Red Circle Tea

There’s a flood of fake tea on the general market. Seriously. You can get just about any tea, any grade from any date. Just ask for it.  “Dragonwell” made from tea from Fujian, (except it tastes rougher and less chestnutty, but it’s hard to tell if you aren’t paying attention) “Bi Lo Chun” can be faked and can come from different counties very far from Suzhou where it originates.  But you really know where your tea is coming from when you get it directly from the farmer in the growing area that it traditionally comes from and that’s just what we did.  Bi Lo Chun comes from Golden Mountain, and Ms Yang and her daughter Miss Yang picked tea the morning we visited with them and Mr Yang showed let us film him while he processed it.  That’s about as authentic as a tea can get!

The wok is heated with propane and Mr Yang knows how high to heat it when he holds his hands over the hot wok and the temperature feels right, about 200 degrees Celsius. No oil is added to the wok, and the tea goes straight in and makes a sizzling sound as it hits the wok. The tea is pulled in and – the best way I can describe this is that the tea is “kneaded” backwards, then fluffed.

Then, the tea is pushed in circles around the wok, and finally, hand rolled. This is very labor intensive and the whole process lasts 45 minutes and produces about 12 ounces of tea.  There is no first and second processing in Bi Lo Chun, the tea is processed all in one go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbIr0ZmveaQ

This tea was from the April 7th  harvest and tasted better than the first batch of tea we tried that was picked the day before. We ate lunch with the Yangs and decided to buy the whole batch we saw processed for a few reasons: it tasted amazing, we are absolutely certain this authentic Bi Lo Chun, and we know it was hand processed by the man whose family grew and picked the tea. We think this a great illustration of one of China’s 10 famous teas and it is certainly a tea you should add your collection to appreciate great Chinese teas. This tea is generally enjoyed at lower temperatures of 160-170, for the 3^rd and 4^th steepings, you can bring your water temperature up to 180 or 190 and do a quick short steeping. Cheers!

The morning sun was a huge relief. The sky was clear and the sun was shining. It was still pretty cold, but no wind, and with 2 pairs of pants on, and the wool socks my mom made for me, I was feeling brave. We hopped on a bus at 8 am and headed out to Lake Tai.

There are at least 3 islands in Lake Tai and we went to the third island, Golden Mountain Island, where the best crops of Bi  Lo Chun grow. The sea air was fresh and salty, the sun was bright and the day grew warm.

We hopped off the bus and met Ms Yang at the main road. We followed her up the road to her tiny village of about a dozen houses.  We walked past her family’s fruit trees of loquat and plums, melons and there were vegetables too:  squash and runner beans. Happy yellow mustard flowers were in full bloom and lush patches of lettuce flagged the road, and if I saw a white rabbit with an Easter basket run through the garden I would not have been surprised. It was that lovely and that idyllic.  Higher up on the mountain, they also farm tea. We set our bags down at her house and took our cameras and hiked up to the top of the mountain.

There were some noticeably different land features in Bi Lo Chun growing area. Pine trees were a new sight for me, and some of the tea plants are shade grown. The air was salty and the ground water we tasted later was calcium rich.

The air was so clean up here, we asked the altitude. Her family’s mountain is 1200 meters, but the highest peak is 3000 meters, and they pick from all over the island.  Here’s the view:

The Bi Lo Chun plants look like they’ve fared better than the Long Jing plants and have far less damage. There was a cold snap in early March, so while the harvest should have started in mid- March, it didn’t start until late March, limiting the amount of pre-Qing Ming tea possible.

Her father offered to let us watch the processing of the tea they picked today. In our next post, we’ll detail Bi Lo Chun Processing.

We finished our business with Ms Lee sooner than we thought and decided to head out to Suzhou, where one of China’s other 10 famous teas grows: Bi Lo Chun, or, Green Snail Spring. Suzhou is about 2-3 hours north of Hangzhou as the crow flies. Of course, this is China, and whatever kind of bird they have here, it not a crow. We actually had to take the train to Shanghai and transfer to Suzhou. That’s like going from San Francisco to Sacramento via Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the infrastructure in China is still – we’ll put it diplomatically – developing. Fortunately, it was the bullet train and it only took 4 hours.

We arrived and were greeted with grey skies, whipping wind, and the staccato voices of “dik-see dik-see dik-see” or taxi in Chinese. We refused because the people calling out are offering unlicensed taxi service. It was absolutely arctic weather in Suzhou and the wind was blowing so hard it was difficult to walk. I’ve never experienced such cold weather in the spring here, and got a feeling for what must have happened in early March, a horrible cold snap. I was in Seattle this winter when it snowed and Suzhou was colder than that. It made me worry about this year’s Bi Lo Chun harvest. We hopped in a green taxi from the street and headed out to our hotel, the Home Inn, the knockoff of Best Western. It was actually pretty nice, for a 2 star Chinese hotel. We went for dinner and had a fantastic bowl of noodle soup with lamb, with a side of lamb short ribs – delicious and warming in this cold. It was nearing 5 pm, so we went back to the hotel to rest for the evening and plan the next day’s adventure to Golden Mountain in Lake Tai.

Red Circle Tea will be serving our newest tea: First Flush Dragonwell at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine’s 30th Anniversary Party This Sunday!

Tea was the first Chinese Medicine and is used today to bring heat to the body, cool the body and to aid digestion, and to  detoxify.  Come celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the premier Acupuncture schools on the West Coast and toast them with a cup of tea!

We’ll also be serving our Chrysanthemum tea, and White Peony teas.

Here’s the When and Where:

Sunday, April 18^th,

From 2-5 PM

SF War Memorial Building, 401 Van Ness Ave. (at McAllister)

Upstairs in the Green Room (2^nd floor)

If you visit Long Jing village you can walk around town and see people processing tea in woks – doing their work that needs to be done, but also putting on a show to bring a crowd and sell some tea. Why not, if your family’s house happens to be at the crossroads of one of the busiest tourist areas of northern China?

Master Yip does not live in Long Jing village, he lives down the road quite a ways. He also lives down a side road from a little tract of houses and his processing facility is in the back of his house. You wouldn’t think to find him here, but surprises often come in places where most people don’t look.  He has been processing tea for over 30 years, and he’s one of the best around. He taught us the hand movements involved in processing Long Jing tea. First, the wok is heated to 200+ degrees. He uses an electrical wok, since he learned to process it that way in the 1960’s.  When the wok reaches temperature, some grains of hard oil are placed in the wok and rubbed around with a cloth. When the wok is primed, 100 g of raw tea are placed in the wok and moved around. There are specific steps to processing and the processing happens twice, in Stage 1 and Stage 2. To learn stage one processing it takes 3 years of training. Then, if you’re good, you might be taught stage 2. To learn stage 2 processing, it takes 3 more years.

When Master Yip finally adds the tea to the hot oiled wok, he first he presses it into the bottom of the wok then pulls it up the side of the wok. He “fluffs” the tea, and lets it fall back into the wok. Then, he presses the tea, circles it around the wok and fluffs the tea. This step lasts 20 minutes. After this the tea rests and waits for the second step.

Step 2 processing happens after the tea has rested and cooled. The second step is called the Grind. Master Yip pushes the tea into the bottom of the wok 3 times- push push push- then circles the tea around the wok and pulls it up the side of the wok and flips the tea over and fluffs it. In the last stage, a glove is worn to absorb any excess tea oil and to “polish” the tea.   This is traditional tea processing at it’s best. Here’s a link to a video of traditional Dragonwell tea processing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2TPkc2J4z8

If you live in Hangzhou and register with the government, you are given part of a hectare of land to use. Most people grow tea on their land. When it comes time for harvesting, some people pick their own tea, others hire workers to pick it. We’ve seen Long Jing tea picked early in the day -as early as 4:30 am when the sky is still a deep gray and there is plenty of dew on the leaves. Generally, the tea is picked starting at 6:30 or 7:30 am and through out the day, with a break for lunch. At the end of the day pickers do one of three things. Either they take their tea home to process themselves, or they take it to a covered tea market where they sell their freshly picked leaves to be mixed with other leaves and all together it’s sold as that day’s harvest. Or, they wait until the end of the day and line up to give everything from that particular picking area to the person who owns it, and they are paid for their day’s work. Some tea pickers are migrant workers, starting North, and making their way South during the harvest season. Being a migrant worker in China is common place and while probably not an ideal lifestyle for long, it’s not looked down upon. In fact, it’s a necessity considering the amount of hand picked tea required to make a kilo of dry tea. A migrant worker can earn 40 yuan per day (if you accept accommodation and food from your host) or – 80 yuan per day (if you do not).  That’s a good wage when you can get a bowl of noodles for 4 yuan.  Unlike in Taiwan, the ladies, and they are all women, are not brought breakfast, tea and lunch. It’s also important to note only women pick tea, men do not. Men process tea. We’ll learn Dragonwell tea processing from Master Yip in a minute. (Yip means Leaf in Chinese, and it’s cute to think his name is Master Leaf because he’s a master tea leaf processor!)

It hasn’t snowed this badly or this late in the season to disrupt the harvest in over 60 years. Ms Lee said in her lifetime, this is the first time this has happened. Apparently, it snows a bit every year, around Chinese New Year’s (February 15^th) but when it snows, tea plants are in a dormant stage, and relatively unaffected. To understand why snow affects the spring harvest in such a devastating way, it’s important to understand what’s happening to the tea plant in spring.  What’s so special about the pre-Qing Ming harvest is that as the weather warms in late February early March, and the tea plant slowly awakens from the dormant stage, the tea plant begins to bring in more water through its roots, and begins to circulate liquid in a concerted effort to the emerging buds. As the plant begins to bud, it is releasing all the minerals stored in the root system for the first time using all it’s energy to come back to life. Therefore, the flavor of the first few flushes are the best, offering depth, body and sweetness, a complete spectrum of full flavor. After these harvests, the mineral content is severely depleted making most of the post Qing Ming teas less flavorful, and ultimately, for the last few harvests devoid of a complete flavor.  To try to save the tea plants this year, they covered each row with a plastic blanket and pumped in hot air to bring the temperature up, and keep the plant alive.  It helped fend off some of the worst damage and kept the roots from freezing, but this year’s late snow will affect the harvest for a few years to come.

We spent the morning at Long Jing Village sightseeing and where the average tourists cup of tea at an open air tea house is now 50 yuan per cup. That’s up from the already outrageous price of 20 yuan per cup that it was last year. Let’s put that in perspective. A bottle of water at a convenience store is 3 yuan, a bowl of street noodles is 4 yuan, a dish at a nice restaurant is 20 – 40 yuan, breakfast at the hotel was 18 yuan, and the woman who offered us a table was asking for fifty yuan for one cup of tea.  This is a great illustration of how little tea there is to sell, and how much the price has gone up this year. For touristy gifts of small canisters of tea the price has gone up 4-5 x, for wholesale 2-3 x. It’s a tough pill to swallow if you’re trying to ask someone to pay that much for tea, and it’s painful and sometimes ridiculous to consider paying what some people are asking if you’re not buying a great tea. If you buy Dragonwell tea at all this year, it better be damn well worth drinking.

In the afternoon, we met with Ms Lee and asked her for the truth: how is the tea? We had asked if she had anything comparable in taste to what we purchased last year, tea from April 2^nd. She brought us a tea, told us it was comparable and let us decide. The cardinal rule of tea is cultivate your palate, and trust it.  Taste for yourselves. We tasted it, and it was by far the best tea we’d come across this trip. It has about 90% of the flavor spectrum of last year’s tea, it has fragrance, clarity in color and sweetness in the taste. It had all the aroma we were looking for, and it was bursting with the brightness of a new tea. Unfortunately, there is very little of this tea, and of course the price went up, way up. Here’s a picture of the entire harvest of the batch of tea we bought. We bought what she would sell us, and will have this tea until it sells out. We tried another grade of tea she offered and it had more depth, but very little fragrance and very little sweetness. No, the first tea was the best, and it’s the quality we feel represents the best of the harvest. We purchased the tea, and asked: When was this tea picked?  We were shocked to learn it was picked on March 28^th – we didn’t realize it, but the tea we chose was picked on the very first day they were able to harvest this year! Due to the difficulties of this year’s harvest, this is a tea that was hard won, and damn well worth drinking. Dragonwell is a tea that should be in every tea drinker’s collection. If you’re new to Dragonwell tea, there’s no need to start off by trying a lesser grade, with a top grade tea you’ll learn more, and  the experience of a genuine Pre-Qing Ming tea is truly unforgettable.

We’re up on Hangzhou, and yes, the harvest is in progress.  The ladies we spoke to today who were picking leaves said they’d been picking for a week now. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is there is definitely damage to the tea plants, and it’s easily visible. Black buds,  half formed buds, dead flowers that were tragically interrupted in full bloom. But! There is promise too. Not nearly as many plants died as we feared.  We learned that snow does come to Hangzhou and doesn’t have to be disastrous, but it doesn’t normally come this late and wreak this much havoc. Tea plants re-bud dozens of times during the harvest. And new harvests are in progress. We believe as of today 4/4 that the buds you see here are one or two days away from being prime tea. The struggle farmers face is that if not picked today, the price of the tea drops precipitously. Because today, these teas can be called Pre-Qing Ming and command a premium price. But, in terms of quality, if picked today, I fear they risk the result of a weak tea flavor, an incomplete brew. Where to find the balance between picking a great crop and getting the best return on your year’s investment? Probably ultimately in blending of leaves that are pre-Qing Ming and post-Qing Ming (and depending on the farmer or vendor, selling as pre or post).  Today, Dragonwell – any Dragonwell is selling for almost triple last year’s price.

One question I have for Ms Lee is that last year she mentioned Varietal 43 was being cultivated on Mei Jia Wu to bloom 2 weeks early, thus giving the farmer the advantage of being the first to market. At the time, I wondered strictly about the taste, i.e. would it be worth getting your tea to market if it didn’t taste the same, or taste good at all. But since this season’s snow, I’m forced to wonder : does that mean that if you’re growing tea to come to market 2 weeks early, is the farmer adding increased risk of crop loss if snow is now more of a present threat to harvests?  And will farmers take that risk?

The heady smell of diesel, the sharp tang of new plastic, and the tickle in my nose from the cigarette smoke from the 5 men standing to my right also waiting for taxis greets us. Yes, we’re in China. Our luggage may not be, but that’s yet to be determined. So far, here we are with the clothes on our backs, passports and the name of a) a hotel we’ve booked and b) the number for Ms Lee of last year’s Dragonwell fame. She’s expecting us today, the day before Qing Ming Festival. This year it falls on the 5^th of April. The festival of lovingly tending to the graves of ancestors, and the capitulation of the Pre-Qing Ming teas. Here, we’ll study the Dragonwell varietals from the four famous mountains and processing steps involved in making a great tea. We’ll head up the mountain and see what’s happening with this year’s harvest.