameters: 2 – 5 minutes with water around 93° – 100° Celsius. Two to five minutes is quite the range though, so I decided to conduct this little experiment.

The Experiment

This a very simple experiment, and one that you could apply to any tea if you want. Here’s what I did:

As suggested in The Story of Tea, I decided to use freshly boiled water. Lately I’ve been leaning towards using my Japanese porcelain tea set, so again I used this. I probably used about 300 ml of water, though that’s little more than a guess.

Four cups of the same tea, just poured at different stages in the brewing process.

The experiment is all about timing. I let the tea steep for a minute before pouring one cup, then waited. At the 2 minute mark, I poured another cup. I poured two more cups, one at 3 minutes and another at 3:30.

The first thing that’s apparent is how much the extra infusion time affects the brew’s colour. The first cup was a very light orange amber, which grew steadily darker with each consecutive cup — by the time I’d reached the fourth cup, the brew was almost black. Based on its colour alone, I was already anticipating that one to be a bit too strong.

Off to the tasting table. I was very glad to have my esteemed wife join me for this part of the experiment.

First up, the 1 minute brew: I could smell very little in this one, but Bec picked up a hint of woody, smokiness — like a bonfire on a farm, as she put it. The taste was on the weak side, with a sweetness bounded by the slightest earthiness. Bec, who ate an entire clove of garlic last night, couldn’t taste much at all.

Next came the 2 minute brew, which had a more intense smoky aroma about it. For Bec, it evoked images of old time, rustic places. I tasted it and found that it had grown earthier in that extra minute of brewing time. After a few sips, I thought I could taste something fruity. A few more sips. Dates!

I could taste those dates even more intensely on the third cup, which was starting to feel a bit too strong. I found it quite drying of the tongue, with more tannins, astringency and a slightly unpleasant sourness. Bec agreed that it wasn’t as nice as the second cup.

Then came the fourth cup. As I’d anticipated, this one was too strong. Far too strong, it turns out. “Yuck!” That was Bec’s reaction to her one and only sip. I tried it and while I think being familiar with pu-erh allowed me to put up with it a bit more, it was obviously far too strong. That astringency that was starting to emerge half a minute earlier was biting now. I ended up emptying half the cup on our beleaguered chili plant.

The 3 Lessons I Learned

It’s good to experiment: Don’t always go by the book (or the instructions on the packet). Experimentation is fun, and it will help you figure out how to make tea the way you like it, every time. Now that I know how much difference a couple minutes of infusing has, I’ll be very careful to time how long I infuse this tea for.

Timing matters: I have a tendency to be lazy about timing a lot of the time, but depending on the tea, it can make quite a considerable difference. Many teas turn out far too weak if you don’t give them long enough, and will make you gag if you steep them too long. Occasionally, you’ll come across a tea that just doesn’t seem to care how long you steep it, but those are in the minority.

Taste with someone: It was really fun tasting these teas with Bec. She would pick up a lot of smells that I would miss entirely, while I tended to be a bit more perceptive on the taste profiles. I loved how the tea would evoke vivid imagery for her. It didn’t do the same for me, but even just hearing how she was experiencing it allowed me to appreciate the tea’s depth a bit more.