Roasting stale TGY Oolong

I've had nice results in a toaster oven at very low heat: 200F. To be conservative, as in not over-roasting, you might try heating it only until you start to smell a very pleasant aroma. Then turn off the heat; you might want to leave the tea in the (toaster) oven for a while as it cools. I don't want to pretend to be an expert at this kind of thing, but it's saved some near-useless teas for me.

I'm really curious about exactly what is being achieved, though. Presumably the water content is being reduced. I've often heard that moisture damage is just as bad as unwanted oxidation, but I don't believe I've seen a chemical explanation of how moisture harms stored tea.

/Lew

As I wrote before it is also possible to microwave old tea (including black (red). Approx exposure - 5-7 g of wulong for about 45sec - 1 min. You may notice some smokiness afterwards - I would shorten the exposure just "below" the tea starts gettin' that smoky scent. After my initial post I get the whole bunch of people all over the world writing me about their experiments with microwaving their old teas, including some serious tea merchants. Everyone had his/her own interesting experience but all were positive and intrigued. You may want to try that yourself.

Sasha.

My trials with the microwave proved unsuccessful. Again, I'm using that green Ceylon I picked up real cheap. Pan-toasting brings out the goodness, but microwaving just a couple grams, even for 3 minutes, failed to produce any roasted scent. In fact, the tea barely got warm.

--crymad

The major source of heat in a microwave is from the vibration of bipolar molecules, mainly water.

Microwaves do more than that, see:

But mainly there's the heat from water doing cartwheels, or so goes the theory that was explained to me.

If your tea had taken on a lot of moisture, the microwave would steam it right back out, which isn't the same thing as applying a dry heat.

Speaking of stale tea, there's an import foods market in my town that's run by a guy who is slowly losing his mind. Not an asian foods market, he carries a lot of european, south american, etc, but asian makes up probably a third of the store.

The store and owner are both a bit of a mess. It's not uncommon to find him working the till in his pajamas - and he will ALWAYS attempt to tell you a corny joke, and say something depressing about his business. He's creepy to be around, so business is quite slow.

Pursuant to this, his oversight of the inventory sometimes more closely resembles a curatorship than a proprietorship. I suspect that the vast majority of his teas have been on the shelf for years and years.

A friend says she once went there in search of papadams and found that every package on the shelf - about 6 brands - had live or dead maggots in it.

So i bought a 100g bag of 'fu-jian oolong' from him for $2. It appeared that the pull date had been wiped off. Bag was metalized poly, black and gold printing on a white background. iirc there was a drawing of a horse pulling a chariot. Not vacuum packed, anyone's guess whether it was nitrogen flushed - I don't read chinese. I don't have the bag anymore.

The leaves were large and appeared dark enough to have been fully fermented, but the brew was dark yellow, without any hint of red.

What struck me about it was how smokey it was. And not in the lapsang souchong camphoric smokey sort of way, more like someone steeped an ash tray full of the butts of cheap cigarettes.

Stranger, the tea at the top of the bag was the strongest in this sense, and was undrinkable unless i washed it with about a 10 second steep, but the further i got down into the bag, the weaker it got. I threw it away with maybe 10 grams of flavorless bits of leaf still in it.

At first I found the smoke flavor to be noxious, but for some reason it grew on me and i enjoyed it.

Since oolongs aren't usually that way, I'm curious what was going on, what i was actually drinking, etc. But not curious enough to walk into that store again and have a chat with the owner about his bedroom slippers.

Is that just what happens to oolong after sitting in a sealed bag for a decade? Or, knowing what *variety of oolong it really was, maybe i can get something reputable with a similar flavor.

Your microvawe may have a feature that does not allow for small loads. Put

1/4 of a glass of water next to the tea and increase the time for 2-3 min (water will boil, but its no problem. Simple arithmetic should have alerted you - normally a MW would be between 500 and 900 watts, your tea at say 5% humidity has just 100-300 milligrans of water. Obviously its not whats going on in your MW.

Couple of gramms of tea in 3 min MW exposure will normally get almost charred.

Sasha.

snipped-for-privacy@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com5/13/05

13: snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com

In a wok is fine. Moderate heat. Keep it moving. Go by smell. If you care about this tea, err on the side of caution. Leave a little behind to "over-roast" just to give yourself an idea of what that means. Most important: Keep it moving as it roasts.

Michael

Lewis snipped-for-privacy@panix1.panix.com5/13/05 14: snipped-for-privacy@panix.com

I used Lew's toaster-oven technique, but my tea took on a peculiar pork chop smell. Any ideas why?

Begs/invites the question of what happens when we roast anything, I suppose.

Michael