About a year ago I started to drink tea more seriously, and mostly I've been drinking oolongs that I've purchased online from places like enjoyingtea.com and theteafarm.com. I'm getting a little bored with their offerings and I'm curious about moving up to higher grade stuff. But, before I do that and start spending more money I want to clarify the steeping of Oolong.
I feel like there is a lot of contradictory stuff out there on this. I originally read that you want 1tsp per 6oz water, which means about
1 and a third tsp per cup and temperatures around 190F, which I estimated by boiling the water and then letting it sit for a minute.
But I also see that another method is to use a lot more tea, and higher steeping temperature, for less time. Is this the more correct way to do it? Is the other way simply an adaptation of black tea brewing for Oolong, not necessarily the best way to steep Oolong? If I was to try the second method, how much tea should be used?
I drink loose leafs for about 6 years and I've never had good results for my taste with using recommended amounts of leaf. I use much less, but that depends on the tea. For green oolongs especially I can't stand using too much leaf. I use about 1.5-2 spoons (I don't measure just drag it out with a chopstick until it looks about right) to a 3 cup pot. For dark oolongs it's a different matter, I could use a bit more. This depends very much on your taste and on whether you drink the tea with some kind of food. I usually prefer tea just by itself and then I don't like if the flavor is brewed too strongly. If I have sandwiches or something sweet along, then stronger tea is good, maybe even with milk, but good freshly ground coffee is even better then.
I don't like the taste of water that was cooled down from a boil. I have a pot now that's got a dark enamel on the inside, therefore I can't see if bubbles are forming and how big they are, therefore what I do is this: I wash my hands and when I think the water may be ready, I hold my hand over the kettle and feel if the steam rising is hot enough. I find this way of measuring to be most practical and precise for me, but it may not look very nice if you're brewing tea for other people and then you might want to time it. Or get a glass kettle ($30 at specialteas) or an electric pot with adjustable temp (around $40 at uptons), but I haven't used an electric pot so I'm not sure if it will make water taste differently, but when I used an enamel kettle on an electric heater, it made the tea taste different in a way that I don't like so I stopped doing that. I'm afraid that may be an issue for me with electric kettles, but many other people use them without problems.
Try if you can feel a difference when you stop water before boiling.
This means you should use a gaiwan or even better a zisha clay 'gong fu' tea pot. They sell those on the site you mentioned. The idea is to use so much leaf that it will unfurl to fill whole or almost whole volume of said pot or gaiwan. Naturally this means using much more leaf, and you also need to use high grade leaf. This means it's an expensive pleasure, kind of like espresso with coffee. It costs much more, it's more hassle to do but the tea will taste and especially smell much better if all goes right. It depends on the tea, I got some lousy results with an otherwise fine keemun I have. I had excellent results with some yunnans, with some oolongs from adagio and an ok result from another honey phoenix oolong, but I almost never do this because I don't have a way to heat water in my room and I don't want to keep running into the kitchen every couple of minutes, and I don't have a vacuum bottle that'd be large enough for this.
Besides, a really good high grade tea that is made properly is already so tasty that I don't really wish to make any improvement over that. However if it was more convenient for me I might have used the gong-fu method often..
No, it's not an adaptation from black to oolong. It's an accepted way of making black, pu-erh and oolong teas and in fact it's most often recommended for oolongs. One issue, though, that I ran into with gong- fu'ing oolongs is that if the oolong is a green type or between green and dark, it always brews too quickly for me so that even if I pour out the water in a few seconds, it's already too astringent for my tastes. But with a dark oolong it works perfectly for me. Maybe others will recommend a way around this. Using less leaves maybe?
Get a really tiny gaiwan or a gong-fu pot and put about 1/4 to 1/3 volume of dry leaf; again this depends on how big the leaves are and how firmly they will pack, if they are very loose then you can even fill half the volume. When it's brewed, it will expand to fill most of the pot. Then do a series of steeps, around 6 to 8, starting with a
30-45 second steep and then gradually increasing the time. As I said with greenish oolongs I overbrew even when I do a couple seconds. But as I also mentioned it seems that I prefer much lighter brews than other people.
There are online tutorials for brewing tea using gong-fu method, they will give you different times, amounts, etc, but that's because all teas are different and tastes of tea fanatics are also different and therefore you tend to optimize for your favorite tea, pot, taste when you write a guide.
Generally, in regard to not being sure if you're brewing the tea the right way.. Until recently, I was always wondering if I'm doing things just right. Sometimes tea would be perfect, at other times it was excellent, often just good and pretty often not too good. When I tried higher grade teas I found that they are much more reliable. They are always great and it's hard to mess it up, even if you do something wrong it gets only a little worse, not much worse. Medium range teas are at times almost perfect but when the temp is a bit off, or when they cool off in a few minutes, they quickly become ordinary or plain bad. I'm never really sure I'll get the next brew right. So, now I plan to go back to medium grade teas and try a bunch of them and see if some of them are close to reliability of the top notch teas..
Other tangential (seemingly) things can be as important, though. Like the water you use, the tea pot, whether you wash it after use _including_ the lid, preheating the pot can be very effective..
There isn't really a "correct" way to do it. Oolong represents a very wide range of degrees of roasting and oxidation (from very close to green tea to very close to red (black) tea), and there are a lot of different styles of making tea.
I usually use a medium or high amount of leaf in a small brewing vessel (2-5 oz) and drink multiple infusions.
Temperature isn't necessarily related to the amount of leaf; it has to do with lots of factors (type of tea, how you're pouring the water, how many infusions you've already done, personal preference, etc.). Experiment and see what tastes good to you. I usually use boiling or very-near-boiling water to open the leaf, even with fairly green oolongs, and then slightly cooler water later on. Some people say that lower temperature water will make lower grade tea taste better while hotter water may be required to bring out the nuances of a particular tea.
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