Hi, let me share my standard sampling ritual with the group before I post some of my ehem ... "reviews". Sampling gear: some 4 and 6 oz Gaiwans, lots of chinese 1 and 2 oz sampling cups, chinese aroma cups, 3 oz "cooling" cup, strainer, porcelain "boat" to keep the temp. of the gaiwan stable (if needed), IR thermometer, digital scale, immersion heater, hiking stove & titanium spoon (travel gear), ...
Initial sampling routine:
- taking a digital pic of the dry leaves for the records
- give them a "dry blow - DB" - put about 3-5 g leaves in the palm of your right hand, place left hand over right hand to form a cavity for the leaves, hold your hands thumbs up, blow between your thumbs or the left thumb and left index finger in order to slightly moisten the leaves so they release a bit of their flavour. Open your hands and sniff away. Write down notes.
- weighing the necessary amount of leaves
- boil water
- prewarm gaiwan
- empty gaiwan into s. cups
- put leaves in G.
- watch the water temp. and pour water into gaiwan if ready
- slightly agitate gaiwan and pour samples into sampling cups #1-4 after (2.5)-3-3.5-4-4.5 mins., if I'm in the mood I use my chinese aroma cups
- now I first sniff the wet leaves and make notes. When the tea has cooled down a bit I start slurping away, beginning with the shortest steeping. Depending on the tea I sometimes transfer the contents of the sample cup into a 3 oz "cooling" cup, or make use of my titanium spoon, shhhhhllllllllp (producing sounds like a Japanese on speed slurping soba) Then I move to the next cup and so on. After finishing the sample cups, and writing down some notes I sniff the now slightly colder leaves and make notes. I usually leave the leaves in the gaiwan (lid on top) and come back later for some more sniffing and a picture of the cold leaves (again many a surprise here). Sometimes I also leave some of the tea to cool, to gain additional impressions of the teas spectrum, especially after I found that some few Darjeeling Oolongs lost almost all of their flavor when allowed to cool down, tsk tsk ...
I really don't know if anybody else samples Darjeelings or other teas that way but this has always worked fine for me and some of the local professionals here enjoyed the show :-). Alternatively, with enough tea at hand I sometimes play around with my trusty old 10 oz silver teapot and use 4 of the chinese 3 oz cups as sampling cups, everything else done the same way. This pretty simple brewing method allows for parallel tasting especially of those complex high grade Darjeelings like some of the 2005 seconds and Oolongs I had the pleasure to try. The best set of steeping times to start with would be 2 min 45 sec,
3'15'', 3'45'', and 4'15. [Sometimes when I'm through with the first session and look for the "optimum" steeping time for a high grade DJ I switch to intervals of 10 - 15 seconds]. It escapes me why the professionals still exclusively focus on single 5 minute steepings. I talked with some guys in the beezness and it appears that the reason mainly lies in tradition and of course the sometimes countless number of samples they have to manage. I have however sampled quite a few Darjeelings that shone at 2'30'' or generally much shorter steeping times than 5 minutes and lost all their personality and charme when steeped longer than say 3.5 minutes, not necessarily because of overwhelming adstringency but of something i'd like to call "magic time windows" in lack of a better term. The finicky characteristics of Darjeeling teas, on rfdt often described as "mercurial" or something to that effect ask for really tight controls of the main brewing parameters for single steepings or a refined gong-fu technique in order to successfully turn those leaves into amrita. Even then, armoured with digital scale and IR-thermometer, and as Holly and other esteemed reviewers have pointed out so often, I too rarely get that "same" experience twice, but exactly that finicky character is one of the main reasons I love Darjeelings so much, they are challenging and always good for a surprise. If I don't have the time for the proper ritual they demand I simply stay away from them and head for some Assam (at one of the teastalls) or indulge in my rapidly dwindling stash of golden Yunnan, Oolongs and Pu-Erhs. As Darjeelings do not automatically qualify for Gong-Fu the aforementioned method gives a good impression of how aroma and flavour develop over time and if gongfuing that tea makes any sense at all, especially if I only have a small sample of that special tea available. If I find the tea to be suitable for Gong-Fu (...) and there's enough leaf at hand I usually get really excited and do it right after finishing the initial sampling.Sorry for the long post, does anything of that make sense to you ?
Karsten / Darjeeling