Leaves

Interesting subject! I always think you can read tea leaves :)

1) I think you are probably right in that many of the teas that require heavier processing cannot use buds, but that is obviously not always the case. I think in the case of oolongs, it will be difficult to do what they do with the leaves with young buds. I suspect the taste profile will be completely changed. Having had an Indian oolong recently made mostly with buds, I have to say it tastes more like a black tea. I think it's probably because fermentation level is difficult to control with small buds? Puerh, and some other teas, on the other hand, are large by nature. Even a small puerh bud is big compared to a longjing bud.

2) Whole/part leaf depends a lot, afaik, on processing techniques. If a tea is heavily roasted, for example, it will be odd if it were still mostly whole leaves, as the process of roasting (and turning the leaves) will inevitably result in broken leaves. CTC or other machine processing will cause breakage, and so will manual process techniques that do the same. I think for some Japanese teas, at least, they roll it very, very vigorously, which I'd imagine will mean some leaves are more broken?

3) I think every tea has a particular colour pattern/hue. Colours do change though. A yuqian longjing should be yellowish from what I've seen before, but a stale longjing can also be yellowish (slightly different kind of yellow, but hard to tell unless you've seen them). Wuyi oolongs all look the same with the same blackish brownish tint, but when unfurled they can look very different. Puerh runs the gamut. Colour of dry leaves is a bad way to tell teas apart, IMHO. Spent tea leaves do reveal a lot more that way....

4) In the case of puerh, I think you can definitely have some clues with regards to storage condition just by looking at the spent leaves. A rough way of telling them apart is that wet stored teas are blacker, a little less flexible, with uneven colours and what not, while dry stored leaves are more likely to be brownish and more uniform in colour, as well as being a bit more flexible and retains a certain sense of freshness that wet stored teas don't. I wouldn't say this is all there is to it, but it is at least partly what you can use to tell storage condition apart.

5) AFAIK having bug bites on the leaf is an Oriental Beauty trademark... the bitten spots promote fermentation.

I think taking pictures of the spent leaves and storing them in an archive has been a useful exercise for me to compare teas and keep my memory fresh. Maybe you can do the same?

MarshalN

I'm constantly amazed at the behavior of tea leaves in a pot. I'll agree with your general conclusions but each pot is entertaining. I often guage brewing time by tea leaf behavior. When the leaves start to look water logged I pour. I just had some Yunnan silver needles and I'd say it took less than a minute for them to form a dam. They don't bob like the Fujian version. I can say each tea has it's own density. I also had a pot of BiLoChun and I could count the snails in my palm but the infused leaf wouldn't. If the infused leaf clings to the side of the pot when I finish pouring it means to me another infusion. Spent leaf will loose its stickyness and will fall back in the pot. Besides leaf in a pot you can tell much about lesser grades like fines and CTC. The smaller grades that can spin back up in the pot mean longer brewing times. The ones that don't shorter. I think each pot is a unique experience. The more action in the pot the more taste in the cup.

Jim

On Feb 25, 8:47 pm, "cha bing" wrote: ...I delete you...

Yes, the bug bites are the key to OB, but I don't think greater fermentation is what makes the difference. I once saw a scientific presentation that established experimentally (!) that the bug bites encourage the living leaf to produce greater amounts of some aromatic compounds. Presumably, from an evolutionary standpoint, these compounds are "intended" as a bug repellent. In any case, this happens in the living leaf, before any fermentation happens during manufacture.

/Lew

Speaking of diminished flexibility, I've noticed that with non-Pu'er heicha it's common to find spent leaves that are remarkably stiff. I sometimes wonder, did this leaf ever live? I don't recall running into this with cooked Pu'er, which I *think* is manufactured in a similar way. But who knows, really?

/Lew

Cha Bing/Marshall

What a fascinating topic. Very vast. I'll add my bits below for (1) and (3):

1. Oolong tea is made from slightly more matured leaves with a different chemical profile, that when processed, resulted in a richer fragrance. Hence the leaves are larger than green tea.

Black tea and (I think) pu-er teas are made from the Assam variety, which is faster growing and have larger leaves than the sinesis variety for the Chinese and Japanese green tea.

Contrary to what you said, shape is a big factor when classifying green tea leaves. Other ways of classifications are processing methods and regions of production.

1. Colour depends on many factors, such as origin and processing. White tea is white because it is covered with hairs, which tea makers left alone when they make them. Some green tea can appears white. Of course, black tea is black because of fermentation. Gyugaro is darker green because they are shaded away from the sun.

Longjing can have different colour because they are basically different type of longjing, as well as due to age as Marshall kindly mention.

For Xihu Longjing tea, the yellowish type is ShiFeng Longjing and is the most esteemed in China. The greenish type is known as MeiWu Longjing or just Xihu Longjing. They look better but taste less good.

They are lots of fake Shifeng Longjing - people would over pan fry them yellow to sell them as one.

Hope it adds to the discussion.

Julian

If by "black" you mean "fully oxidized", I'm afraid there are Chinese blacks ("red" in Chinese classification) that are made from small-leaf cultivars also used for greens and whites, e.g. Keemun (Qimen.) And I've read that the famous seeds taken from China and planted in Darjeeling for the best Indian black tea were C. sinensis sinensis.

/Lew

AFAIK, on non-OB teas, bug bites is an indication of less reliance on using insecticide by the farmer.

Thanks all for the very interesting posts. Tea seems so much more cerebal than that other popular caffeinated beverage (which I occasionally drink and appreciate greatly). I particularly liked the idea about watching how the leaves react to the water and the sides of the cup. I have read about the joys of watching certain green teas when brewed in a clear glass, but I have never thought much about how the way a tea reacts to water might tell me about the leaf.

I also like the idea of cataloguing tea photos. In fact, I began reading MarshalN's blog some time ago primarily because I found the photos so fascinating. (What kind of lighting do you use to take those pictures, anyway?)

At one point, when I first started drinking tea and trying to figure out what it was all about, I sorted through each spent pile of leaves to find the best representatives of each kind of tea I had. I took the leaves, pressed them in a book over night, and scotch taped them to a sheet of paper, which I proceeded to pull out and show to everyone in my office who hinted that they might like tea. Generally, the sheet of tea leaves may have been a bit over-the-top for the casual drinker (judging from the looks of concern I received whenever I brought it out). But the reason I did it, and that reason has been affirmed by these posts, is because having that visual reminder of where the brew came from somehow made tea-drinking seem more intriguing--something to ponder and figure out.

Anyone know of any books that have a strong photographic component, sort of like a field guide for tea drinkers? One thing that is clear from everyone's posts is that this subject is indeed (as Julian stated) "very vast." Creating my own log may take some time, especially since I never seem to have a camera ready when I am drinking tea.

I just found the above interesting article, which shows some great pictures of different oolong cultivars--leaves are indeed shaped very differently from one cultivar to the next.

Cha Bing

Great find.

The varieties of of tea shapes after processing are even greater. Broadly speaking they can be classified further into three types: broad/flat (e.g. dragonwell), rounded (e.g. gunpowder) and thread- like. A Chinese tea book even classified them into eleven shapes - just for green tea alone. Quite staggering.

Pretty much of the books I use are Chinese, and it is such a hassle to order from China. Sorry wasn't able to give any references to help.

Julian

How does the opacity of the tea when it is poured define the quality, like for example I had a high quality japanese sencha and it was light green yellow and very clear then I had one which was lower quality and it was a little cloudy. I s this true of all teas in general?

No, not even for sencha, in my opinion. A tea can be cloudy because of the tiny "hairs" characteristic of buds and young leaves.

I think you'll have a hard time coming up with a rule, however trivial, that really applies to the whole range of tea.

/Lew

Yes, there's a genre of Pu'er often called Silver Tips that's basically all-bud. But that isn't all; lots of cakes and bricks have buds in the mix along with mature leaves. And who knows, with Pu'er I wouldn't be surprised if there were other good reasons for the liquor being cloudy. (Not to mention that virtually all cooked Pu'er is cloudy.)

/Lew

what about pu-erh, i usually look if tea is clear or cloudy but there are pu-erh with buds too, probably not too many of them as i have only one or two with buds and haven't tried them for a while.

once bought same cake with and without buds, of course ancient wild, etc.. :) with buds was more expensive but jury is still out which of them is better, at least for me it make sense to get cakes without buds.

for cooked i have some pretty good ones that tea doesn't look cloudy just dark, if you can see thru dark :)

also read, don't remember the source, that by pu-erh tea liquor you can judge factory processing skills, like kill green process,it should be clear - if cloudy no good, maybe it was about cakes without buds.

Interesting, As far as black teas go, certain regions or qualities are rated better for iced tea as they do not cloud up when iced, I was told argentina has a very good base tea for these ice teas. I have just started learning about tea and actually find all the different aspects of it quite fascinating.

Not really. Cloudiness is usually the result of dissolved tannins linking up together and not staying dissolved. It an also be the result of hard water.

A tea that is more tannic will tend to be more cloudy. If you ice tea down, it will tend to become cloudy too since the tannins don't stay in solution as well at the lower temperature.

For a sencha, I could believe that the higher quality ones would have less tannin, but the same may not be the case for an assam.

--scott

Argentina has a lot of very cheap low grade tea without a lot of big tannins. The Lipton's blend sold in the US is has a huge amount of that stuff, presumably because it's marketed to people who will ice a lot of it and don't want to spend much money.

--scott

Thanks scott,

While we on the subject of leaves, I had drank two different batches of Jasmine pearl yesterday, some really nice ones too, very white tippy ends, delicious. The two teas were hard to tell apart other than the one batch had smaller leaves , than the other but interestingly I left them to dry on the edge of the table and notice that they shriveld up like new plant growing from a seed, The base was dark green and then slowly shaded over to white in a curled looking shape . What was different here was that the smaller leaf had a much lighter or whiter tip than the large leaf . Is there a reason for this, is the white an indication of a higher quality. the jasine had sweet fragrance and it cam e out on the tongue. i have seen around some tiny bal and some big ones too. I intend to try em all as this is god drinking. I have enjoyed leaving the bals in a sealed bottle sparkling water over night, makes very refreshing drink.