There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A 40ml crackle glaze cup, for Gong Fu tea making, acquired from Jing Tea. This size is rather big for my own personal taste, but I do enjoy drinking from it from time to time, especially green tea and light oxidized oolongs, mostly because of it’s green color. The tea from the main pic is not so green (in terms of color) actually, the cup gives that effect.
Many have changed in my way of brewing or in my teaware, but these towels have not. I am using them on all my tea sessions, without exceptions. They belong to my brewing sessions.
I use the blue towel to clean my teapots and my tea cups, while the yellow one to grab extremely hot things or to clean accidental water drops on the ground or any other place. Of course, they were not created specially for tea. I will use them until they can no longer hold together, because their usage made them unique.
This was one of my first quality yellow teas. Till then, I encountered only fake or horrible yellow tea from local vendors. Here is the description Jing Tea offers:
In Mandarin Chinese, this tea is called Ming Qing Mo Gan Huang Ya.
An amazing and rare yellow tea from Mo Gan mountain in Zhejiang province. It is composed of extremely small tips and leaf, which were the first crop of the year.
Yellow teas are processed in a similar way to green teas: picking, withering, firing…but there is an extra method, unique to yellow tea production, in which the tea is wrapped in paper and gently warmed (40-60 degrees), which softens the flavour of the tea and removes the vegetal flavour present in green tea.
I don’t know about that vegetal flavor thing, if I didn’t knew this was a yellow tea I would have said this is (one of ) the best green tea I had. This tea is in my stash for almost a year, I only have about one brew left. I enjoy it so much that I didn’t want to ruin the experience by taking photos. When I did that, the tea was not as good as in the rest of the sessions, as it didn’t have the required attention. Now, I’m getting ready for the next yellow tea that I chosed for 2010-2011. I hope it’s as good as this one.
I usually brew this tea using a thin gaiwan . If I wait for the water to cool, I don’t wait too much. I usually pour on the gaiwan‘s lid fist, and that’s enough cooling for this tea.
A very nice and informative post about yellow tea (not this one) can be found at Life in Teacup, by Ginko.
A simple piece of teaware that it’s used most often to dry my yixing teapots. Other than that, I use it to support various items when I brew without a tea tray.
A nice accessory , but not a necessary one (for me).
This tea cups, although touched by the Yuan dynasty spirit, are also something European now. The tea cups are made by David Louveau, under the guidance of Stéphane Erler. This is the result of their first collaboration, I’m honored to have them.
I actually acquired a set , two cups and a tea boat, but I will write about the tea boat some other time . These tea items traveled from Europe to Taiwan, and then , back to Europe . Somehow, their spirit was unsettled for a while .
These cups were designed to match shu puerh. The cups material develops little cracks in time that absorb the tea color, which will give the cup an unique character.
I also tried the cups with hong cha, the results were nice, but not as nice as for shu puerh. I reached the same conclusion when I tried the cups on a sheng (?) puerh ,
Speaking of size, this cup has a capacity of 7 centiliters, being the biggest cup (used for Chinese tea) I own . The support has a diameter of 10 centimers and a height of 8 centimeters. It’s Chinese name is Cha Tuo.
You can find much more information about the cup here, on the first post about a cup like this.
I have received a generous sample of this tea from Canton Tea Co. I must say, this is one of the teas that shows me just how green I am when it comes to tea. This tea is a cooked puerh, but If I wouldn’t knew, I would say it’s a raw puerh. Leaf, liquor , taste, everything is like for a raw puerh. Why is then this tea a cooked puerh? That will be my research topic in the following weeks.
I used my shu puerh teapot to brew this tea and some cups that I usually use for that type of puerh . In the near future I will try to brew this tea again with another teapot and a different set of cups.
This tea is great, but I found out that If I shower my teapot at the early infusions, the liquor has an accentuated note of bitterness . So in order to avoid that, I used short infusions, and I showered the teapot only on the last infusions. Even when the tea had notes of bitterness, I could feel the sweet aftertaste immediately after.
There are eight infusions in the pics, but they were not the only infusions. I left the leaves in the teapot to have a session of tea later. It was simply to much tea to drink in a single session. The guys from Canton recommend 10-15 infusions, and I strongly agree. In conclusion, a very nice (confusing ) tea.
This tea is available for purchasing here .
Update:
Here is a pic with the wet leaves:
